The newspaper headlines should be: "God strikes Jerry Falwell dead." Somehow he took a book about loving one another, not judging people and helping the poor ... and used it to preach hatred and reign down judgement while accumulating wealth and worldly power.

GOD STRIKES JERRY FALWELL DEAD!

Hey NYT! Run tell 'dat!

I remember when John Cardinal Cody died in Chicago, and it was revealed that he had fathered a child with his cousin and had embezzled tons of money from the catholic church. There have been so many cases of celebrity clergy-men who, when their private lives are examined after they are no longer able to keep them secret, turn out to be the ultimate hypocrites. The mayor of Spokane, the televangelists caught in motel rooms with hookers, or with online sex habits, or with drug addictions.

The thing all of these people rail against is the inability to overcome our human frailties; they exhort us to deny who we are, to deny understanding and compassion and empathy to others different from ourselves. In the end, it turns out they themselves most of all required the very thing they felt no one deserved.

I'll wait patiently for Kitty Kelly's book about Jerry Falwell to come out in which she will no doubt reveal he had sick sexual predilections and hated all of his fellow man. How else could he have come up with the drivel he did? Sometimes cynicism is a reasonable response.

The man (and I use that term loosely) did nothing but hate, hate and hate some more.

He deserves no sugar coating, in spite of his dough like appearance.

I'm not a hypocrite (unlike Falwell), so the first thing I did when I heard that he had died was cheer.

He was a hateful, bigoted man posing as a Christian. I wonder if St. Peter slammed the gate shut and told him to go to the other place because that's where he belongs.

One can only hope.

We now have a model for the Al Sharpton obit.

but Elephantman's as well. How do you feel, e-man?

Falwell to City: Ok, I will

May God have mercy on his soul cause not many on earth will

We have a "special" bottle we haven't touched for ages. We're cracking that sucker open tonight.

"I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!"

I guess Falwell's wish didn't come true. But MINE did. Well, not really, I was hoping his demise would be appropriate: rectal cancer, mouth cancer, etc. Eh, I'll take what I can get.

Sharpton is most definitely a dork of the highest order.

True....and still.... what glee you must have felt in making that post! How dazzling is your sting! How true your aim!

I love Republican trolls on liberal websites (and vice versa). It's such a great way to learn hundreds of ways to say "I know you are, but what am I?".

Thanks for your contribution!

At least Falwell was honest about hating people. He didn't try to paint his Bible in a pretty light or take the text as anything less than literal. Much as I disagree with everything that that man every did, thought, believed, or said, he was never under the impression that the Bible was kind, gentle, loving, or accepting.

I'm not mourning him, either, but I'm not giving his ilk a pass on what I consider dishonest evangelical discourse. Even the "gay friendly" and "sex before marriage is OK" Christians are just ignoring parts of their canon.

Jerry Falwell was first and foremost delusional and badly needed help for living in the real world. He so lacked credibility when he opened his mouth to spew damnation on anyone who did ot adhere to his reality of an unforgiving and furious deity. So why did the media even court him? Here is Larry King who will undoubtedly again give him a platform and Fox and other networks who will be damned of they speak ill of him. I am disgusted that the same mainstream media that would shun the likes of a Noam Chomsky or others who care about ALL humans, should give this hateful man even a second of air time. He lived his life full of hate. I wish that someone had shown him the way to real love of ALL people

Please, everyone, let's remember the person who is suffering the most tonight and has the most to grieve over at this time:

Wolf Blitzer.

Blitzer had Falwell on his show nearly every ten minutes for years, to the great exclusion of other voices of religion, other denominations, let alone faiths other than Christian, until any time a "Christian" or even a religious controversy came up, Falwell was CNN and Blitzer's default representation of Christianity and even, sometimes, religion itself.

Please, though, no matter what faith you profess, say a prayer tonight for Mr. Blitzer. It will be very hard-- if not impossible-- for Wolf to fill up time on his show without constantly running to Jerry Falwell. (The only thing worse for Wolf would be if something were also to happen to Al Sharpton, Blitzer's go-to representation of all things African-American).

Let's remember who is really hurting tonight. The death of Falwell is truly a Blizerian tragedy!

To the extent that history will remember him, it will be as a politician, not as a preacher.

I disagree. I think that history will record him as typical of his religion. Not in his extremism, mind you, but in the divisiveness of his faith.

Fuck him. He was a bigot, and his life should not even be a footnote to history. Let him be stricken from the records, along with all his ilk.

Kind of like a Bohemian Rhapsody, I guess.

(Sorry, I forgot the "z" in "Blitzerian" in my last post).

I'm going to quit now, while I'm behind.