On July 8, 1741, in Northampton, Massachusetts, nearly half a century after Christians hanged people in Salem they believed to be witches, Jonathan Edwards preached from his pulpit, describing how his god tortured people Edwards regarded as sinners.

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you,” he said.

Such attitudes still exist, as evidenced by Phill Grant’s July 13, 2016, letter printed in The Recorder. Grant, who like Edwards must surely regard himself as a good Christian, regularly writes hate-filled diatribes for publication in The Recorder.

He calls himself a reverend, but as is true of Edwards, there is nothing to revere in the rigidly barren and bitter spiritual vision secreted beneath the thin facade of Christian piety from which such preachers condemn those whose lifestyles, politics, philosophies and beliefs differ from their own.

It has long been shameful that The Recorder has allowed its opinion pages to be used as a forum for such venom. It is especially execrable now given the incidents of intolerable hate speech and actions that have occurred in Greenfield over the past months.

Just as Paul, Jesus’ self-anointed apostle, tragically misinterpreted the simple message of the man he claimed to admire and follow, people like Grant seem determined to make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell.

The poet William Blake put it this way:

“I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A chapel was built in the midst,

where I used to play on the green.

And the doors of this chapel were shut,

And thou shalt not writ over the door;

So I turned to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be,

And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars, my joys and desires.”

If Satan existed he would prepare a home for such priests and preachers, smile as they did his work, embrace and kiss them lovingly for their contributions to his ends when they arrived at the gates to hell.

He should then slam shut those gates, hell’s torturous flames blazing behind him, and cry out a warning to his minions as Jonathan Edwards and his fellow preachers stood outside, “Quick, bar the doors before these damned fools take the joint over.”

Wilson Roberts lives in Greenfield.