Audio and text from Lindsay's Radio Pacific Editorial, Tuesday Aug 28:

Yesterday I mentioned the new billboard that Hell Pizza had erected after Jewish complaints about its Hitler billboard. Apparently the new one features Pope Benedict saying, “Hell is real, and eternal.”

It’s inconceivable to me that anyone could believe such stupid, vicious nonsense in this day and age. While Hell Pizza is taking the mickey, of course, the Pope believes it—or pretends to. In that sense he’s worse than Hitler—the suffering that Hitler revelled in inflicting was at least temporary. God, according to Christians, is a cosmic sadist who’s never satisfied—and the Pope is his accomplice. Only morons could seriously believe this, of course, and while there’s no shortage of them, most Christians are not that imbecile. Their religion has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into a secular age—and to that extent, humanised, civilised, and dumbed up.

It must be acknowledged, too, that the Christian superstition has inspired some of the most divine art and heavenly music, even if some of it, like Verdi’s Requiem, was written by atheists. Secular Man, equally, has created his own hell—the torture and torment of rap, heavy metal and the like far surpass the diabolical horrors of any unquenchable fire. And—they’re real.

Secular Man, 2007, is like a repressed, hormonal adolescent suddenly released from arbitrary and cruel parental constraints but with no idea how to behave in the absence of such constraints. His so-called art reflects his intellectual and emotional retardation. Anyone who likes rap-crap or any type of headbanging is as backward as any Christian, to be sure. Secular Man faces an urgent task. Failure will mean a reversion to the irrational, tyrannical constraints of primitive superstitions such as Christianity and Islam. That task is to use his brains and grow up. The absence of God doesn’t justify a life-long temper tantrum. Reality is what it is, and by unlocking its secrets Secular Man can make life here on earth heavenly. He’s shown intimations of this already. But if he doesn’t grow up, Hell will indeed be eternal, as well as real.