"If he [Hugo Ch�vez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop." -- Pat Robertson

"Muslims want to rule the world. They want to take over the whole world. That's their evil purpose . . . Most of them are very harsh. There's no tenderness or love."

Question asked by Rose Aguila: "Where do you get your information about the war?" Answer of Mary Fowler, 54, Oklahoma housekeeper: "The Bible and the 700 Club. I also listen to preachers who know what's going on. Pat Robertson." -- Excerpted from Rose Aguila's blog, Stories in America: Conversations at the Gas Pump.

Listen up, Reverend Robertson, Mary Fowler and every last one of you Apostles of Perpetual Psychosis, it's time that you were called out.

The time is long past due the rest of us ceased our cowering and stood up to you Christo-fascists bullies. The hour has come round that we look you straight in your bulging, true believer eyes, and told you that we've had it with your smugness, with your blood-drenched crusades, with your victim mentality -- and with the madness begot by this cracked-brain belief system of yours, which all began (according to your sacred delusions) more than 2,000 years ago, when, at the behest of a wicked cabal, a mob of mammon-worshipping, blood-lusting rabble went on a cosmic killing-spree and murdered your god.

First off, let's get one thing straight: No one ever killed anyone's god (not Jews, nor Romans, nor Geeks playing Dungeons and Dragons) -- although it's time somebody nailed you, you collection of conflated failures at Christian martyrdom, to a metaphysical cross of reality.

It's high time someone told you outright that you must be suffering from holy water on the brain, if you think we can't see you for what you are: a klavern of counterfeit prophets waxing psychotic for other cretinous hypocrites. Also, you can cease playing the persecuted party, whenever someone stands up to you, because we're no longer buying that ploy. Remember, you're the ones who threw the first epitaphic stones. It was you who labeled us a mob of Hell-bound, Satan-pimping sodomists . . . Although -- as much fun as that sounds -- I must ask you, where do you get the unmitigated gall to make such insane claims? When did the golden light of the sun abandon its position in the eastern horizon and begin rising, each morning, from out of your silly, neo-Iron Age asses?

And tell me this, you medievalist simps, you delusional, retrograde dip-shits, how is it possible that you became privy to such timeless truths -- that the mind of the "One True God" is available to you, and that God's words and wishes resonate through yawning millennia to be understood only by you and you alone?

Looking back on the rise of you Christo-fascist bastards, I'm mortified as to how it came to be socially and politically acceptable for you to bandy such vicious and demented assertions in the public arena, without them meeting with the derision they deserve . . . And don't bother going into one of your pat victim-swoons over being called on it, because when you go so far as to claim that you alone have been bestowed with the secrets of boundless creation -- and that anyone who chooses not to buy into your version of events will be condemned to the torments of eternal damnation -- then you can bet your fatuous asses that your asinine assertions will be ridiculed. What in the blue blazes did you expect, for us simply to fall to our collective knees before you?

Yet, I fear that's exactly what you expect from us.

Could I suggest an alternative idea? Would you simply let the rest of us be? Would it be possible for you to keep your life-defying delusions to yourself -- keep them within the airless confines of your bigotry-riddled churches and the cramped quarters of your own minds?

If that's the way you choose to spend the passing hours of this finite life, it's fine by me. But when you start your habitual proselytizing, then you should be prepared to be told that a great many of us think your cosmological conceptions are a steaming pile of elephant dung.

And, while we're on the subject, for the longest time, I've been wanting to tell you this: If Jesus died for my pathetic sins, then he flat-out overreacted.

What makes this situation all the more unsettling is you believe these creepy, death-enamored myths are literally true. Instead, I suggest you try the following: Rather than attempting to commune with Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Ghost (or Casper the Friendly Ghost) or the Lucky Charms Leprechaun, why don't you attempt to channel the departed spirits of Voltaire or H.L. Mencken? There will be no otherworldly conjuring (or con jobs) required to perform this miracle: simply go to the public library and check out their books.

Once there, you might want to stop by the science section, as well, where you could happen upon a few delusion-decimating tidbits such as the following: While your bible tells you that the earth is a shade over 7,000 thousand years old, the actual figure is (approximately) 4.6 billion years. How do you account for the slight discrepancy of say . . . 4,599,993,000 years? And that number is derived when calculated against the approximated age of the earth -- not that of the universe, which is estimated to be between 10 to 20 billion years old. You can do the math on that one, all you reality-challenged Children of the Lord.

And those aren't the only things in your bible that just don't add up. In your Book of Joshua (10:13) it is stated that God commanded the sun to stand still in the sky . . . Really now? Pardon me . . . but how is it possible that this omniscient god of yours, whom you believe created the earth and heavens, all by his divine lonesome, didn't realize the simple fact that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth?

Furthermore, he was apparently ignorant of numerous smaller details as well, such as, where in Matthew (13: 32) he identified mustard seeds as "[ . . . ] the smallest of seeds." How can it be that the creator of the universe could have had such an embarrassing lapse of basic knowledge on the subject of botany?

And what about the many other lapses in logic (flights of fantasy that are insane by any standard, with the exception of the sublime logic found in the realm of cartoons), such as the one about the fellow who survived, for three days and three nights, in the stomach of a monstrous fish (Jonah 1:17) -- and what was up with that wacky, talking donkey in Numbers (22:28)? We're in Looney Tunes territory now, all you highly suggestible Idiots of God. Plus, in a cartoon universe, such as the one described in the Book of Exodus, why didn't the Almighty, instead of leveling plagues and pestilence upon the guilty and innocent alike in Egypt, simply, drop an ACME anvil down from heaven on the head of Pharaoh and be done with it?

Which brings up the subject of the deplorable cruelty of your deity of choice. Ergo, isn't this a lovely little passage from Deuteronomy (32:23�25)? "I will spend mine arrows upon them . . . The sword without, and terror within, shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of gray hairs."

Then there is this lovely bit of divinely inspired baby-killing and faith-based rape from Isaiah (13:9,15�18): "Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger . . . Every one that is found shall be thrust through . . . Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes . . . and their wives ravished. Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them. . . . [T]hey shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children."

Worse, your striving to make these pathological ravings manifest have resulted in tragic consequences. As is the case with your current, genocidal adventure in Iraq, where you believed the vengeful ghosts of the Crusades could be dispatched, dissolved in the beatific light flaring from the bombs that your holy (armchair) warrior, commander and chief ordered dropped from Kabul to Bagdad . . . In your madness, you believed you could make the citadels of the New Jerusalem manifest in Mesopotamia. Upon every bomb detonation, you were certain that the heathen hordes cowered before your righteous fury, that ghost and demon would flee back to Hell, and the wicked would tremble before your sacred fury. Now, of course, that all worked out just like you saw it in your head beforehand, didn't it?

As we speak, your Armies of the Lord (who more closely reassemble a collection of economic conscripts) wince and stumble, blinded by blown blood and squalls of searing sand . . . The desert wind taunts you true believers; your visions of conquest evaporate, as the pitiless sun glares down upon the folly of yet another legion of hubristic Crusaders, who came to free the heathen hordes from their brutish ignorance by way of relieving them of the confusing burden of their untapped wealth.

Of course, the only small recompense you ask from these monumental ingrates is unfettered access to their oil. And the only reason for that is a purpose as exalted as yours requires a great amount of energy to sustain its radiant glory; such a selfless enterprise of holiness demands a few rewards for the long suffering Christian martyrs on the home front -- because American's God-kissed flocks of pious consumers must be permitted to sit, in perpetuity, high above the roadways of the land, serene within their oversized pick-up trucks, SUVs, and RVs -- their junk food-bloated countenances must never be darkened by want, doubt, nor self-reproach.

In accordance with this self-referential lunacy, you sermonized that Satan's earthly emissaries, such as Hugo Ch�vez, should be righteously slaughtered because they and their ilk scheme to deprive American drivers of their God-given right to the oil, which, inconveniently, happens to be located beneath lands belonging to inconsequential people. Those brown-skin, oil hoarding wretches, down in Venezuela and their false idol-clutching counterparts in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, must be taught that God, seated upon his golden throne, scorns the sight of their iniquitous ways. The Kingdom of the Lord stands before us, you proclaim. If we listen closely, we can hear the voice of God above as he counts his money. Furthermore, the era of George W. Bush has brought a new revelation: If America's plutocratic class had even more blood money, then the Baby Jesus would smile.

The Reverend Pat Robertson, Mary Fowler -- and every last one of you Apostles of Perpetual Psychosis -- listen up. Given the self-evident fact that your beliefs bring little relief to your own troubled souls and have, on the whole, served to engender tragedy worldwide, don't you think it's time you gave it a rest for awhile. In other words, this is a polite way of suggesting to you that you shut your pie-in-the-sky hole and take stock of the things you're saying, because your utterances are becoming sicker and sadder, by the hour.

If not, you could, at least, in the words, of Tom Waits, "Come down off the cross -- we can use the wood."