Burn in Hell, Jerry Falwell, Burn in Hell
If there is a Hell, Jerry Falwell's stunted, blackened, hate-filled little soul is at this moment almost certainly smoldering away in its deepest, hottest pit. How could a just God possibly spare a man who was an unapologetic segregationist (until the political winds started to shift), who supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, who gave his blessing to one U.S.-backed imperialist bloodbath after another, who callously applauded as the government slashed funding for the poor and the homeless, who saw the 9/11 attacks as divine retribution for "sins" committed by secular groups like the ACLU and People for the American way, who equated feminism with witchcraft, whose homophobic tirades (at least implicitly) legitimized hatred of and violence towards gays and lesbians, and who rarely missed an opportunity to spew demagogic misinformation about everything from children's TV characters to global warming in the national media? Unfortunately, as an atheist who is skeptical of the whole notion of an "afterlife," I strongly suspect that Falwell in death has evaded any sort of final reckoning for all the lives he destroyed in the course of his mean-spirited sanctimonious career. He now sleeps the blissful, eternal sleep of nonexistence. We, sadly, have to live with the legacy of evil he has left behind.