One reason I can't take most christians seriously on their "faith" is that I know they simply don't read the bible and have no real idea that it says that plants existed before the sun, that dudes surfed in whale's mouths, that their "god" drowned everybody on Earth (yes, babies, too) except for eight lucky people, and that virgins were ravaged with alacrity. It seems to cause christians no pangs to know that the "virgin" Mary was ravaged by "god" before her husband Joseph consummated their marriage with his corporeal penis.
Perhaps christians know many of these "highlights" but simply don't think about them much. As the wonderfully eloquent and witty Robert Ingersoll said about 150 years ago: To read the bible is to giggle. And christians aren't giggling.
Damn Ingersoll for saying that before ME!
Which brings me to the people who actually READ the bible. The shamans, the magic men -- known in common parlance as "preachers."
If you don't go to church, you know them by their job six days a week: thinking of cute things to put on signs in front of their churches: "If you need to talk to someone, put god on speed-dial"; "a friend in need is a friend in need of god"; "the Sermon on the Mount is for those stuck in a valley"; "the bell tolls for the belles and the beasts." Ouch!
Shamans are not Shakespeares. Here, I must quote Ingersoll again, who said: I'll take Hamlet over all the religious sayings, quotes and books every written or said.
Hallelujah, Bob!
The life of a priest is a bazaar thing really. His life is built around a book filled with a thousand contradictions and thousands of violations of reality. Leprosy is not cured with a tough of a finger, and when we die, we decompose, and the universe is 13 billion years across, not a shell (firmament) a few miles up (as the ancient bible writers thought).
The priests know all this and must commit their minds to, basically, saying, "Shit, I need to get paid, so I have to try to make sense of all this shit to my flock, who's going to be here in 10 minutes!"
Those are the "honest" ones, the ones who have some sense that the bible is primitive BS. These "honest" ones try to modernize and have "gigabyte" meetings, replete with a coffee bar so the youth can have their mochas and lattes. It ain't about the bible; it's about the caffeine. But who's asking?
The dishonest priests (but I repeat myself) REALLY believe the bible. When Jesus says that he has not come to change "one iota" of the previous (Moses) laws and then proceeds to change ALL those laws, the dishonest priests turn a blind eye -- and then find a clever way to explain this contradiction to their sheep.
The dishonest priests are pretty damn good salesmen, if their engorged parking lots are any indication. On Easter Sunday, with a straight face, they say that jesus has risen. Their flock screams hallelujah. They smile and weep. Then they all have lunch and lattes.
The priesthood is not about honesty or information. It is about power, like politics -- the power over people. It's a heady thing, I'm sure, to look out on a thousand faces and see rapture and attentiveness, while you fill their minds with giggly bile.
But what does such evasion on an unimaginable scale do to a man, a priest? How does a mind deal with the thousands of contradictions of reality replete in the bible on a daily basis, while the rest of us are living real lives? What HAPPENS to such a mind?
It becomes the grinning monster. The shaman of old. The personification of cognitive dissonance. A twisted, distorted, special case of insanity attempting hourly, daily to fight back the rational mind that is screaming: "Get out, get out, get out of here! Go LIVE"
That's why when you see priests at the store or on TV, they have that ethereal, far-off, fake-smiley look on their face -- like they are secretly having your kittens tortured while you shop.
You cannot read daily that an alleged god blithely wiped out entire villages of men, women and children for his alleged "chosen ones" without annihilating your own good judgment of the fact that that alleged god is a murderer of the highest order.
You cannot read that the vast majority of human beings, according to jesus, will endure an eternity of torment and excruciating pain in "the undiscovered country" simply because they won't "worship" and "have faith in" jesus -- without, again, suspending your own better judgment as the fairness of such malevolence.
Let's not even mention the fact that ANY being would wish to be worshiped. Talk about low self-esteem!
These "men of the cloth" have sold their minds to a boundless ugliness, and they attempt to convince others every week to do the same. They prey on the most precious thing we humans have: the mind. They are far worse than pedophiles, who seek only the body of the young.
They feast on humans, the human mind.
They are the modern-day monsters.
