Now, let me pause here in this story. You cannot imagine how stunned we were by Amel himself and by the presentation of his ideas. But think on this! Think on the surprise of Welf and me when we came alive again in the twentieth century, having slept for aeons in the ice, to discover that the major religion of the Western world taught that suffering is good and suffering has value! Think on our shock to hear people speaking of “offering up their suffering” to a God who valued it! Think of our horror to discover the mythic story of a God who sent Himself in human form to the planet to die a horrific death through crucifixion to appease Himself with His own Incarnate suffering! Think on that. Think on our horror to see the very concept against which Amel railed as the driving force of a religion that has dominated the West during the time of its highest philosophical and technological and artistic development!

Whence came such ideas? Whence came the notion that suffering could have such value? Oh, I don’t mean the common gratitude we all feel to those who have suffered inconvenience or pain for the good of others, or the gratitude we feel for those who are willing to die to protect others from harm! But in those instances, it is the good of life which is important. I mean now the rock-bottom idea of the God Incarnate religion that holds that God Himself works through pain and suffering to “redeem” His creatures from His own wrath. And then think on the concept of eternal damnation that lies behind this God Incarnate–crucifixion religion—the idea that the Maker of the universe, the Maker of all worlds, has devised a place of eternal unspeakable conscious agony for all human beings who are not redeemed through acceptance of the horrific execution of this God Himself as His own Son in the flesh! How this God has consecrated suffering; how He has elevated unspeakable suffering as something to which He personally attaches unlimited value. He requires this Hell of eternal suffering as some sort of payment from those struggling finite humans who have disobeyed Him or failed to consecrate the suffering of God Incarnate on His fabled cross as an act of love!

And He Himself, this God, is presumed to be eternally aware in every particular of this unspeakable suffering, else how can this Hell be supported and maintained? Think of how this struck us—Welf and me—as we came alive and to consciousness again in the town of Bolinas on the West Coast of the United States. Who could have authored such a religion, we asked; who could have developed it and perfected it, were it not the Bravennans!