On Blasphemy

or "Blasphemy from an Odinist Perspective"

Fuck Odin. Fuck him hard. What has he ever done for any of us? Clearly he departed before Christianisation even began, leaving us and our traditions, our carefully grown ways of life, to die, doing nothing to help us, his children. Impotent, incapable, avoidant, a liar. Odin is a waster, useless; in fact, he is non-existent, he is a fiction, he is an illusion, and a dangerous distraction from truth and reality.

I can say any such thing without fear, since I know, categorically, that my God is not so petty as to be upset by mortal words.

I can pile lie upon lie upon God, whether by thought, letter, or speech, and be perfectly safe in the knowledge that I am harming my soul not one bit (most assuredly, because I do not believe any of it - perhaps I should harm myself if I did).

Who is this arrogant, self-important, huffed up - thus inimitably minute, worthless, and shitty - "deity" that gives a damn about the utterances of man? What is this stick-bummed spirit, this asinine Æs, that cares so grievously about the mumblings of the ignorant?

These fanciful Abrahamists insist that God is such a crap being. God is so meagre, so lacking in confidence, that the words of men sorely affect him - or, if they are more honest, acknowledging that it is not words on their own, nor actions on their own, but an underlying sentiment, a rejection of the divine in the heart of a man, that causes God grief - there they are only closer to the money because it is the heart of that man (who has cause to curse God) that is grieving - but still they fall short of understanding the infinity of God, for it is God himself who has stirred this fire of blasphemy in the heart of the aggrieved (unless they should engage in "shirk" and imagine a devil, along with their "free will" and other such ridiculous metaphysical inconsistencies).

If there is some spirit out there that responds to the name "Odin" that is dismayed if I should tell him that he sucks cocks in hell, he is not my God. It’s that simple. I might still use this name "Odin" to refer to my God, but whatever is so spinelessly inept as to allow such an all-too-human response to my bullying is certainly not a deity. So too, if "Allah" - what’s in a name, after all - has a hissy fit because I say he's a whoreson and a dribble of shit off the back of a camel, it’s no deity, but at best some daimon who has, somehow, failed to learn that "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me."

It is a gross superstition that imagines that spitting on a cross, or pissing in a mosque, or burning some cunt's silly little hat should constitute "offense to the divine." More likely amusement, context considered - wouldn't you, after countless aeons watching trillions of supplicants prostrating predictably before your icons (or lack thereof), be most intrigued by that one shithead that sets the priest’s beard on fire? I'd follow his course, throw some interesting incidents his way - make of him a believer, who, by the arrogance of his nature (that I gave him) put me in my place (once) that I might put him in his (for all time). Perhaps I might simply make a better deity than most believe in.

Blasphemy, therefore - I don't think it should be encouraged, per se, since it doesn't need to be (rather, it seems to come about whenever anyone feels there is cause to curse God, which is a product of natural suffering) - but it shouldn't be outlawed. Let people complain. We know that someone is suffering when they say "God, you are a devil to me." Why give them more suffering for it? Truly anyone who curses circumstances curses God, irrespective of the language used, since circumstance is God's product - if there is a difference between "damn these conditions" and "damn the root cause of these conditions," well, one speaker may be smarter than the other (possessing, by God's grace, a more penetrating intellect).

Altogether too precious about divinity, not at all precious enough about human life - this the mark of so many so-called "religions," who say on the one hand "do no evil," or "thou shalt not kill," and on the other - well, there have been centuries when atheism was almost non-existent, and they were hardly devoid of evil, were they? When has there not been killing, and how much has been to do with religion, because what one faith professes is "blasphemy" to another? (So they say - the truth of the matter is, of course, that the other faith exists in territories harbouring resources or trade routes whose control favours one's economic prospects - religious difference is an excuse, not a reason.)

Really, "blasphemy laws" characterise flimsy beliefs. Enforcement of the language of others is born of a lack of conviction in one's own position. There is, and can be, no God who is dismayed by men's words, since whatever God there is put those words there in the first place. Disbelieve this, as most Abrahamists do, and you disbelieve in the power of God; you imagine that there is some power comparable to God; you are, in fact, a polytheist, which is bad only insofar as it constitutes, after careful consideration, an abrogation of reason (see Eleatics, Stoics, Platonists, “any philosopher worth their salt”). Assuredly, God doesn’t care if you think of him as more than one. Why on earth would God be dismayed? Again, who is this loser "deity" that gives a crap about what men think, when men's thoughts have been set in their circuits by the very hand of the divine?

It’s humans that can't stomach blasphemy (or any contradictory religiosity) because they use God, religion, temples and so on as crutches to cope with the difficulties of life (including existential dread, moral terror, etc). God might be a crutch - I will not deny it - but if one's crutch can be kicked out from under one by the utterance of a word, it’s either a pretty crap crutch, or you don’t have a firm enough grip on it.

Personally I might rather use God as a weapon - as a sword to cut through dread, a hammer to pulverise terror - since what dread need I in the light of infinity? What terror holds in the knowledge of immortality? We might rather be like those hashishins who, on command, in total faith, flung themselves from the heights of Alamut, proclaiming only “God is great.”