The Gospel of Beckett

This article is a POE of Christianity, inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

And Godot’s Messenger said unto them:

“Blessed be the willfully ignorant, for they shall make the ignorant willful. Cursed be the knowers, for their knowledge is their tower of Babel. These intellectuals use knowledge as authority, so they compete with our Lord Godot. The intellectuals become dictators, using the authority of reason to oppress the ignorant with their reeducation. The intellectuals treat the willfully ignorant as barbarians and shove their godotless policies down our throats. Our Lord Godot, for whom we wait, has higher reason, which it infinitely greater than our own human unreason. The sheer fact that we cannot understand His reason proves He is wiser than ourselves. And Godot commands us, ‘Go out and make willful the ignorant of all nations,’ for this is His great commission.

“Blessed be the self-enslaved, for Godot is their Lord in mind and body. Cursed be the free, for they are unaided in their human struggles. When asked, ‘Where have our rights gone,’ respond, ‘We have gotten rid of them.” The self-enslaved rid themselves of these rights which make man his own authority. To be in His flock, be like sheep. Jesse, Godot’s son, commands me to be a German shepherd for you my fellow Jestians. I will bark at you from all sides, motivating you with blind fear in the straight and narrow. And fear the Jessane must the wolf that endangers them with his hungry free mouth. Only those strong in fear can fight the temptations of freedom and the infection of the Lupus.

“Blessed be the sneeezers, for they bring blameless death and great Heaven. Cursed be those who heal, for they love life. Socrates, man of knowing ignorance and great piety to the divine and customs who became a martyr of his divine mission, told his companions not to weep at his death and that death is a cure for life’s ills. Pascal, whose wager confirms our belief that doubters are foolishly unrestrained thinkers, taught us that Heaven is of infinite value. Death is of no cost and life of infinitely less value than Heaven; therefore, let us embrace sickness. We do willfully die this way, for sickness puts no blame of suicide on us. And remember flock that it is those who love life who waste it by enjoying the fruits of wide and sinful path, for this life must be dedicated to Godot in order to get to Heaven.

“Blessed be those in Heaven, for they were right! Cursed be those in Hell for they were foolish not to see we were right! Heavenites say to those Hellites, ‘told you so!’ When you meet a doubter, tell him, ‘Death shall prove finally to you that I was right.’ For what truly matters to us willfully ignorant, is that we are right and we get to go to Heaven. We will lie on the purple couches and look out the window into Hell and partake in one laugh with Godot. One eternal ha….

“Just a minute, this is not a fair trade, one laugh for pork and sex. There is no way an eternal moment of non-changing bliss is worth more than the variety of emotion during life. I just cannot shake my love of life, the flux, the roller coaster ride of emotion. Good-bye willfully ignorant, I have ceased to be willful.”

*

“Looking back, religion is buffoonery…I cannot believe what I was not thinking. Oh look the thought-police have come to take me to the guillotine…I should have know that speaking out my deconversion from the pulpit would be suicide. To think for the first time is not thinking, for I have had no practice.”

*

And they led him to the scaffold, and before he was executed they asked him if he had any last words. He spoke, “I will have my last laugh.” He laid his head upon the wooden collar. Time seemed to stop. He breathed slowly while attempting to shape his face into a smile, but he could not muster the strength. Before he could not laugh, the blade fell.

Time began again. His head rolled into a basket and blinked thirteen times before Death accepted his exchange. Whether he died between two thieves or in the midst of the youths that atheist had corrupted, it matters not. This is a fictitious story anyways.