Letters | Sunday, 06 December 2009

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Crucifixes and electric chairs

If Roman Catholics only know how absurd their crucifix is, they wouldn’t be so keen on flaunting them all over the place.
Consider the theology behind the crucifix: the philosophes of the Enlightenment “laughed at original sin, and the God who had to send himself down to Earth as his son, to be scourged and crucified to appease the anger of himself as Father piqued by a woman’s desire for apples or knowledge.” (Will Durant, The Age of Voltaire).
In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins writes: “It is remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as its sacred symbol, often worn around the neck. Lenny Bruce rightly quipped that ‘If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”
Applied to Malta, Lenny Bruce’s quip would give rise to the following scenarios. We would see replicas of electric chairs on the walls of our law courts, at Mater Dei hospital, and at the Prime Minister’s office next to the Maltese flag. Moreover, when Malta’s President, Prime Minister, and MPs take their oath of office, they would do so not by kissing crosses but by kissing replicas of electric chairs.

John Guillaumier
St Julian’s

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