Terry Firma

Brazilian pastor Marco Feliciano (40), who we’ve featured on Moral Compass before, is back in the news. This time he’s spreading Jesus’s love by maligning Beatle John Lennon, who was shot and killed in New York in 1980. Feliciano is pro-life — but pro-death when it comes to heathens like the Beatle peacenik. John Lennon died because he offended God by suggesting that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, according to a Brazilian pastor.

“The Bible says God does not let this type of offense go unpunished,” evangelical pastor Marco Feliciano said in remarks published by local media on Tuesday and gleaned from a video of a sermon he made at his church in 2005. Mr Feliciano, who is facing growing calls to resign from the Brazilian Congress’ human rights panel over his disparaging comments about gays, women and blacks, also said he would have liked to see the body of Lennon when the English pop star was shot dead in December 1980.

“I would have liked to be there the day they discovered his body, I would have lifted the cloth which covered him and would have told him: Excuse me, John, but this first shot is in the name of the Father, this one is in the name of the Son and that one in the name of the Holy Spirit.”

Feliciano was seven when Lennon was murdered. The image of a seven-year-old lifting the sheet from Lennon’s body, then addressing the corpse with holier-than-thou spite and glee, is probably not conducive to returning Brazilians to the churches they’ve been abandoning at an ever-increasing rate. Quoted in the New York Times,

Andrew Chesnut, an expert on Latin American religions at Virginia Commonwealth University, said that the fastest-growing segment in Brazil’s religious landscape may now be nonbelievers and people unaffiliated with any church, making up as much as 15 percent of the population. For a country that as recently as 1980 had negligible levels of people saying they were atheists, this development points to big shifts in society.

Let’s see if ragging on dead secular peacemakers can reverse the trend, shall we?

[image via spinner]