Bringing In the Sheep

Let’s see how many readers this one costs me…

I wrote this last time I was in California, but wasn’t sure if I’d ever use it because it’s not very complimentary about Christians and who really needs to whack that hornets’ nest, but then read an op-ed piece in the Sunday Kansas City Star, written by a pastor who said there is a War on Christmas, but it’s being conducted by the Right-Wing Christians who withhold food from the hungry and shelter from the homeless and generally speaking don’t act very Christ-like.

So if he can get away with writing that so can I and Christmas seems like a good time to remind people what it’s at least theoretically based on and BTW, this essay is pretty hard on my mom and her religious beliefs, but at 100 years old she can’t see for shit and will never read this, so mum’s the word and if one of you blabbermouths tells her what I wrote, that’s on you, not me.

And awaaay we go…

The title of this essay was inspired by the religious hymn Bringing In the Sheaves which, when I first heard it as a child, sounded like Bringing In the Sheep which, if you think about it—and I have—makes a fuck of a lot more sense.

Just in case you’re not up on your harvesting terminology; “sheaves” are bundles of wheat and according to Wikipedia, the lyrics of Bringing In the Sheaves were written by Knowles Shaw in 1874 and the music was composed by George Minor in 1880 and nothing will make you want to explore the possibility of becoming a Fulltime Satan Worshipper faster than listening to this dreary tune, which is supposed to be about rejoicing, but sounds like it was composed by a manic-depressive who recently got a cancer diagnosis and chugged an entire bottle of Nyquil to celebrate.

If, by and large, White people can’t dance—and by and large White people can’t and Elaine Benes is Exhibit A and I’m Exhibit B—it’s because we were trying to dance to soul-crushing melodies like Bringing In the Sheaves and not more catchy tunes like Thriller or YMCA or The 1812 Overture.

Anyway…

This essay is about my religious upbringing and if you don’t want to hear someone question Christianity and the Christians who pretend to practice it, now would be a good time to stop reading and come back whenever I once again write about the 2015 Kansas City Royals who let me down a lot less often than the Christians in my life.

And Awaaay We Go—Again…

My mother likes to tell the story of when she became a Christian and in this quite possibly fictional tale, I’m a baby and she’s rocking me in a rocking chair, when Jesus Christ comes into her heart and—as future events will indicate—misses me completely.

A Heads-Up:

Due to my efforts, my mom has been getting a lot of good press since her 100^th birthday, but you can’t count on her telling the truth because she’ll tell stories the way she likes to remember them and they may have no basis in fact.

In my personal experience nobody can match a Born-Again Christian for telling lies with complete confidence.

If a lie makes a story better, lies will be included and as I said to Ernest Hemingway when we caught that giant Marlin together, I find that trait deplorable.

For example: on numerous occasions my mom told us kids our father’s favorite song was Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire which came out in 1963 and makes my dad the Nostradamus of Country Music because my father died in 1960.

So from this point forward take everything with a grain of salt the size of a 16-pound Brunswick bowling ball and we’ll now return to our spiritual journey which may or may not have a happy ending, but let’s face it, the start certainly hasn’t been promising.

Shall we continue?

OK, so now mom’s got God in her heart and surrounding organs and wants to go to church and we become Southern Baptists.

A label which raises a question:

I just asked Google if there are Northern Baptists and Google says yes and it used to be just the plain old Baptist church (no North-South divisions involved until the postseason Christianity playoff system was instituted) and there was no split until 1845 when the Baptists decided that slaveholding missionaries were probably a bad look when it came to marketing Christianity to the Godless Heathens.

But the Southern Baptists wanted to keep owning slaves so they started their own church. (Apparently they overlooked the part in the Bible about loving thy neighbor and not kidnapping him or putting him in chains or whipping him and forcing him to bring in your goddamn sheaves.)

So now due to my mom’s rocking-chair conversion, we’re attending Southern Baptist religious services/cross burnings, but that’s way too tame for mom and her fellow religious whack-jobs.

Because they’ve been reading the seldom-read parts of the Bible about speaking in tongues and faith healing and being filled with the Holy Spirit and decide to give it a go. Apparently even the Southern Baptists who in the recent past were OK with owning other humans, thought mom and her friends were going far too far.

That being the case, mom and her fellow lunatics split off and start their own church which my mom forced us to attend and as future events would demonstrate, by and large, Christians are bad salesmen (and/or saleswomen) for Christianity.

(Christ seemed to be OK: Christians, not so much…a lot like the Boston Red Sox and Boston Red Sox fans.)

And by now my mom is not just a Christian, she’s a Pentecostal Christian and over the years has been a fan of/or supported, Christian evangelists like:

• Jim Bakker (Sex scandal)

• Ted Haggard (Sex scandal)

• Bill Gothard (Sex scandal)

• Tony Alamo (Sex scandal)

• Bob Coy (Sex scandal)

• Dave Reynolds (Sex scandal)

• Doug Phillips (Sex scandal)

• Jimmy Swaggard (Sex scandal)

• Mike Hintz (Sex scandal)

• Joshua Duggar (Sex scandal)

• Rory Coyle (Sex scandal)

• Robert Tilton (Religious scam)

• Fred Phelps (Assault and battery)

• Oral Roberts (Financial misconduct)

Man, after enough sex scandals, religious scams, assault and battery and financial misconduct seem pretty wholesome, don’t they?

• Leroy Jenkins (Conspiracy to commit assault and plotting arson)

And finally…

• Pat Robertson (Just being an All-Around Olympic Gold Medal-Level Ignoramus Asshole and making Life harder for people who were already having a tough Life to begin with.)

Basically: a bunch of con artists, swindlers, adulterers, sex offenders and really bad dressers. And when one of these Titanic Jerks stepped on his own dick (and in some cases, the dicks of others) my mom would just switch to a new con man and continue sending them money she needed for herself and her family—AKA: ME.

So I’m pretty goddamn unforgiving when it comes to these “religious” con men. If you want some details, be my guest:

https://www.ranker.com/list/pastors-that-fell-from-grace/genevieve-carlton

And if you’re now going to offer up the over-used “a few bad apples” excuse; up until Francis, the popes haven’t been much better and there was that whole Inquisition episode and the Puritans were no day at the beach either and, oh, yeah, almost forgot the Crusades.

And while we’re at it, the Muslims also have some bad marks on their permanent record and without doing any research—the same decision-making method employed by Our President—I’m guessing more people have been killed over religion than any other subject and if you now feel like you want to hit me in the head with a heavy gold crucifix, you’re proving my point.

But before you get to my more than likely well-deserved crucifix thrashing, let me refer you to Matthew 7:16-20:

“By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit... Thus, you will recognize them by their fruits.”

Actually some pretty good advice from the Bible:

Don’t listen to what people say, watch what they do. So if you can tell who’s an asshole by what they do and if their fruits are any indication, we had, have and will continue to have a lot of bad trees in the Christianity Orchard.

If that Biblical passage left you cold and you’re looking for some substitute reading material, might I suggest Matthew 6:5-8 in which Jesus (whom we prefer to think of as looking like a sexy Viking) says you shouldn’t pray in public because that means you’re just showing off for others and if you were actually sincere you’d pray in private.

So every time you hear someone pray in public—and I’ve heard a Lifetime of it—according to Jesus, those people are hypocritical show offs which doesn’t seem to stop Christians from doing it at the drop of a jewel-encrusted miter and there’s only one logical conclusion:

Jesus was a killjoy.

Other than His incredibly handy party trick of turning water into wine, He was widely considered a pain in the neck because He was offering people inconvenient advice about praying in private and loving your enemies and maybe stop stoning your local whores (although Stoned Whores would be a great name for a debut album) and being a pain in the ass is how He wound up nailed to a cross and you’d think I’d learn a lesson from that episode, but so far it hasn’t taken.

Now here’s Kris Kristofferson singing Jesus Was A Capricorn and Kris summed up a lot of my feelings in two minutes and four seconds:

Anyhoo…

My mom and her pals believed if you have enough faith, God will give you the power to speak in foreign languages which is known as “speaking in tongues” and since I’m clearly headed for Hell anyway, turns out I have a few things to say about that, too.

Speaking In Tongues/Little Richard Digression:

“Speaking in tongues” is based on some murky Biblical Episode in which some Christians wanted to sell Eternal Life Insurance Policies to some Godless Heathens and the Godless Heathens didn’t speak the same language as the Christians, but when the Christians started to speak and say “Let’s call it a day and find a Happy Hour” God gave them the power to speak the Heathens’ language.

So if they have enough faith, modern Pentecostal Christians believe they can “speak in tongues” which to my untrained ear always sounded pretty much like the lyrics to Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti:

“Wop bop a loo bop a lop bomb bom.”

And if you asked “What the fuck was that?” you’d be told it was an ancient “dead language” which seems suspiciously convenient if you’re just making shit up and speaking gibberish and God never gave my mom or her friends the power to speak German or French or Spanish or Pig Latin which, even at a young age, I would have recognized.

If my mom had suddenly asked: “Donde esta la biblioteque?” I would have found speaking in tongues a lot more believable.

And while we’re not on the subject:

I think Little Richard is an American Hero because in the 1950s he was walking around looking like this and somehow getting away with it:

And just in case you were wondering, even though you probably weren’t and are going to wish I didn’t bring this up: before they cleaned it up so it could be played on the radio, Tutti Frutti was originally a song about anal sex and included the lyrics:

Tutti Frutti, good booty,

If it don’t fit, don’t force it,

You can grease it, make it easy…

(Man, bet you didn’t see that one coming—I know I didn’t. And now that I look back at that last sentence maybe I should have chosen my verbs more carefully. Also, it would have been awesome to watch the crowd’s reaction if Little Richard sang the original version.)

And now back to…

Jesus Christ, Matchmaker

Jump forward in time and now I’m a teenager and decide I need to deal with the whole Heaven or Hell issue and get serious about religion so I try to read the Bible from cover-to-cover (waaaay too much begating for my literary tastes) but the more I read the more I found myself saying:

“Hey, we aren’t doing any of this shit.”

We’re not forgiving our neighbors and their trespasses or giving our coats to the poor or any of the other highly-inconvenient stuff Jesus suggested and meanwhile I’m also reading the news and hearing about Christian evangelists stealing money and sexually abusing kids and coming up with schemes to separate their followers from their hard-earned cash and I’m starting to have serious doubts about the Christians around me and their highly selective use of Biblical scriptures.

For instance:

The Christians in my immediate vicinity are all worked up about the prohibition against homosexuality, but totally ignore the other Biblical prohibitions like:

Eating shellfish, mixing meat and dairy products (there go cheeseburgers), wearing garments made of two different types of material, rounding the corners of a beard or head (which would make you a blockhead), priests with flat noses, stoning your disobedient children to death (my disobedient children get stoned on their own) or—and this is my personal favorite—if two men are fighting and one of the men’s wives grabs her husband’s opponent’s genitals, she’s supposed to have her hand cut off.

Every time I hear that last one I think: “OK, what Biblical incident led to someone thinking they needed a rule about genital-grabbing wives?” because it sounds like some WWF shit was going down in ancient Jerusalem or some Biblical Scholar had some fucked up fantasies.

https://www.thechristianmyth.com/banned-by-the-bible/

The final straw on my Religious Camel’s back came after my mom held a “bible class” at our house and some dude and some girl were standing outside on our front lawn and through an open window I heard him say:

“I feel like Jesus wants us to go out on a date.”

Great pickup line, Dipshit…why didn’t I come up with that?

And now that I think about it I’m starting to feel like Jesus wants you to send me a check for One Meeellion Dollars, so if you’re not a Philistine, get right on that.

Today’s Lesson

As previously admitted, if there is a Hell I’m probably in trouble, but so are most of my friends and we’ll have lots to talk about while doing the breaststroke in a Burning Lake of Fire.

Second, I consider myself an agnostic (I don’t know) not an atheist (there is no God) mostly because I don’t know and face it, neither does anybody else. You can choose to believe there’s a Benevolent God in charge of things and everything happens for a reason and good luck with that, but it seems an awful lot like being a New York Jets fan.

My mom has often said if there is no God she’d still want to live her life exactly the way she lived it, but what I see is a life lived giving money to con men and hating the wrong people for no good reason and following a bunch of rules written by a group of ignoramuses who seemed to think getting their dick grabbed by a neighbor’s wife was a danger worth talking about and if God gives us Free Will and then punishes us for using it, I’m going lose faith in His system.

Faith has been defined as “belief without evidence” and there’s way too much of that going around these days and explains how Donald Trump got elected twice.

If I’m wrong—it wouldn’t be the first time—and trying to be a good person and not hurting others isn’t enough to get me into Heaven, here’s what I’m going to say to St. Peter:

“Wop bop a loo bop a lop bomb bom.”

(Fuck it: if I’m going to Hell anyway I’m getting a laugh before I go.)

Feel free to disagree—I’m a lot less finicky than God—and leave a comment and tell me why I’m wrong or unsubscribe, but if you’re a Christian you have to forgive me. It’s right there in the rulebook.