The Fractured & Fragmented Body of Christ

Got this off a Christian ecumenism site. It's a quote from an editorial published in October, 2000 concerning the Roman Catholic Church's explications in Dominus Iesus concerning the primacy of the RC church over all other Christian churches. The editorial quotes from the Vatican document, in particular that part concerning the position of believers outside the Christian cult's belief system.
    Like Hindus and such.
    Here's the quote:

"If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation. However, all the children of the Church should nevertheless remember that their exalted condition results, not from their own merits, but from the grace of Christ."

Now what I find interesting, other than the ability of the RC governance to issue dictates on the condition of "grace" that non-Christians get stuck in, is the fact that it makes a decision about the eternal rewards of those who don't know Jesus.
     Kinda like the police figuring you're guilty before a crime has even been committed. An a priori statement about whether or not you're going to hell 'cause you don't know the Lord before they even got to you to tell you the "good news."

Up front, this is the same game as a mullah saying that all infidels will burn in hell, even those who have, for reasons beyond belief by today's communications systems & the level of political & social activism, never heard of Islam.
     "You will all be punished!"
     And that's it. No more & no less.
     You don't know Jesus? Well, it's to hell with you, Jasper! Ain't nobody gets away without knowin' about the Lord God Jehovah and the Salvation of the Blood & Christ!
     Period.

At which point we get to the point where I'm remembering a cartoon that somebody sent me once. Bunch of post-neanderthals sittin' around the fire, talking about who does what in the universe. Talkin' about belief, god, goddesses, moon & sun, all that.
     One of the cave men says something like "Well, that settles it. Glogh doesn't believe in the wind spirit so we'll smash his head in with a rock."
     The only difference between this and that, between the dictates of the RC church pursuant to the condition of "grace" enjoyed by non-Christians & the retribution promised by the divine lover upon those who are non-Christian, is the fact that it's a cartoon, one, and it's supposed to be a joke, two.
     Yeah, a joke: smash his head in with a rock 'cause he don't know Jesus. Praise!
     On the joke side, such a cartoon, were it to say Allah instead of the wind spirit, would be cause for a world-wide pillage & plunder fest from Muslims. Not to mention the fact that it says a lot about how seriously we take religion, in as much as we (gringos) can put a joke like that in a magazine and get away with it.
     Also on the joke side is the fact that religion itself is indeed a joke.
     As in: I can't believe it. You gotta be kiddin' me!
     And yet so many do believe, a condition that leads me to doubt seriously that any of us humans would be able to survive a big rock from space or an appropriately mutated germ. We'd be so caught up in killin' each other off from lack of faith that the killin' off done by the impactor or germ would be pretty much inconsequential and moot, deaths & body counts and all.
     'Cause you can damn sure betcha that the impactor or the germ would be ascribed to satanic forces acting against the loving nature of the god who wants money or would be the work of the divine hand to show us how we're gonna suffer without all that grace flowin' out over us like something you don't wanna know what I'm thinkin' about.
 

Sleeping Through Dead Girlfriend Music

There's a pile of music that came out and went straight into my brain about the time I joined the USN back in '68. Most of it's the stuff I'd been listening to with other hippie types, music that had so much meaning to me then but which I today realize was, for the most part, vacuous.
     Some of the music, upon hearing it today, reminds me of the girls I knew back then, the women I knew back then, when I was a sniveling little shit more interested in getting laid than in getting to know someone well enough to really care about them. Some of the women that this music reminds me of, well, some of 'em is dead. Some of 'em just disappeared into the void of time and have since turned up in the SSDI, deceased as incredibly wrong ages. Or dying from truly incredibly unbelievable diseases.
     One died from the effects of AIDS and liver failure brought on by hepatitis (which she contracted long after I knew her). Another died of unknown causes back in the 90s at age 47. When I was 47 and still no less of a kid then than I was when I first met her. On and on like that, one woman dead here, another dead there.
     And the music?
     Well, when I hear some of the stuff from that time & place in my life, it reminds me often enough of the dead women or the woman I just met & passed on. I call that music just what it is to me: "Dead Girlfriend Music."
     Some of it's so bitterly unlistenable to me now that I would rather turn off the radio or box of whatever's playing it and move on to the next cognitive distraction.
     But some of it, well, it plays a longer role. It makes me remember then and think of now and how much I never heard those words or thought of that song or even listened to the notes with enough sense to realize how much those songs were part of me even then.
     Like it maybe Dead Girlfriend Music but it's also music that reminds me of the peregrinations of mind that I took in the process of losing my faith in faith.

One song in particular is James Taylor's Sweet Baby James, a bit that I remember listening to while thinking of Kathy Alexander as the wind went through what was left of my hair in Navy boot camp. I was there 'cause I didn't want to get drafted and I had the sense at that moment that my life was gone out of my control.
     As if I'd ever had any control of it in the first place, but that's another story.
     Something about that song – probably because it was popular to some of my old friends back in the barrio – made me think of how much I wanted to be with Kathy as opposed to standing on the asphalt "grinder" with a pile of other recruits, learning the dance steps to a routine some ten weeks into our collective futures.
     Now the song in question has some topical referents that I just plain didn't get or heard as somehow homey. The bit about it being a song about a "young cowboy" on the range, "his horse & his saddle his only companion" were only tags to me in remembering my earlier but none less immature at the moment involvement in the daydream of what I had learned from television westerns. Gunsmoke, the Sugarfoot and Cheyenne tv shows were some kind of romanticism thing for the "Old West" that my father said never really existed as they showed it on tv. Didn't stop me from believing that it really was that way or that guns were dangerous in the hands of your range-wandering sociopaths.
     So there was that.
     The other nostalgic stuff about thinking "of women and glasses of beer," well, I wasn't yet then quite that hip to the beer and the women, well, I was pinin' for Kathy, see. So it stuck in my head that way.
     Until a couple days ago when I got in Cindy's car and headed off to the store and what should pop up on the car's playlist but a piece of Dead Girlfriend Music. James Taylor singin' Sweet Baby James.
     As I sang along – 'cause I still remember the words to the song even though I might not remember what it was I was goin' to the store for in the first place – I thought about how the song's lyrics tied to when I was where I heard it repeatedly . . . back in bootcamp.
     There is, after all, a certain range-riding mystique attached to sailors. They make great wanderin' guys for song writers and poets, the probable best to my mind being the song Brandy, by Elliot Lurie. The guy turns down some fine chick 'cause, as the lyrics say, his love and "life and lady is the sea."
     Shortsightedness like this would take decades to filter through to my consciousness, which is why that song and Gerry Beckley's Sister Golden Hair always remind me of Janet Norton, another of the list of dead girlfriends.

But that ain't quite the point yet.

See, as I sang along I came to a part of James Taylor's song (you remember that song, right?) that gave me pause again to consider the meaning of the words from a long-ago worldview as compared with the meaning of the words to this old guy remembering dead girlfriends' worldview.
     The lyrics in question go:

" There's a song that they sing when they take to the highway,
A song that they sing when they take to the sea,
A song that they sing of their home in the sky.
Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep
But singing works just fine for me."

And it was in the end two lines that I started thinking about how much I'd missed by just pinin' for Kathy.
     See, Taylor says (and yes, I'm gonna get academic on you here) that there is a song some folks sing "of their home in the sky" and then suggests that your sleep may be affected by the chance that you believe in this celestial home.
     To me that sounds like a suggestion the Taylor might be saying that he doesn't believe. Not that he doesn't. But the words suggest he didn't at the time of writing. Or that he might believe but that some don't and those who don't, well, their sleep is not disturbed by not believing.
     Which is right where I am now and well on the road to disbelief then but never tied the words in the song to the words disappearing in my head as I discovered my own evolution to disbelief.

It's shocking to me that the song, especially with those lyrics of possible disbelief, got as much air time as it did back then. Back then was when the Beatles caught hell for suggesting that they might be more famous & well-known than Jesus. Back then was when kids were living together without benefit of matrimonial ceremony, and sometimes not just livin' together but actually sleeping together and getting pregnant without benefit of ceremony. It was a time of social upheaval and the damn church heads didn't even catch that line in that song!
     What a trip, so to speak.
     Here all this time I'd put this song on the endangered species list and all along it had been there without any participation from me.
     Which goes back to the concept of the time/space where that song was birthed and what it might have meant for me if I'd been paying attention.
     Even if it is still Dead Girlfriend Music to me to this day, reminding me of a time when I was so seriously disconnected from society by way of having myself included (as opposed to including myself personally in society) in a society that was then as it is now, horribly artificial.
     Hippie days, yo, were seriously artificial.
     Peace and love and all that, sure. But in the end we just wanted to be the usual white gringo kids who had no responsibility and expected our parents to bail us out if we ever got slipped off the high moral fiber or whatever we thought we were pursuing.
     Which weren't much, what we were pursuing weren't.
     We were after hedonism, instant gratification, ratiocinated-all-to-hell escape from responsibility and gimme-now-I-wanna-get-laid. That's what we were after.
     If we actually ended the Vietnam War, I ain't so sure.
     It was Nixon, the creepy old dude who followed LBJ in the president's chair who ended the Vietnam War. And we can look at that move now as the beginning of the end of isolation between China and the USA.
     Maybe Nixon was going after the kids & veteran vote in ending the war but I'd be hard pressed to say that we, as a demographic, actually "ended" the war in Vietnam. Our noise & bustle might have been part of it but I seriously doubt it was all that much.
     We wanted to be cowboys by the fire, sailors on the sea, warm breeze blowin' south over our shoulder, stardust and bullshit. That's what we wanted.
     And out of it all, I remember the dead, male, female & whatever else. Kathy, Janet, Steve, Dick Curwell, the crazy little dude who always came to me when he wanted to get stoned, Renée & Jerome and Susan & all of 'em, dead from our inability to see how close death really is everyday, because we believed we could change the world for the better. Believed that we could make the world a bright & shiny place to live, full of parking lots and shopping and sunshine and all that expanded consciousness stuff that we as a demographic were into then.
     We believed.
     And it helped us to do more than sleep together.
     It hid the meanness of existence from us just as much as the church or religion has always covered for the nasty shit in life by promising a home in the sky.
     If you can believe that.
 

Ora pro nobis, yo.

Noted earlier on – as in last posting – I have a pretty good time with folks come to the door trying to sell me a soul. It doesn't happen very often but more 'n once or twice a year and I start to remember 'em better.
     The Mormon thing, well that was an interesting moment.
     I was over a friend's digs, putting together a Heathkit AM/FM tuner for him, bits at a time, when some Mormons did indeed knock on the door. Matter of record.
     Then a couple days ago I got the knock on the door early up a week day morning. I was home, as was Cid, 'cause both of us was feelin' puny and it was all we could do to keep ourselves awake from one nap to the other. Between that and all the concomitant parts of having some rhino virus, we was just plain blowed away.
     So the knock on the door.
     It was just after the postal organs had deposited the days fun, so I figured it would be cool to see what was up & get the mail outta the box at the same time.
     I opened the door and noticed quick off that the guy at the door had a black prayer-ish lookin' book in his mitt. There was a woman with him, similar attire and also holding a book.
     Bible thumpers, I thought to myself.
     This did not preclude me from being friendly and all that "good mornin', neighbor" stuff.
     The guy intro'd himself and I acknowledged by saying that I'd seen what I could only guess was a bible in his hand.
     He acknowledged my acknowledgment as I opened the mail box.
     I made some mention about the mail.
     He made some mention back.
     And right there on top of all of the stuff in the box was the monthly edition of the FFRF newspaper, Freethought Today.
     I said that it was interesting coincidence that he should have a bible in his paw while I was taking my monthly disbelief newsletter outta the mail box.
     He didn't get it.
     I explained: "You're sellin' belief and I ain't a believer."
     So he explained back that he was going around inviting people to see how the bible was a source of solace and quietude in troubled times. The bible was a book that showed how the future would work out.
     I said that I didn't believe and the I didn't want to take any more of his time and I wasn't gonna let him take any more of mine.
     "Thanks for stoppin' by. Have a nice day."
     They left.

Now prior to this, or just as I had opened the door and looked out onto what would have been a beautiful day to be outside, were Cid & me not tied to the Kleenex box, I noticed a county auditor's vehicle parked in front of the house.
     "Oh Lord, let these two belong to that vehicle," I said to myself 'cause ain't nobody else was listenin' to my thoughts but me.
     Well, it weren't.
     At least I don't think it was. The pair on the porch left by the steps and walked down the street, passing the county vehicle and walking on down the street toward the bank. So I didn't have to worry about church/state issues.
     It was such a relief to me to see them not take county bus that I went upstairs immediately, took a nap and immediately upon waking up from the nap, wrote a letter to my friends at the Freedom From Religion Foundation telling them the story and enclosed a donation check.
     Then, feelin' drained and puny again, I took another nap with the cats.

This is the second time in what I can only remember as a couple three months. Peeps show up at the door with their holy books or whatever and try to convince me that I'm needin' saved or goin' straight to hell unless I'm washed in the blood of Lord Jesus.
     Seriously.
     I take this stuff in a good frame of reference. I mean, they's all just good-hearted folks worried for my soul. They show up at the door and hope to bring me into the light. They usually get a pretty friendly rejoinder from me and that's it.
     But the other day while I was out in the printery thinking of Joey the Car Wiper, I came across a sticker that I swear I'm gonna put on the door.
     It's one of those "not allowed" red circle with a diagonal line through it signs. Under the red diagonal and inside the red circle is a restroom gender kinda sign with the characters holdin' bibles.
     "No bible thumpers allowed."
     "Take yer jive simpering superstitionism somewhere else, you mutant albino freaks!"
     Only problem is, if I do it, Cid will be up in arms over it.
     She said the first time it happened that she was surprised that I had been so calm and gentile about it. I said I'm always calm and courteous about my disbelief. I'm even that way about belief in general.
     I guess she expects me to go off like a rocket and tear the holy word up into shreds and tatters right there in front of the poor delusionals.
     Like hell.
     There's standing at my door and there's assault. The standin' is ok as long as it doesn't become a matter of me havin' to shove 'em off the porch. The tearing up the book would be pilfering from the poor retards and then assaulting their beliefs right there on the porch.
     That wouldn't be fair.
     It'd be like kickin' a puppy.
     But I have to say that the past two occasions is pretty much my limit. And I have to say that it's likely that, after two such visits that I know of, and with my neighbors pretty much knowin' well-enough by now that I don't believe, that there'll likely be more.
     There'll always be more.
     In fact, there's some suspicion in my mind that some day I'll wake up and there'll be a hand-holdin', candlight-filled, mumbling & gyrating prayer group standing in front of my house, legal on the sidewalk, prayin' for me.
     Oh, please, Lord, let that cup pass from me, yo.
     'Cause if it does ever come to that, I will definitely have a problem.
     I'd have to kick a puppy or two to get 'em to leave. And hope that they would.
     My orbit is fixed. And the more gravity gets piled up against that, at my LaGrange point, you might say, the more out of kilter the rest of the universe will become. I'll be steady as the rock of wherever and they'll be out there gyrating on the sidewalk and then it will become difficult.
     They'd be impeding the progress of foot traffic back and forth from the bank. And you and I both know that we can't have people unable to get to their money.
 

Old "It Came to Pass" Again, Almost

Somewhere back in space I got on a rant about people who leave religion. Folks will cut out from the Roman Catholic herd and go mill around with the Baptists or Nazarenes or whatever. Go from one religion to another, usually within the same belief set, like the examples above. Some will do that but go elsewhere. Like the friend I had once who, after becoming involved with a woman of the Jewish tribal belief system, joined up with that belief and, as far as I know, went off to live on a kibbutz somewhere.
     Hope he's still alive. Him and his loved one.
     Another group of drop outs kinda makes me wonder. You know: good RC boy goes off to become a Muslim, hoping some day to be a shaheed. A martyr. Blow himself up with a bunch of other sinners around. Or a plain wrapper Lutheran will drop out of that one and head off to spend time saving diesel fuel in barrels on a commune and waiting for the arrival of the ass-ended masters.
     And then there's folks who become $cientologists.

Well, this ain't about none of that. It's about the divergent gang who fall under some name or the other with Latter Day Saints in it. Like Church of Christ Jesus in the Reformed Latter Day Saints of Yore. Or Ladder Carrying Polygamists of Jesus & Quetzalcoatl from the Latter Days of Saints. Or Church of Mormon Reformed and Isolate. Whatever.
     Mormons.
     Them.
     Like when I was a kid we knew about Mormons 'cause, well, my father had been raised in Arizona, close enough to Utah to know about 'em and with a last name like Young, well, it aroused prescriptions, see?
     "No, I'm not related to Brigham Young. I'm one of the Arizona Youngs. Different people, see?"
     Some folks did. Most didn't even ask.
     That was back when Mormons lived in Utah and the rest of 'em weren't all that common, even with the pairs of missionary kids out patrolling neighborhoods in black pants and white shirts with black ties all day and night in 110-degree heat.
     The knock at the door.
     "I'm Elder Levi and this is Brother Nephi and . . . "
     "And I'm an atheist. Have a nice evening, fellahs."
     And the closing of the door.
     Say hallelujah.
     Hallelujah.

Well, as you can well imagine in times like these, there are tons of web sites defending or defaming the Mormons, their prophet and his antecessors and all that. Some of 'em try mightily to convince you or me that, despite all the archeological evidence and the DNA research and all that, there never were chariots pulled by horses under the command of Jewish tribal migrants in the North American continent before Cecil B. Demille and Charlton Heston got ideas.
     Other sites provide intimate detail on how the prophecy of the Book of Mormon came to be, was plagiarized, fabricated or whatever else you want to know about it. The book.
     All in all there's a ton of stuff on the InterWebs about Mormons and a big chonk of it ain't all that nice neither. But then there's a ton of stuff about Roman Catholics and Baptists and the Holy Spirit of Pedophilia Crutch pastor got sent to prison a couple weeks back for somethin' happened at Christ Camp.
     So you get to see a lot of it, if you chose to look for it.
     
And then, sometimes, you get a good giggle out of it.

So let's start with Oahspe, of which I have two copies, one the British 1960 printing, which I bought at a hippie/lesbian book store, back when I was self-medicated. The other is the 1935 edition, edited by E. Wing Anderson and published under the dispensation of The Essenes of Kosmon, a Fraternity of Faithists.
     Them.
     If you are not aware of Oahspe (also called "The Kosmon Bible"), I can tell you that you better get yer readin' glasses on. It's a hugely thick book of persistent stuff about different godhead figures having children who become gods and travel from planet to planet in "star ships" doing whatever they want as gods and so forth. Some of the stuff is from the divine perspective and some of it is in parallel text from a historical & more human perspective.
     The spirits keep good records.
     I say that 'cause it was the spirits of the various deities and the arch-chief-overall deity, known as Jehovih, commanded the transcriber of the texts to buy a typewriter and to turn to with taking copious notes.
     The transcriber, a dentist named John Ballou Newbrough, was told by visiting angels and spirits what to do and how to type it. He eventually finished all the writing out of the spirits' stuff and had the entire thing published, first, in 1882 (also known as Anno Kosmon 34). The book attracted some attention, in that Ballou Newbrough suddenly found himself with questioning followers, and eventually the collected folks formed a community that ended up, of all places, in . . .
     You ready?
     . . . ended up in . . . New Mexico.
     Bet'cha you were thinkin' they'd end up in Utah, didn't'cha?
     Nope.
     They formed a community in Shalam, NM, where, during a flu epidemic, John Ballou Newbrough and many of his faithful met their ends.
     But the book's still here, two copies in my house and a bunch more in libraries and homes of disbelievers and not. Don't know how many of 'em there are, them books, but I figure if I got a copy in 1972 or so, printed in 1960, there's gotta be a bunch more of 'em out there.
     And man, are they out there.
     Star maps. Descriptions and pictures of hieroglyphs – none of 'em as cool as the stuff Joseph Smith the Prophet of Moroni cribbed from newspapers &c – with the path of the stars and planets through the firmament. All that. The rotation of the galaxy. All that.
     In the book. Fold out pages in the small, 1970 edition. Full page in the larger edition from 1935.
     It would be a hoot to find a copy of the original printing. That would have been around the same time that the Mormons were getting run out of town after town on their way to the promised land of Utah.

According to what I've been able to spirit up (no pun intended), the Book of Mormon and Oahspe are just two of a couple more religionistic spirit texts that surfaced in the 19th Century. The two that got printed (Oahspe & Mormon) are probably the lucky two for having a readership and subsequent followers.
     All the same, I come back to the question of leaving faiths again.
     Like why would anyone look at their present belief system – religion, creed, fellowship, whatever – and say to themselves that such was not the right path.
     "Hmm . . . this killing for virgins . . . It don't make no sense . . . "
     "Hmm . . . maybe I should stop being a Muslim and become . . . "
     A dead body?
     That's what happens with that line of thought.
     "Hmm . . . the nuns brutalized me in Jesus' name . . ."
     "Maybe I should become . . . "
     A Baptist?
     Yeah, right.
     Look at a belief and reject it, only to take up another belief with all the usual mental gymnastics that the previously rejected faith had in spades. Don't make no sense to me. I don't understand it: Why would a person fall away from believing on a god who had certain rules only to take up a belief in a god – either under another name or with a completely different disguise – who had another set of equally arcane rules?
     Wouldn't it make more sense to just say "Nah. Ain't no god. I'm done"? And go forth from that moment to believe no more?
     Makes more sense than to spend your life as a Roman Catholic and then become a Mormon. Or a Nazarene Church goin' person.

But here's the real dig: Out there in the InterWebs, there exists a site that goes on about Mormons for some time before revealing that there are two books from the book of Mormon that never got put in the original book.
     And whoever said that didn't pay much attention to the website promulgating the first one, The Book of Zelph.
     If you go to it (the site), you'll quickly see that it's a spoof on the Mormon book, right down to the blind obedience to the person who claims to have found the "cartload of gold plates" which said person subsequently translated – a la Joseph Smith – and subsequently offers to the masses yearning to be free of their minds.

At least it's not another Church of the SubGenius con. Right?
 

शान्ति This Ain't About, Yo

In aftermathismatic fervor over the satanic & diabolical massacre (please pardon my hyperbole for a moment) in Mumbai a few days back, some Muslims appear to have suddenly gotten balls. At least that's what you or I might get from the reportage in the most recent online edition of the Times of India
     The article, however, has only one quote from anyone Muslim saying that the Mumbai carnage was troubling. To wit:

"The occupation of the synagogue and killing people in hotels tarnishes the Muslim faith," said Kazim al-Muqdadi, a political science lecturer at Baghdad University. "Anyone who slaughters people and screams 'Allahu Akbar' (God is Great) is sick and ignorant."

     And meanwhile, back at the madrassa, a person named " Sheik Youssef al-Ayeri said the killings are in line with Islam.

'It's all right for Muslims to set the infidels' castles on fire, drown them with water .... and take some of them as prisoners, whether young or old, women or men, because it is one of many ways to beat them,' he wrote in the al-Fallujah forum."

     And as much as I am willing to take one quote against the carnage with one quote for the massacre, I'm still wondering, among other things, what took these few more vocal than your average sheep Muslims so long to get up about the inherent violence hidden in the untranslatable verses of their holy book.
     Or to put it simple: The massacre was one of a continuing list of atrocities perpetrated against civil society by a religion that preaches in text and pulpit & deed the annihilation of everything that goes against the creed. And that includes members of that creed's community. And here we are, seven years and some after the destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers, Muslims are finally getting the idea that such madness might be harmful to the view of others toward their faith.
     Yeah, right.
     Fact is, somebody probably went fishing to find out how many Muslims might have something to say about it. Such a fishing expedition eventually led to the two quotes above ending up in a small article on a web site.
     Seven years after 9/11.
     Or some five hundred years after the reconquista
     Finally.

At the same time, after watching this madness for the past however many years that the show's been on the air, The Daily Show has also taken off the gloves in a more forthright way than they have since 9/11 knocked the entire television audience into holy-shit-mode seven and some years back.
     You check that response online here.

At which point we get down to the part where I reiterate once again (kinda like déjà vu all over again) my feeling that religion and the superstitious mind from which it springs will be the ruination of the species.
     Of course, I am now so far gone in my cynicism toward my species and my pessimism that there will never be a better reason for us all to just die out and let the processes of physics on the planet carry on blindly in our befuddled, cranky, lame, abusive, self-absorbed, self-centered, "screw-you-I-got-mine-every-crumb-for-himself-his-hair-stands-up-and-crackles" way of doing things absence.
     And yes, from time to time I see signs and portents that say much about the ability of our species to actually act like we have a rational brain in our heads or that we may just for one moment have worth more than the last roll of toilet paper the cats shredded up for me special over night. Sometimes it happens. People behave in ways more appropriate for what we presume to be the most rational & knowledgeable species in the whole goddamn universe.
     Sometimes I see that.
     Most of the time I don't, and most of those "most of the time" times I see that it is usually a handful of considerably addled and viscious (in ways that no wild or predatory animal would even begin to understand) humans going on a tear about an imaginary friend or some conception of having been dishonored or whatever silly puerile bullshit we dream up. Most of the time it's a couple loonies, truth up.
     Most of the time it's insanity.
     And that gives me another chance to reiterate once again (kinda like déjà vu all over again) my feeling that there are some six billion point 993 many of us; that we should just snuff it and let the processes of physics on the planet carry on blindly in our befuddled, cranky, lame, abusive, self-absorbed, self-centered, "screw-you-I-got-mine-every-crumb-for-himself-his-hair-stands-up-and-crackles" way of doing things absence.
     And if you think I'm getting boringly repetitious, stick it in yer heiny, hotshot.
     I think the entire species is getting repetitious. In act, word, thought and, best of all, conversations with imaginary friends for whom we are quite willing to kill many folks who otherwise ain't caused much more harm than making someone slow down at a crosswalk.
     These repeated killings and massacres in the name of a nonexistent entity are getting repetitious. Goddamn repetitious. F@%king repetitious, actually. And it's time for those who don't agree with the perpetrators of these horrible travesties of reason and intellect to pick up the stick and beat the living bejebus out of those who think that rape and pillage, piracy and murder, subjugation and pedophilia (among other brutalities) are the course of life.
     It's time to end the bloodshed and misery by giving to those who perpetrate bloodshed and misery the chance to kill themselves off before we get pissed off enough to do it for them.
     Which presents the conundrum of capital punishment, into which I will not now delve, since I've begun to become one of those who feels very strongly about the need for capital punishment, bitter old shit that I am. Even as my family tries to keep me from sitting in a chair Christmas morning, happy with what they gave me but still unable to smile a genuine smile 'cause there's peace on earth and all that happy shit.
 

We Shall Gather in the Restroom . . .

I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand gayness. You know: homosexuality in all its many permutations across gender and age. I don't understand why heterosexuals don't leave meeting notes on restroom walls like gay males do. I don't understand why heterosexuals don't meet in parks and highway rest stops to have moments of passion (whether amorous or just hedonistic) when so many homosexuals have no problem with such meetings, judging by the arrests & crime sweep-ups of such events. I don't understand what is so inspiring of passion in a young boy's butt or the soft skin of boys' faces yet to be touched by a razor.
     I just don't get it.
     But then, I don't get how anything at all happening in the world is immediately taken as a sign of the divine's disapprobation of whatever is judged sinful or damnable by the divinity of the moment.
     And after such an announcement, I can get down to the point where the sex and the gods get together.
     See, a friend of mine referred me to a blog website whereon the blogger proposed that the fires now doing a Bushian job of California are the divine getting back at gays.
     Only problem with that is such an event would show that the divine hand is pissed at California for voting against gay marriage. Hell, you can be gay and get married in Connecticut. How come god ain't burnin' the livin' bejebus out of the East Coast? You'd think any god who was weirded out by two men French kissing in a restroom stall would set fire to the stall and its wide-stanced inhabitants as a much more directly readable response to gayness on the part of the deity in question.

Of course, the blog aforecited engaged many comment responses, the most rational of which proposed that the Christian propensity to explain natural events from a divine perspective was, at the very least, self-serving and self-absorbed. That and how "not everything is a sign from god" and that such explanations of events are a more sure sign that "you are not allowed to make it up as you go along."
     Which is exactly what we're talking about here: making it up as you go along.
     At which point I am in firm agreement with the commentator's extension of the metaphore:

"Religion is -- in my opinion -- a brain virus. The need for some daddy figure or his graceful, lithe, unmarried, hippie son to rescue you from your own personal misfortune is childish enough. But the further need to have this dad or his son visit wrath upon your enemies is pure school-yard nonsense that really speaks to a sense of helplessness in your own personal life."

     To which I must go on to say is a perfect explanation for the tendency among believers of any stripe to blame misfortune of others on the other's being unapproved, unloved, unsaved in the sight of whatever divinity is supposed to be doing the misfortunizing. That or the misfortunate are supposed to be unschooled in the divine mysteries and/or belief and thus even more deserving of the divine wrath.
     It is schoolyard stuff, however, plain and simple.
     Little Johnny gets his feeling hurt by a girl don't like his nose and he then claims that he's gonna get back at her for it. Only problem is, Little Johnny ain't got the muscle for it. So he thinks about how he'd like to see whatever misfortune fall on the girl. But time she go by and the girl goes on about her life while Little Johnny wastes time and neural energy vilifying the girl in his mind, which Little Johnny knows subconsciously is a further sign of his weakness before her and thus even more disempowering. And it's the disempowerment that really does the job on Little Johnny.
     Weeks go by and every time he sees the girl he gets pissed at her and even more pissed at himself. On and on like that until he's so full of hatred and bitterness that he can barely spare a smile on a sunny day.
     And when the slightest thing happens to the girl, like a cold or a bruise or a missed period, Little Johnny doth rejoice in his heart that some bad luck has finally befallen the object of his bitterness and disgust.

Ach, Freude in Himmel! Gott hat Seinen Zorn gegen das Mädchen doch aufgewiesen!

Makes no never mind that the girl got sneezed on by her little brother who had a cold or that she happened to walk into the open fridge door in the middle of the night or that she engaged in unprotected sex with her best friend's step brother. To Little Johnny's little mind, it's the divine hand taking retribution against the girl on Little Johnny's behalf.
     As if all the starving children in Africa and all the people poisoned by tainted milk in China or the seventeen-year-old youngster got shot in a ghetto drive-by had to be put on hold from the divine's protection just to avenge Little Johnny's pitiful, puerile and prepubescent sense of dishonor.
     As if Little Johnny took precedence over the divine hand saving a child from dying of an asthma attack or the divine hand preventing a family in Yorkshire from being mowed down by a drunk and obviously sinful Muslim.
     Like that.
     Which is exactly where the comment quoted above points: Such claiming to understand the hand of divine justice are stupifyingly self-absorbed, self-centered and quite seriously & immaturely self-adulatory.
     "I know what god's doing 'cause, well, I'm tight with the god-dude, yo."

Yeah, right.

This is the same shill been used for the past thirty-thousand and some years. I figure that stretch since it was about thirty k-years ago that we flat-faced chimps drove the last Neanderthals off the cliffs of southwest Iberia and into the sea. We took control of everything and then decided that our invisible friend was really in charge and that he had given us control of everything.
     Another "yeah, right" moment.
     Everyone claims to be in contact with the divine but we always leave it to one special, usually self-appointed loudest monkey to tell us what god has in mind. You know: the prophet has all the answers, even if we each claim that we understand how the divine has punished this person or that.
     You died. I didn't. God loves me.
     What a horribly self-absorbed way to think. What a horribly self-aggrandizing, mean-spirited way to view the world.

Let's face it: the fires burning the hillsides and valleys of California, much like the earthquakes that rattle buildings which subsequently fall on children and parents and the floods and tornadoes that rip up farm lands and families happen because, well, somebody's at whatever site it is that the catastrophes take place.
     If nobody were there to notice, nobody'd be bothered by an earthquake or a storm or grass or forest fire. And if we didn't have the technology to monitor and understand such things as earthquakes or the weather at a distance, we wouldn't know about them or even care that much. But since there have been at least a few hundred million humans on the planet for the last couple tens of thousands of years and since we're so widespread in our overpopulation of the planet, we notice a lot of stuff goes against our survival.
     Or so we think.
     See, we survive mainly 'cause we've figured out how to have the free time to make our lives easier. If we didn't have our imaginations we wouldn't have figured out how to make arrow points out of metal, which of course led us to being able to kill more of each other over time than we would ever have done with a Clovis point and a stick.
     All that imagination has taken its toll on us and not the least of which toll-taxes of our imagination is our ability to dream up goofy ideas for the way things work when, later on we were able to imagine new ways of seeing how things work so that we could do away with the goofy ideas. At least that would be the plan, were it not obvious that many more of us than is necessary still believe the goofy stuff even if we accept the possibility of the new ways of seeing stuff being more correct than the goofy stuff.
     That's why we fight over the space between gods and science.
     That's why we still manage to build conceptual pictures of the molecular structure of the basic cell while going off to thank the divine hand for having given us the last couple hundred thousand breaths. That's why we pray for good weather and wonder how we pissed off god when the weather turns sour, even if we can read in the technology how the weather patterns are predictable and produced.
     It gives us the ability to cop out, religious belief such as that does.
     God's burning the forests and valleys and homes and houses of people in California because they voted against gay marriage?

Gimme a break.

The houses being burned down in California are burning because they were built in the middle of a forest area that has been for a long, long time notorious for its near desert-like drought and fire cycles. Ain't no god told folks to build there and it ain't no god told folks not to think of what they were doing.
     It was just such pretty countryside that somebody had to develop it.
     And people paid for the houses thus developed.
     Without one thought to the fire and drought possibilities. Or the possibilities of flash floods in those times when water was droppin' from the sky in buckets and barrels.
     People moved in there of their own delusion, much like the delusionals who believe that they know the hand of a god being that no one in history other than seriously deluded psychopaths have ever seen. Ever seen. Not once.
     Which leads me to the following proclamation: I do not understand gayness. It just don't even begin to make any sense to me. That don't mean that I think gays are the demon spawn. Yes, I do wonder about the juvenile and narcissistic hedonism that I see in the multiple messages on restroom walls. But I ain't about to claim that we should cull the herd beginning with the gays and lesbians.
     And if I cannot understand such a simple concept as gayness . . . or the lifestyle that it is supposed to be, or any of the other bits and pieces of gay behavior or gay thought or gay psychology or gay physiology, up to and including transsexualism, I am sure as hell not going to understand the even more simple concept of the existence of a divine being punishing its creation (humans) for the divine having allowed the gay humans (its own creation as well) to be. And I do not understand how anyone can claim to know that catastrophes are happening to people because they themselves do not want gays getting married. It just don't make sense.
 

Divine Retribution & the Voice of Whoever

Aside from the linguistic considerations of how humans think, there's one question that has always made me just stand shaking my head in disbelief: religious zealotry. Take any religion, any belief system that proposes first that there is a supernatural divine agent as the source, cause and continuance of the universe with a set of doctrines and pronouncements about the divine agent & its rules of conduct for all that is. Apply those rules to every human creature and do so in a way that makes any variance from the following of the rules the most abject form of blasphemy and then make any blasphemy punishable by death.
     God, as divine agent & ruler of the universe, has rules. You obey the rules, you get an eternal reward beyond measure in a supernatural existence. If you disobey the rules, you get punishment & torment in the afterlife and, if you disobey the rules enough to piss off other believers to want you dead, you die right then and there.
     Now my question about this hangs on one simple hook within any belief system.
     Makes no never-mind whether we're talking about Christianity, Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism (in all its manifestations), $cientology or – dare I say it? – Atheism, Agnosticism & complete disbelief.
     You act against the divine commands, you can pay with your life in the here and now.
     Never mind that your sins will deny you an eternal reward in the hereafter.
     Sin means death and sufficient sin means that believers will want you dead.
     It ain't enough that the divine judgment of eternity will not tilt in your favor.
     It's that right here, in this physical world of this very moment, other believers will want you dead. In fact they will be quite glad to see you dead. They will end your life right now so you can burn in hell or suffer whatever divine retribution might befall your soul in the hereafter.
     But most importantly: you will pay right now for your sins today.
     And those who do not believe as the rest do will suffer the same fate, should they choose not to convert their beliefs to those of the gun-totin', scimitar-wavin', rock-chuckin', epithet-screamin' majority believers.

You do as someone has decided the divine wants you to do or you suffer physical torture and, ultimately, death. No questions asked. No second-chances given. Belief and obey or suffer and die.

Now, this is all a little weird to me because, if I understand the divine agency message correctly, the divine agent, by dint of having created the universe out of nothing, is thus much more powerful than anything or anyone who might have lived, ever will live or could ever live, now and forever, amen.
     So if god is omnipotent, god itself can punish the sinner directly.
     Why would an omnipotent god need to use its creation – human beings in this case – to punish those who act or believe or speak against the divine will?
     Why doesn't god punish them now? And why is punishment right now in this time and space so absolutely necessary? Wouldn't an omnipotent divine agent, able to transcend time and space, matter and energy, be capable of punishing the sinner before the sin was even contemplated, let alone committed?
     Are you getting me here?
     God is divine. A divine being is immortal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent.
     God is thus aware of everything everywhere all the time.
     God has rules which god has transmitted to the humans.
     If humans disobey god, then god will exact punishment.
     So why do other humans – creatures much less powerful and a lot more inclined to weakness in all aspects of the universe than god – have to become involved in the punishment of the sinners?
     Shouldn't humans just let the sinners die off and receive the punishment in the hereafter that the divine agency has promised those who disobey?
     It doesn't make any sense to me.
     It's not a wookie. Wookies don't even exist and yet here's a picture of a wookie.

"For it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord."
(Romans 12:19)

At least that's the way it comes to me, that condition of retribution: god says that retribution for disobeying god will come from the hand of god.
     Or so some might think.
     So it's here that the question becomes all foggy and ratty.

First off, what we as humans know about the divine agent comes not from direct communication between that agent and every individual in the human species. The info we have on god, how it works, how it built the universe, how it expects us to act, how it will or has or can act with or toward us comes from the mouths of singularly self-appointed other humans.
     God doesn't tell me how I'm expected to act or what I get for acting nice.
     God tells someone else and that someone else tells me what god told them.
     Chinese whispers on a metaphysical scale.
     Thus, linguistically, the trouble begins there, with that particular human being who claims to have been informed by the divine as to the wishes, commands and directives of the divine. Not god directly. Another human being. Somebody just like you and me, with blood in his or her veins and a whole life of likes and dislikes, neuroses, psychosis, hates and loves and preferences and all sorts of tastes and disgusts.
     Another human speaks for god.
     Which, despite all the history of human beings trusting in the words of some self-appointed (or otherwise mysteriously chosen) human being as the front man for the divine, is the weak link in the chain.
     Prophet, priestess, shaman, wizard or witch, it makes no diff: god don't talk to nobody directly. The divine agent has an agent.
     And we know how selfless & dispassionate agents can be, don't we?
     As if.

See, that's where it really all falls apart for me. Over the course of six million years as a species under development and over the course of something like twenty thousand years as a species per se developing today's culture, it's likely that a few billion human beings have claimed to speak for the divine.
     Among that group – and most recent 'cause they seem to keep better records now than they did twenty thousand years back – you can count the likes of Ezekial, who saw the wheels and the faces and such. Or John Smith, who got his info from some stones in a hat by way of gold plates carved with stuff that no one ever really, truly saw in the flesh, hands-on, so to speak. Or Jim Jones, who distributed the Kool-Aid to his flock in the jungle of Central America. Or David Koresh, about whom any number of conspiracy theories have been proposed and used as fodder for or against government interference in belief. Or the Ayatollah Khomeini, who proposed in a fatwah that it was ok to have sex with a child. Or Adolf Hitler, who proposed that the German people were the last vestiges of a once great Aryan race, despite all evidence to the contrary then (or now). Or Julius Caesar, who claimed to be the child of parthenogenesis and who was supposed to have ascended into heaven upon his death all them millennia ago, thus copping in on an act that Christians today claim only happened with Jesus.
     Yeah, year and month and day and century after millennia of this or that human being claiming to be inspired by and speaking for the divine agency when the divine agency, by way of being divine and thus omnipotent &c should, by all rights, be talking to each and every one of us individually.
     Or is that the story of prayer?

See, that and the rest of it makes the entire conceptual underpinnings of belief and disbelief so incredibly, well, human. And I ain't talking about humane or how humans are better 'n the other animals on the planet, even if they do appear to have some sort of inner dialogue or reflective consciousness.
     I'm talking about humans gaining control over other humans by saying that they got the word from the divine mouth.
     Ages upon ages of prophets, seers and metaphycicists.
     Them guys.
     The holy men.
     Every single one of 'em born of the flesh, given to the flesh and living within the flesh, they somehow get called "holy" and none dare question what they say about what the divine might have said to them.
     Period.
     Silence! I kill you!
     Them guys.
     
All of which brings me back to something I noticed when I was talking with a believer one year at the Dayton Hamvention.
     This guy and I started talking and he expressed his belief in a divine agent. Jesus, to be exact.
     I explained that I did not hold to that particular accretion of mythic elements.
     I explained that I did not see a god to believe in. (As opposed to saying that I didn't believe in god, which to me is a way of saying that I choose to not believe in a god which I somehow have to admit exists by way of negating my belief in it. In god.)
     The other guy then went on to explain that he worried for my eternal soul and then explained how his life had been beset by some personal problem (into which I will not go, since it's basically immaterial). He explained how this problem bothered him and how he prayed and consulted the Bible and prayed and tried to figure out what his god would have him do.
     Then, finally, he said he put the problem in his god's hands (yeah, I know: this is figurative speech about something that is entirely conceptual within the reflective consciousness of any human of the species) and how at that point a great weight was lifted off his shoulders.
     The great weight being, of course, this problem in his life.
     So the guy tells me that he just let it all go and then, lo and behold, he hears the voice of his god telling him to proceed as he has been proceeding and to change this or that behavior and all would come out well.
     Which, he told me, it did.
     Eventually.
     Now all the time I'm hearing this story, as I listened to him tell me about his concerted effort to find a way to fix things, I kept thinking that his prayers and his readings and his contemplations of scripture all amounted to the beginnings of a trouble shooting exercise.
     Collect all the data about whatever you've got to fix.
     Look at the problem in a linear, step-wise fashion, not letting one minor thing get missed in your evaluation of the problem's cause.
     Then! Then you let your understanding of what you're looking at, based on what you've accumulated as data and information, float the problem to the surface.
     In other words, you relax all the serious referentiality of the situation and look at what you've got.
     This don't happen because of action A, B or C.
     Or, to put it a bit less technically, the guy had given up thinking about the problem, at least to his own conscious awareness.
     This didn't make the problem go away, of course.
     It just meant that he wasn't spending serious awareness time on it. He put himself to the task of not thinking about what was wrong by way of not thinking about all the thinking about the problem that he had been thinking about.
     Degrees of referentiality. Or at least one version or the other of degrees of referentiality. Among many others.
     And then one day the gentleman's subconscious mind just floated a solution to him and, bingo, just like that: problem solved.
     Thank you, Masked Man.

Of course, the conversation that I had with this guy is just one of many such that I've had over the many years of my life of disbelief which cause me to take a very simple, almost chimp-like, view of just what it is comes out of our minds when we assign significance of thought to an agency outside of our six-million-year-old neural architecture.
     In other words, the idea that a divine speaks to the select comes directly from our innate ability to miss the fact that nothing comes from the mind that doesn't come from the brain.
     We think of stuff and, since thought & language seem to be so intrinsically linked after a hundred thousand years of gibbering like patients in the Thorazine ward, we think it's not our voice telling us to do shit.
     Even if we do think out loud and even if we do work out problems in our heads using words – which words are really never spoken but are nonetheless taken as "internal dialogue."
     Which, as usual, brings me right back to the question of the divine agent needing an agent.

Having spent so much time thinking about language and thought and applying that to the obvious question of why the divine don't communicate with everyone individually and all at once with a uniform message across time, space, geography & politics, it's obvious that there ain't no divine.
     Either that or there's a lot of 'em and they're all very weird about who knows what about them. Or the other 'n.
     Or the one Deeny listens to.
     
And it came to pass that after such a time as was wont, no knowledge has appeared to me directly from the voices in my head. And I know that they're voices plural 'cause, well, there's a huge range of personalities that I am.
     Everyone is.
     A huge range of personalities.
     There's the more-or-less '60s me, the crazy guy who has no serious referentiality at all. I'm just watching the show, man.
     There's the father-son me, the guy who stands in his garage print shop and talks with the now absent & non-existent father who died a couple days before Christmas over 26 years ago come this December.
     There's the sailor/NCO me, the RM2 guy, who stayed with the watch while the rest of the section got sent topside when the second of two engine rooms flooded back off the coast of Greece back in 1972.
     There's the guy who looks at women and girls and thinks of other women and girls whom I've known, some of whom are dead and gone many years. That guy, he's the same one who watched friends in high school walk hand-in-hand with their girlfriends and wondered why.
     There's the guy who loves his sons and his wife and looks forward to growing very old with them as part of his life.
     There's the guy who builds things.
     There's the guy who, when he messes up or injures himself building things, can drop into a rage so violent and single-minded that he may as well be homicidal.
     And there's the inner homicidal maniac, sitting there waiting for the moment of truth.
     And there's the me who knows all them guys and who knows that every single one of 'em is completely outside the control of the guy who knows about 'em.
     Them guys.
     Them referentialities.
     Not a one of 'em the voice of god or Jesus or even The One True Frank.
     Just me.

One thing I know for sure about all this, by way of knowing so much about my inner selves: I cannot account for all the voices that communicate the me (that persona who is me at any time) to me. I know that the person I am varies from moment to moment and that, since I am in a constant state of conceptual flux, my perceptions are in a constant state of flux. And the universe, as cosmic and big as it seems to be, is not a steady state either.
     Part of this is time/space theory, granted. But part of it is also cognitive theory and cognitive theory is pretty damn exact in all its vagueness when it comes to explaining beingness.
     The old Cartesian view (Cogito, ergo sum) of the mindness state has been proven false in all ways by neurology, biochemistry and chemical & neural biology.
     Nothing comes from the mind that doesn't come from the brain.
     That, in sequence, means that all the folks who claim to hear the voice of a god speaking to them directly – and particularly those who claim primacy in delivering what they think god is saying – are dead wrong. They are listening to their own self-perpetuating, self-moderating, self-absorbed selves. Certainly not a divine being.
     Which, again, brings us around to the original question or conundrum with which I started this rant: The info we have on god, how it works, how it built the universe, how it expects us to act, how it will or has or can act with or toward us comes from the mouths of singularly self-appointed other humans.
     There ain't nobody ethereal and divine whispering in my ear. And no, it ain't because I don't believe that I don't hear it, that divine voice. It's 'cause there ain't nobody whispering in my ear.
     Thus I shake my head in solemn disbelief when I hear Benny Hinn or whoever else is hip with the divine making fanciful pronouncements that, like all other such pronouncements over the course of human history, serve not the divine but the ego and self-adulation of those claiming to speak for the divine. And who claim the right to demand payment for blasphemy in the here and now instead of waiting for their imaginary friend to do the job itself, as any truly omnipotent & transcendental being should be able to do . . .

Unless that being never has existed and never will.