Quit Smoking, Quit Religion, How To
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Christians and other religious Zealots are like smokers and boomboxers, and, sadly, like the poor, they’ll probably always be with us. It’s when the Evangelicals took the fateful turn to Avengelicals in about 1980 that we should have gotten frightened, very frightened. It’s late now – I hope not too late.
As someone who, in the upstairs bathroom, started smoking Parliament cigarettes pilfered from my Mother when I was twelve (tho I never smoked my Mother’s religion); as someone who smoked a pack a day, often Camel straights, for 30 years; as someone who went cold turkey seven days before my sister’s gala wedding with its parties and wines and champagnes, I’m here to bring you the good news that horrible and deadly addictions can be quit cold cold turkey, and after two weeks, 14 days, a fortnight of vigilance against the Insinuating Voice of the Inner Tempter, you are free and clear and living a more wholesome new life under a kind of cosmic Witness Protection Program. Nicotine and Religion and Heroin are three of the most addictive substances on Earth. They can be quit.
And society can say, we’ve had enough of that crap. These new virulent Christians are exactly like smokers of yore who used to blow smoke in your face without a thought to your personal ecology. We have to speak out, stand up, and say, “What you do in the privacy of your own room is your own weird business, but I have the right to work and be governed without your, to me, soul-threatening, toxic christiotine tarring up my lungs. If that’s your poison, happy to it, but leave me and mine deeply alone.
Trust me, I would one mile short of infinity rather be puttering around admiring the origami petals of the begonia – begonia begonia burning bright in the forest of my morning than riding the Steed of Wrath against the tediously ever-present overtly zealous Christians who like the mannersless Picts and Visigoths have invaded and befouled our simple, cheerful lives previously blissfully devoid of their Savior the Lord Jesus Christ, that occasionally insightful whippersnapper.
There were three vials worth of Wrath that led to the launching of this anti-Crusade, this war against the once-insidious, now braying and blatant Zealotorism.
Well, the first two were vials of Disbelief. The last turned the water of Incredulity into the wine of Wrath.
Probably eight years ago – I don’t quantify time well – I was in our local Red Rock café talking to a very nice middle-aged woman, Amy Turner, a Democrat, a person of deep thought and earned and practiced compassion. I knew she was a sincere Christian whose ‘faith’ informs and enfolds her heart and soul. Far be it from me, a jolly and happy heathen who dances at the Altar of Comedy to begrudge her her comforting and perhaps invigorating hallucinations. It’s all a smorgasbord. You eat squid tentacles. I don’t. You have a weekly slurp of your god’s blood. I don’t. No harm, no foul. So far, so jolly.
“Amy, I need to ask you a question,” I say. We’re sitting at the big round table in the north corner of the café. Well, I know the likely answer to this question intellectually as you, dear reader, will think you do. But slow your thoughts down and perceive this slower, thicker, like blood or molasses, with heart-thought.
“Amy, you know that I am generally good, that I actively act upon principle and honor in a daily way, imperfectly but earnestly. I need to know if I, your friend, must go, in your Christian view, to Hell because I will never take Jesus as my savior?”
It was as horrible a 40 seconds as I’ve spent. Blood rose in her face. Then she went pale. A clammy sweat broke out on her face. She was unable to look at me. She said, “It is the single hardest thing about my Christian faith,” in a voice strangled quiet and of agony.
“You would watch me, your friend pog, be herded onto the Down Escalator (I could still summon a grim joke)?” She could not speak. She nodded.
A few years later, there was Ben Davis, a Christian friend who actively studied and practiced local decency, though schizophrenically a convinced capitalist and a high-order of screw-the-peasants Republican. An economic and political pitbull and a personal Golden Retriever. At a point when we knew each other very well, I asked the dreaded Down Escalator Question. “I hate it, but I have to believe it,” he says, also stricken with dismay.
I thought – oh the open-hearted pagan naiveté – in both cases that a living breathing friend would trump a doctrine. That they would say, ‘I believe and cleave to my Faith and eschew this clearly dumb garbage that would cast a friend who is good into the fiery pits for an eternity of conscious torment.’ That’s what I would have said. I would have ripped from the Book the stupid pages which damned my friend who was good. (Probably even my friend who was bad if nothing but the truth be told.) I still reel when I think of it – the horribleness of a spiritual addiction that would condemn your friend. That’s deeply ugly stuff. This is the nub, the hub, the rub – it is this willingness to choose a spiritual or political belief over a person that leads to all this collateral damage that litters the juggernaut swath of destruction that Christianity has scathed through history. I, real pog, was collateral damage to my two Christian friends, an unfortunate but necessary cost for an Idea. Ask your Christian friend the Fiery Pit/Eternal Conscious Torment Question. The horror the horror.
I still don’t care if they hold their repugnant ideas in private – between or even among consenting adults, who really cares? How you beat upon your spiritual gonads is your business – just, please, get a room.
I forgot – there are four tipping points. The first two are the cast-good-ole-pog-into-hellfires friends. Then a few months ago, I surfed upon a program on CNN. There was this poised, lively little seven-year-old girl, articulate, vivid. Her pleasant-looking, apparently un-horned, un-cloven hooved mother was home-schooling this child. The interviewer off-camera asked the little girl something like, “How did religion start in your life?” This marvelous child piped up in her little girl’s voice, “When I was three years old, I took the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal Savior and He saved me from Sin.”
Sin? Sin? You were three years old. Sin?
What sane person could poison the mind of a three-year-old child with the idea that they are sinful? What sane person could poison the mind of a three-year-old child with the idea that they are sinful?
The 4th tipping point for me is Van Orden v. Perry condoning the garish Ten Commandments monument on public ground in the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Texas state capitol. The state should not support Christian granite,¹ nor paper, nor heads-of-pins monuments. It is not a Christian Nation – it’s all of ours, so the idea of democracy says.
It’s hard to rile a pagan. We never got kicked out of the Inner Garden of Earthly Delights. Basically, we don’t want to be fussed and we don’t want to fuss you. But your Stupid, Belligerent Narrow-minded, Narrow-hearted God is Not the Lord, my God, and I’m sick of it now. How dare you tell gay people they can’t get married? How dare you tell a woman she must bear a child she can’t emotionally or financially cherish? How dare you support the Military Death Machine? The first big act of JC was to kick over the tables of the money changers and you applaud grotesque profits?
One of the Founding fathers, John Adams suggested to Thomas Jefferson that he take the Christian Bible and a pair of scissors and cut out everything that was stupid, cruel, tribal, and insane. In what is known as the Jefferson Bible, a very few wise pages are left. Which should be embraced in the Eclectic Canon of Merry Good Sense smorgasbord of kind and wry thoughtfulness where we might all be nourished.
As to the rabid stuff Thomas Jefferson left on the cutting room floor, dear Christians, please take your meds.
Sweeter honey bee Christians vs the sting-everybody-to-death swarming Killer Bees Christians — consider that to do the right thing, the just thing, you might have to gainsay your very Faith. Which is, of course what Jesus did in his time. It don’t matter what a Book says, your father, your preacher, even if they say Jesus said it – you can’t join in or even stand by while a good person is kicked off the cliff into the Fiery Pits. It ain’t right. (And of course the Stupid Book got it wrong, and your father and the preacher. Horribly, the Universe forgives forever, but that’s another story for another campfire.) It can be a hard and lonely read, conscience, but what are we doing still lauding red-glaring rockets and bursting bombs in our national song? Ain’t right, it’s wrong. Suppose all the Books vanished for a decade (Books and sutras and all of the other fancy dress Clothes stored in the attic or the basement) – and we had to think for ourselves and couldn’t quote any bludgeoning verses?
If I revere my Lord & Savior Chocolate Ice Cream, am I less saved than you? What universal law requires redemption to be solemn?
At least if I fight with Ridicule, and believe me, brother, I will, at least you have a chance to tut-tut and berate the frivolous infidel or whatever feeble outcry you noisily raise against the Trumpet of my Ridiculously Righteous Wrath. Against bunkerbusting bombs, none of us rises again on the third day, pilgrim – Jesus neither. Think it through and through. Quit blowin’ your smelly holy smoke in my face; whatever you’re smoking makes you dangerous and cruel and paranoid. If you can’t go cold cold turkey, at least quit smoking on our parade.
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There are large areas of the country where smokers and tolerance of smoking remains the norm.
I love the phrase “zealotorism” .
We seem to be headed in a similar direction though with regard to the value of everyday kindness vs. grandiose visions of sin, moral decay, etc. It seems to me that in a sane world acdtual friendship should trump belief not the other way around.
I find holy smoke much more toxic than tobacco smoke.
I was so shocked and baffled that these putative 'friends' would choose a doctrine over me or you. Was very sobering to see the depths of the disease, how profound propaganda can be.
Monotheism is an essentially power-ridden and undemocratic construct. Monotheism does not tend to ferment or foment humble or jolly.
I'm not so keen on theism whatever, but at least pantheism is much more dramatic and droll.