The sickness wraps around you

in many different ways.
For a lot of you, it began in
Sunday school, or the madrassa,
or Hebrew school,
when you learned
(or thought you had learned)
that God only loved people like you
and that everyone else was simply
pitiable,
misled,
deluded,
trash
that was meant for the Fire.
And the fate that was waiting for
the heathens
was really unfortunate, of course,
but it couldn't be helped,
because it was His Will. (Amen)
Everyone outside of your own belief
became The Others, Them, the Infidels, the Terrorists,
the Jihadists, the Zionists, Great Satan, and worst of all
the Eternally Damned who would suffer
shrieking agony every second of eternity
because they didn't embrace the same
absurdities
you did.
And some of you have the sickness to the
terminal degree.
You're the ones who are waiting for
praying for
hoping for
watching for
the End Times, and the mass
killing,
and the victory of Your God
over all the hated unbelievers,
and the Eternal Victory of You--
I mean, God's justice--
over everyone outside of your
righteous certainty.
And I'm standing on the sidelines,
watching in fear,
hearing you damning each other,
and throwing anathemas at each other,
and threatening each other,
and seeing you tear up each other's "Holy Books",
and hearing you invoke His mysterious name
against the ones you loathe even more than your
mythical Satan,
the ones who dared to believe something else.
My only hope is
that in trying to "help God's work along"
or "do Allah's will"
or "interpret the signs"
or whatever other damned fool nonsense
you call it,
you don't end up
killing the people
I call sacred
in the process.
And that last possibility
seems a lot more likely to happen
than anything in your terrible, demented
eschatologies.