A death to celebrate

So.  Fred Phelps has died.  Ever since it was announced a few days ago that his end was near, most atheist bloggers have been falling all over themselves to declare that, abhorrent as he was, it would of course be wrong to "sink to his level" by "celebrating the death" of a "tragically misguided old man" who led a "wasted life".

Oh, come on.  Phelps was not "misguided", he was evil.  He did not waste his life, he spent it doing exactly what he wanted to do.  Don't tell me he was brainwashed by a Christian upbringing.  Millions of people grow up with that, and do not end up behaving like Phelps did -- his own son Nathan managed to become a good and humane person.  Like all humans, Fred Phelps had free will and was fully responsible for his actions.

Phelps and his church specialized in picketing the funerals of dead homosexuals and soldiers, taunting and tormenting those who were already in grief over the loss of someone they cared about.  He did everything in his power to maximize the suffering of people who had done nothing to deserve it.  He richly earned the hatred and contempt of all decent people.

The capacity for hatred and anger is born in us for a reason.  There are people toward whom those emotions are appropriate, even necessary.  Fred Phelps was such a person.  I'm reminded of the death of bin Laden three years ago, when normal people celebrated and hand-wringers whined about it.  This is what happens when people become so hypnotized by abstractions and clichés that they lose touch with honest human feelings.  Here's one atheist who gets it.

Did Phelps do any good at all?  Some say he actually helped the cause of gay equality by giving the opposition a face so ugly that no one wanted to be associated with it.  That's almost right.  In an age of euphemism and mealy-mouthed language, his brutally straightforward evil showed what was behind the more mainstream enemy's façade of civility.

A few have said that Phelps is now in Hell.  This is nonsense.  Hell is nothing but a product of the same twisted imagination that produced the God he claimed to speak for.  Phelps tried to make other people's lives into Hell.  He is now nonexistent, and that is all.  His death does not diminish me, or you.