Sometimes, no matter how well you think you’ve learned your lessons, the world still finds ways to confound your wisdom and circumvent your insights.

Take my friend Brett, for example.

A fellow atheist, he has it as a simple, basic, fundamental rule in his life to never, ever date christian girls. They can’t be trusted. This is a known fact. Ask any atheist who’s ever made the mistake of dating a christian girl, and they will share their stories of how the girl in question flaked out on them, betrayed them, turned on them, or else just basically went wrong on them. And so, now, at the very beginning of every prospective relationship, he always asks them if they’re christians. If the answer is yes, he wisely ends it right then and there.

However, as noted, the world finds ways to confound your wisdom and circumvent your insights.

The other day, he and I were out to lunch at a local eatery, and he told me a tale of the dissolution of his latest relationship. This girl – whose name he did not offer and which I didn’t care enough to ask – had been going out with him for five months. At the beginning of this relationship, he asked her, as usual, if she was a christian. Her response, essentially, was "Well, my family sort of is, but it’s not a big deal, not a big part of our lives or anything. I don’t really care about it". Brett considered this to be "good enough". More the fool him, as it would turn out.

Five months later, he was quite, quite smitten with this girl, and thinking seriously about a future with her. It was during a discussion with her on this topic that certain revelations, if you’ll pardon the expression, came to light. As it turns out, she was a christian. And rather actively involved, actually. While it remained true that her family was "sort of" involved in christianity, it might have been more honest to say that her father was a minister at a Pentecostal church, and that she was herself a Sunday school teacher. As it turns out, moreover, she felt that her relationship with him had progressed to the point where she could now demand that he join her church as a prerequisite for continuing to date her.

Brett, dear man, is a fellow who loves deeply. And though he felt betrayed by her deception, nevertheless tried to salvage the situation. Could they continue on together and just not involve her religion? Could she go to church on Sunday and just leave him at home? If they were to have kids together, could he just not be involved in their religious upbringing? No on all counts. He was to convert immediately, permanently and passionately, or else it was over. She felt, it seemed, that they’d been together long enough that he was unlikely to say no to whatever demands she might make in order to sustain their relationship.

This was a game she’d played before, you see: As it would turn out (upon Brett’s later investigation), three previous boyfriends of hers were members of her father’s congregation; she’d forced conversion upon each of them, and then left them once that objective had been met. This was her real aim, it seemed: She was seducing people into conversion. Brett was the first one to have turned her down in this act of spiritual blackmail; the first person with the strength of character to stand firm by his principles in the face of her threat of denial-of-vaginal-access. The others, it would turn out, were all christians of other stripes; catholics and such. She didn’t know what she was getting into, trying to use her pathetic head games on a determined atheist. Brett called her a "Whore for Christ" to her face as he dismissed her from his life.

As we commiserated over this turn of events over a plate of nachos, I told him: "See, this is the problem with christians. They can lie to your face, stab you in the back, and betray you, and so long as they can then receive forgiveness from Jesus, they can be washed of all sin, and then it’s like they’ve done nothing wrong in the first place" I affected a high, feminine, baffled voice, as I asked "Why are you still upset at me? The sin is gone!". The problem, as I told him, is that their fantasy life will always trump their real life. Sure, she actually lied to you, and actually broke your heart, but in her fantasy life, she was trying to win souls for her imaginary god, and the imaginary good she was trying to do is more important than the actual harm she was doing. How can you ever reason with or expect rational behaviour from someone whose moral code is based upon non-real events and factors?

See, in her fallacious, nonsense cost/benefit analysis, it looks a little like this: "Alright, I lose a certain amount a of god points for lying, but I gain way more back by winning a new soul for christ, and then getting him to breed a litter of christlings (christlets? christopillars? I’m not sure what the accepted term is these days) using my (or some other christian girl’s) uterus, and so in the end, it works out in my favour". Brett then observed that he couldn’t believe that some christians actually use the word "god points" this way. I laughed out loud, at once both horrified and deeply amused; I’d thought "God points" was an incredibly cynical parody of the christian world-view which my friend Ryan and I had come up with some years back, but, no: Apparently some christians actually talk in these terms. These people get harder to parody every year.

In the end, he was able to laugh about it, but there was considerable ruefulness about it. Because he’d really thought he’d managed to put this kind of craziness behind him, but, as stated, life finds ways to confound your wisdom and circumvent your insights.

Remember that creepy kid in high school? It doesn’t matter which high school; every school had one. He was the kid that kept to himself, didn’t really get along with anyone, was probably a little smarter than the people around him, and was way too aware of this fact? He would sit at the back of the class, making snide comments about the shortcomings of the people he saw around him, read his heavy metal magazines, and whenever he was particularly moody and introverted, he would write.

He would write nasty poetry, maybe. Or violent song lyrics. Or more recently, vitriolic blog postings. Or maybe he would write elabourate revenge fantasies. You know the type; the short story about the day the school burned down, and all the jocks and cheerleaders and popular kids got burnt to death in it, while the main character – a crude analogue of the author – would stand outside, maybe with crude analogues of a few of his friends, watching the school and laughing. Or maybe it was masked gunmen. Or zombies. Or whatever.

You could read one of these stories, and see within them written a veritable roadmap of the mental problems of the author. You could see, in the traits and qualities which are punished and made note of in this story, what things he loathed. You could see in his selection of those who were punished, the people who he most hated… or envied. You could see, in his choice of descriptors, the traits which caused him the most distress and consternation. For all that he meant for the story to be creepy, or upsetting, or threatening, in the end, they always came across as sort of sad and pathetic.

I was reminded of these stories recently while thinking about the Book of Revelation; the final book of the christian bible.

As the story goes, the book was written by a fellow named John, living in exile from the Roman Empire, at a time when the Jewish cult which would become christianity was still a weird little fringe religion in the Mediterranean region. He wrote, in isolation, this bitter little story about how all the people who weren’t like him would very soon suffer this gruesome fate, with plagues and fires, and seas of blood, monsters with the bodies of scorpions, and, tellingly, the faces of women… and eventual eternal damnation for everyone who he didn’t like.

I thought about this poor, put-upon guy, sitting alone on his island, watching the mainstream of the Roman Empire thriving all around him, while he was all alone and getting crazier by the day… And I envisioned him venting his frustrations by writing himself this little story about how in the very near future, they would all suffer and die, but paradoxically still be alive in the Lake of Fire, and able to look on with envy as he and his buddies stood in the kingdom of god, in their nice white robes, where everything would be okay for them forever… And I saw for the first time just how sad it was.

The book of Revelation is nothing more than an adolescent revenge fantasy. John was that creepy kid in the back of the class, who desperately wanted to be liked, but just didn’t have the proper social skills to do it. And so, alone, fuming with sullen rage, he wrote about what he wanted to see happen to all the more popular kids. They would all burn… forever! And not just the people alive now, but everyone who’s ever been alive, and who weren’t basically exactly like him.

As I said; one of the common elements of all of these stories is how, in the traits used in these stories to describe those who were worthy of punishment, we can see what things the author resents the most. Perhaps the saddest, creepiest part of all of the book of Revelation is the passage in which he writes about the people who are worthy of salvation being those who had not "sullied themselves with the flesh of women". It makes clear one of his own neuroses; the man was plainly a frustrated virgin, and wanted to see all the people who weren’t virgins punished for their damnable successes with women.

The fact that one of the world’s most influential religions is predicated in such a large part upon the ramblings of an adolescent revenge fantasy is at once both hilarious and crushingly, crushingly sad. Hilarious, in that christians don’t seem to see the neuroses-made-bare which is the book of Revelation; they take this childish cry for help from a broken mind to be literal truth, and sneer endlessly at those who don’t share their weird misinterpretation. I’m sure that John would have liked to have been able to have believed that it was a literal prediction of things to come, but I doubt even he was that deluded. Sad, because christians today not only lack the insight to understand the context of what they’re reading; they also lack the empathy to be able to identify the real pain and loneliness and frustration of the author which is so plain to anyone who cares enough to listen to this desperate cry for help.

I have often wondered what christianity would be like today if it hadn’t had Revelation tacked on to the end of its holy book. It’s the book where the afterlife myth was firmly entrenched, and where the apocalypse myth was introduced. Absent these, I’ve often thought that christianity would be a religion which would be a lot more concerned with actual human hardship and solutions to here-and-now problems, rather than deferring them until the coming of this bizarre afterlife. Now, in light of this revelation I have had about Revelation, I wonder something new: If the bible had not ended on this note, of crushing bitterness, resentment, frustrated longing, and desire for retribution, might it have been a NICER religion over the years? If people hadn’t been infused with the simmering rage of this mean-spirited misanthrope from birth onwards as though it were a virtuous thing, might they have been less apt to bring suffering on to those not like themselves? How many people over the millennia have suffered horrible deaths because, ultimately, of the inclusion of the bizarre revenge fantasy of one lonely, angry virgin?

It brings me both chagrin and wry amusement to think that John, could he have known the pain which would be meted out as a consequence of the misinterpretation of his cry for help would have been both grimly satisfied to see his pain shared by so many, and frustrated that nobody understood him.