Praise the Lord And Put More Money In The Slot

 

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:

Before the Lord God made the sea and the land

He held all the stars in the palm of his hand

And they ran through his fingers like grains of sand

And one little star fell alone.

Then the Lord God hunted through the white, night air

For the little dark star on the winds down there

And he stated and promised he'd take special care

So it wouldn't get lost any more.

Now a man doesn't mind if the stars grow dim

Or the clouds roll over and darken him

As long as the Lord God's watching over them

Keeping track how it all goes on.

But I've been walking through the night and the day

'Til my eyes get weary and my head turns grey

And sometimes it seems maybe God's gone away

Forgetting the promise that we heard him say

And we're lost out here in the stars.

Little stars, big stars blowing through the night

And we're lost out here in the stars.

Little stars, big stars

Blowing through the night

And we're lost out here in the stars!

*©George Carlin

SPRING THOUGHTS 2021

The Proud Boys have little to be proud of and much more that is their shame.

Are you really a "patriot" if you want to tear down the democratic government of your country?

The people who attacked the U. S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the lying scum who encouraged that attack are "PATRIOTS" in the same sense that right-wing Evangelical CHRISTIANS are Christians (i. e. they are not!).

Dr. Samuel Johnson defined patriotism as "the last refuge of a scoundrel." Ambrose Bierce, writing in America and over 100 years later, corrected Dr. Johnson noting that patriotism is the first refuge of a scoundrel. I think we need a new word for love of country. The word "patriot" has been so abused for 60 years that it has no positive meaning anymore when lunatics, fascists, cultists and assorted other scum can call themselves by that name.

If people like James Dobson, Jim Bakker, Creflo Dollar, Franklin Graham, Tony Perkins, Pat Robertson and Roy Moore are CHRISTIANS it is just as well that Jesus of Nazareth has been dead for more than 2000 years.

The Oath Keepers might want to look for an oath that's actually worth keeping.

If Stewart Rhodes is an actual patriot, I'm the Queen of Sheba. Please note: I have never been a queen in any sense of the term and have never visited "Sheba" in any sense of that term either. 

The Second Amendment to our Constitution reads as follows:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

We have only to look at the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021 to see that these self-styled militias are anything but "well regulated" and oppose "the security of a free State". In consequence of their NOT meeting the conditions set forth in the Second Amendment their right "to keep and bear Arms" needs to be "infringed" and actually curtailed in the same way that we would take a firearm away from any other lunatics.

When we're being polite we call Republiscum office holders, candidates and voters Republicans even though they can't. The Republiscum Party and its adherents have made a disastrous mess of the national economy causing a total of 22 Recessions and Depressions of the 35 Recessions or Depressions since the Republican Party was founded. In almost every case it is Democrats who have had the task of cleaning up the mess that Republiscum have left the nation. Please note that the Republiscum Party bills itself as the party of "fiscal responsibility".

We also call them "Conservatives" when "Fascists" is the correct term. Why?

Once upon a time there were Republicans and Conservatives but largely since the 1950s there have been Republiscum and Fascists with few notable exceptions.

Jeffrey Epstein, his girlfriend and abbetters Ghislaine Maxwell and fellow trafficer(?) the Failed Orange Führer, trafficed in underage girls. Now Rep. Matt Gaetz, who describes himself as the most dedicated of dedicated Failed Orange Führer supporters, is under investigation for trafficing in underage girls. One of the most basic lies of the QAnon Cult involved in the sexual exploitation of underage children. I wonder how the right-wingnuts came up with that idea?

Antifa is shorthand for anti-Fascist. Other notable anti-Fascists include Dwight D. Eisenhower, George C. Marshall, Mark Clark, Omar N. Bradley, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Josephine Baker, Frederico García Lorca, Berthold Brecht, Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, George Kistiakowsky, Alan Turing, Reinhold Niebuhr and most of the soldiers and sailors who fought in World War II. So what's not to like unless, of course, you are a Fascist?

About half of white, evangelical voters say that they will refuse to be vaccinated against Covid-19. While their decision is both stupid and a prime example of sheep being led by the Judas Goat of disinformation  to the slaughter by from Fox, OANN and other right-wing media outlets, look on the bright side: many idiot right-wing evangelicals will be culled from the national herd, an outcome devoutly to be wished. If that makes me a bad person, so be it.

Unfortunately, many of those unvaccinated imbeciles will go out and infect smarter people and some imbeciles will survive this pandemic. That is a tragedy.

One of the reasons that the Republiscum Party has been so successful in locking in the evangelical vote is that the majority of evenagelicals will believe any bullshit that's fed to them. They believe in The Rapture. They believe that mental illness is caused by demonic possession. They believe that they can tell who is possessed by nonexistent demons. In short, they believe the same utter nonsense that allowed 20 citizens of Salem, Massachusetts to be murdered in 1692 and 1693. Technology progresses but we remain the same ignorant apes  century after century.