According to
Kevin Smith's movie "
Dogma", this is what upsets
Jesus Christ the most about people--the
shit that goes on in his name.
The
movie cites
the Inquisition, the
Crusades (which I tend to call "the
Charades"* when I'm feeling
sarky), the
evil missionaries and that
crap in general. I think ol' Kevin might have
left out a bit in the interest of not getting
lynched for his movie...but I have
no such interests.
Let's talk about the
shit that gets carried out in
his name TODAY.
Televangelism. They say that if
the Christ were around today, he'd be on TV. Well, ANYTHING would be better than the
asshole creeps that are on it now! We all know that as soon as something
sells in America, it's meaning is
pretty much doomed; this is probably the
epitome of that
postulate. Some guy--not even a
nice or a
good-looking or a
philanthropist kinda guy, but a
greasy,
sleazy money-hogging fucker--
screaming "Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!" into a
microphone because he knows it'll trigger that
spending switch on the herd. Not
Jesus' flock, mind you; these guys preach for the
hyenas--the only people dumb enough to think they can
buy their way into
Paradise.
The Pope. Yeah, I'll go
screaming straight to Hell if I'm wrong, but I think the Pope is probably as
Anti-what-Jesus-meant as you can get. Not only is the
Holy Roman Church the one that
slaughtered Jesus in the first place, according to the
Story, but they've managed to remain
amazingly corrupt for
centuries by using the same ol' switching-sides method. Now, I have this
personal axiom:
Never trust the Truth coming from a bad guy. And every time I hear the
Vatican open it's Head Puppet's mouth, what comes out is
pure evil. Women can't be
priests (because the HRC doesn't recognize a female as having a
soul of her own).
Don't use condoms. Homosexual people are
going to hell. And
intolerance upon
intolerance, compounded with
insensitivity and
forty thousand gallons of preachy self-righteousness. And every time I
turn around, some
nice old lady who doesn't have a
thing against anybody, gay or not, is
dropping a dollar into the
Vatican's help-us-be-assholes basket. Didn't we
learn when we caught them
running drug money a couple decades ago???
The Convincers. I
separate the Convincers from the
televangelists because their
goals are different, though the
outcome tastes as
bad in either realm. The Convincers include
every f*cking Mormon on a bicycle, the
damned Jehova's Witnesses, the
Mennenites with their awful
pamphlets, even the
seemingly-harmless Gideons who leave the
bibles all over
hotel rooms. Well, at least the Gideons are nice about it. The televangelists, we all know, want
money. They don't give a fat fuck about your
soul and I think everyone who
still has one probably knows that. The
Convincers are special because
they've even managed to convince themselves that they're doing you a
favor and
saving your soul and really being
damn nice guys and gals all the way. I hate
dealing with these people because I always feel so bad
treating them like shit, when I know they
think they're being nice, and really they're just
too damn stupid to understand what
pieces of shit they're being. Jesus was
all into missionary work--that is, missionary
work; not
missionary annoyance. How many
pamphlets do you remember the Christ passing out? How many
dinners did he
interrupt to issue
dire warnings and
pleas to people at their front door? Not one, I'll bet; and I'll be right if
mythological accuracy is what you look for in a
parable. Jesus, be he
man or
god or
story or all three,
healed the sick for
missionary work. He offered
comfort and
friendship, not
pamphlets and a
sales pitch. In reality, the Jesus
figure much more
resembles a Buddha than the
missionary zealot most people worship him as. But then again,
a poor guy doing nice things until we kill him for it doesn't sell very much, does it now?
*"Charade"--not as in "
pretend thing that didn't really
happen" but
rather as in "thing whose
premise was a
lie right from the
get".