I shouldn't be surprised. After all televangelism is all about putting money in the slot...sorry...collection plate to get the jackpot of salvation from your "big imaginary friend in the sky"©*. The other night I was watching a movie that someone else had put on the television when a Caesar's Casino ad blared forth (blare is a modest term for what they do) with the news of the...I am not making this up "The Jesus Slots". Now we have one-armed bandits to match the two-armed bandits like Creflo Dollar, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, Greg Locke, and their Simoniac ilk.
I thought that I had seen the ultimate when I saw the Jesus on the cross flicker picture that Cheech and Chong so effectively satirized. I also, years before that, saw at Easter season a chocolate-marshmallow crucifix, your sweet, chewy way to consume the body and the blood together. Yet "The Jesus Slots" bring us to a whole new level of religiose absurdity, I fear.
I have said before that Evangelicals have given Christianity a bad name what with their incessant money grubbing, not to mention their using religion as a pretext for tax avoidance and expounding and encouraging neo-fascist politics. Evangelicalism is the untreated sewage of Christianity. In fact, the marriage of Evangelical CHRISTIANS and the neo-Nazi Republiscum Party is a match...dare I say it?...made in heaven (the one that's only a myth like Santa Claus). Evangelicals will swallow whole and in amazing quantities any bullshit that the con artists posing as pastors and prophets feed them. The Rapture? Sure! Qanon? You betcha! Then there are the old standards like anti-Semitism, white supremacy, religious bigotry and hate of anyone who doesn't adhere to a lifestyle that they find glancingly referred to in some passage of the inerrant Bible that Jim Bakker or some other charlatan has just edited for his own flock of bleating sheep. The Republiscum Party is for "the little guy"! Sure!! That's why so many million and billionaires fork over a chunk of their quarterly dividend payments to keep the sheep thinking that nonsense.
But wait, you might say, most of these "bleating sheep" are simply good people, good, simple people. There's no need to insult and denigrate them. To which I say, your standards of "good" and mine differ widely. I exclude from "good people" the racists, the xenophobes, the hate-filled fools who rail against the gay or lesbian or transgendered, the religious bigots who insist that only their religion worships their particular and special, one and only "big imaginary friend in the sky"©* properly and that all others must be converted or destroyed, any "good people" who insist on following a "prophet" none of whose predictions come true, who insist that demons possess anyone not playing a part in a movie, who insist that women do not have a right to choose what happens within their own bodies or an education or work outside the home or refuse to have sexual relations with their husbands ever or report their husbands to police when the husbands abuse either the women themselves or their children. Such folks are not ever included in my definition of "good people".
These same insane people who insist that women have no individual right to choose abortion now rally to insist that they have the individual right to go maskless and infect others as well as refuse to take a safe and effective vaccine which could save their lives, the lives of those in their families, their neighbors, fellow congregants and also prevent the Covid-19 virus from mutating into more dangerous and deadly forms. To call these people insane and imbeciles is not hyperbolic. They can't discern that their refusal to get vaccinated and masked is as inimical to human life as they claim abortion to be. If they can't figure that out they are either insane, imbeciles or insane imbeciles or, worse yet, insane imbeciles who credit Fox News, Newsmax, Sinclair or OANN.
Too harsh?
Let me put it to you this way: vaccines made by Pfizer, Moderna, and several other companies, including Johnson & Johnson, have proven safe, effective and have reduced both infection and death rates in the United States and around the world. Those vaccines have allowed many areas' businesses to reopen, sometimes fully, and encouraged economic growth but that doesn't matter to the insane, the imbeciles, insane imbeciles and, to be redundant, Evangelicals among us whose latest snake oil cure-all is horse dewormer. The con men selling Ivermectin to their audience of fools will tell you that the Covid vaccines can make men sterile. They can't and don't but when have the facts ever stopped a con man? In place of the actual effective vaccine, they tout a veterinary medicine that actually can sterilize humans. When the con men know they have the attention of the insane, the imbecilic, the insane imbecilic and, to again be redundant, the Evangelicals their villainy knows no bounds. Yet a part of me thinks that sterilizing these fools is a thing devoutly to be wished.
We should not be surprised at this. Evangelicals are so steeped in the idea that this life is a "world of sin", "a veil of tears", a world so deeply flawed that their "big, imaginary friend in the sky"©* has decreed that it should be destroyed and that we are thus in "The End Times", that their great joy is the total destruction of their "big, imaginary friend's" handiwork. It never occurs to these fools that planning your life for the destruction of your god's creation might be offensive to that very god they claim to worship.
The bleating sheep who trust that their "big, imaginary friend in the sky"©* will protect them from a world-wide pandemic are dying like flies. In states run by the Republiscum Party, the infection and death rates soar while their preachers and radio blabbers tell them that their god is angry at the United States for allowing (take your pick from the following list):
- Abortion
- LGBTQ rights
- Black Lives Matter
- The Anti-Fascist Movement known as antifa
- Eliminating prayer in schools
- Feminism
- Not reelecting The Failed Orange Führer
- Rigging the 2020 election to defeat The Failed Orange Führer
- Allowing anyone to even think about Critical Race Theory
- Teaching Evolution
- Liberalism
- Communism
- Any "ism" that your preacher says is bad
- Some cabal of politicians, celebrities and folks they don't like that are actually reptiles who steal the essence, blood, pheromones, something from babies and children and wear red, high-heeled shoes
- All of the above
They never seem to wonder why their "big, imaginary friend in the sky"©* is taking it out on his worshipers of the "one, true faith" and not killing off the nasty people included in the list above. Could it be that the disasters inflicted on these "good people" happen randomly, or because of climate change (oops! I almost forgot. It's not climate change it's Chinese weather machines and Jewish Space Lasers!") or maybe, just maybe, if their is a god looking out for his special planet, those disasters get visited upon the "good people" because their god is pissed off that they are so utterly stupid and wants to sift the Evangelical chaff from the Liberal grain so that creation, with all it's nasty flaws, can continue to chug along without their bullshit?
We'll just have to wait and see who gets the jackpot from the "Jesus Slots" of life.
To close, let me quote Maxwell Anderson's lyrics for the title song of the musical Lost in the Stars:
*©George Carlin
