Is Monotheism Dangerous? Gore Vidal Against the “Sky-God”

If you are still wondering why the secular worldview is inherently opposed to the Christian understanding of reality, consider this attack on monotheism from Gore Vidal, one of the scions of the literary Left:

Now to the root of the matter. The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved –Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal –God is the omnipotent father– hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family home.

This is a selection from Vidal’s 1992 Lowell Lecture at Harvard University. It is indicative of the logic of the secular mind — a mind that increasingly sees any form of theism — and especially monotheism, as dangerous.

Vidal calls for “an all-out war on the monotheists.” Oh, and it’s about sex too, of course:

The ongoing psychopathic hatred of same-sexuality has made the United States the laughingstock of the civilised world. In most of the First World, monotheism is weak. Where it is weak or nonexistent, private sexual behaviour has nothing to do at all with those not involved, much less the law. At least when the Emperor Justinian, a sky-god man, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes, and so must be prohibited. But our sky-godders, always eager to hate, still quote Leviticus, as if that looney text had anything useful to say about anything except, perhaps, the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area.

So Vidal declares war on the monotheistic “sky-godders.” His lecture serves to make the antagonism between theism and atheism transparently clear.