A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven (5 page)

Let’s get back on topic. Religion, when it is organized and focused, crumbles foundations and judges the good and bad alike; there are no exceptions when the righteous get their blood up. Hell, America was founded on the very principle that church and state should always be separate . . . well, technically anyway. The original settlers of the colonies that would eventually become America purportedly came to the New World to escape persecution for their religious beliefs. I say fair enough on that—no one should be demonized or tortured for what they believe or how they live their life. But many of these spiritual refugees also came to this land to baptize the heathens who already lived here. To the tribes who already had houses in North America, there was no such thing as the “New World”—there was just home. Unfortunately, the new tenants were told in the Bible that there would be no second coming of Christ until the entire world was evangelized. So the settlers came here, ready to “save” the indigenous populace. They soon found themselves freezing and starving, so they eventually started slaughtering the very people they were trying to baptize so they could raid their food storages. So in a way the doorway to the resurrection of Jesus is America’s front porch, and it is stained with the blood of innocent peoples just living their own way of life, with no real need for European zealots to save them.

My slaveholding forefathers knew that we would accomplish nothing if the slavish rhetoric of the Church bound our hands. Now look at us: America is one of the most pious, one of the most self-righteous and judgmental countries on the planet—shit, in the Milky Way galaxy. America is also ranked twenty-fifth globally when it comes to education, and we have not produced a true genius-level visionary in forty years. Okay, fine, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but all they did was saddle us with bigger and better distractions, thus cementing our spot at twenty-five. The American sects are insane, crying wolf whenever their ignorant blood starts boiling and protesting when we try to do something crazy . . . like educate people on gun control or design stronger, more hardy foods that can be grown in the more inhospitable parts of the world. They hate gay people and discourage their rights to get married, even though gay couples are statistically more stable than hetero couples, especially when those numbers are padded by professional welfare cases and teen pregnancy, which might not happen as often if the Religious Right did not fight sex education at every turn. They are so misinformed and opinionated that listening to them “speak intelligently” is a painful and incredible contradiction in terms. It is like reading from the worst script imaginable . . . or the best script of all time, depending how you like your movies.

Then again, I am sure some people will feel the same way when they listen to me go on and on about paranormal activity. But here is the difference: I am not saying you have to believe in what I believe. Modern religions damn you if you do not while also damning you if you do, depending on your taste for deities. I guess that would be where my all-purpose “Go Fuck Yourself” gesture comes in handy. It is pretty simple: give the middle finger, making sure to flick your wrist upward as you do, and blow your raspberries (for the uninitiated, that means stick your tongue out and “SHPPPPPPPPP”). I know I have intimated that the God folk may be more prone to jumping on my spooky bandwagon than most others, but at the same time there is a fanatical, conspiracy-theorist glint in the eyes of the righteous that I can do without. In dodge ball you do not pick the weakest links; you pick the ones who can handle the job load.

Just between you and yours, I know and believe the difference comes down to knowing and believing, if you can allow the words to play. I know the things I have seen are real. I recall the events with a historian’s clarity. I can close my eyes and remember the room I was in, the clothes I was wearing (or had just taken off), the look on my face, and the cool tingle that ran up my spine. Fear can be a strong bookmark when it comes to recall. But that is just it: knowing and believing are so different that they might as well be magnetic opposites. A person who knows can draw on the experience to use the framework of explanation in sculpting a stronger foundation of acceptance; a person who just believes may eventually find him or herself living in a house that never existed or stuck in a position of seeing their cellophane walls dissolve under the warm rain of truth and fact.

Religious zealots believe what they do with no proof or understanding. Worse yet, they treat others by the Book, a tome that is older than most accepted behavior in this day and age. I am not just jumping on the Christians, although my experiences have dealt mostly with their ilk. Devout Muslims treat women like second-class citizens at best and used tissue at worst. In fact, most religions have almost all been severely matricidal, spiritually speaking. Women are denigrated and limited to backup rolls so the “men” in charge can carry all the glory and take all the credit. In the world’s most sectionalized cultures women are punished and often murdered for doing something as unthinkable as voicing their opinion. If this is what religion can accomplish, then I would rather throw my own little faithless tea party, thank you very much.

Once again, this book is meant to start a conversation. My last book dealt with sin; this one, among other things, deals with death and what might come next. I had a talk once with a very good friend who is an odd mix of comic-book geek and devoted Catholic. We were having some afternoon java and comparing notes on things like the paranormal. He tried to explain to me that, although he truly believed in ghosts and had seen his share of strange occurrences, he was convinced that most spirits were people who had sinned in life, had paid no religious attrition, and were doomed to walk the Earth until their sins were forgiven. I frowned a bit because that raised several questions, but I started with a few precursors first: “So you are saying Earth is a sort of prison for the unrepentant?”

“Correct,” my friend, who we will call Carl, answered.

“Well, being Catholic, doesn’t that rub with the whole ‘Purgatory’ setup?”

He paused for a minute, then said, “Not really, when you consider that perhaps the glimpses we get of these spirits are simply Purgatory’s thin spots. And Purgatory is essentially temporary Hell—those souls will eventually go to Heaven. The spirits on Earth might just be the ones who cannot recognize they are dead. Once they do, they will go to Hell.” He smiled and drank his coffee.

I just stared at him.

He blinked and said, “What?”

It took me a second to finally blurt out, “That cannot be what you believe. Are you shitting me?”

“What is wrong with that explanation?”

“Where the fuck do I start? What about the ghosts of children? What about the souls of the truly decent? How can they all be sinners, just waiting to get clued in to the fact that they are dead so they can go to Hell?”

“Why does that bother you?”

“When do you suppose a six-year-old found the time to do something worthy of being damned for eternity?”

Carl then did something I had never seen him do before: he took on the air of someone who had a certain knowledge and truly felt sorry for the ignorant, giving me a knowing smile that almost made me punch the shit out of him. “People commit sin, no matter what the age.”

You have got to be . . . “You know damn well I do not believe in Hell.”

“C. T., just because you do not believe, that does not mean it is not true.”

“Oh, and where do you suppose Hell lies—just below the topsoil or just above the Earth’s magma?”

“That is not funny.”

“It was not a joke! And let’s not forget the fact that you contradicted yourself. How can these supposed ‘oblivious dead’ be forgiven their sins but still go to Hell? Is that not part of the whole Heaven gift basket?”

Carl left.

Subsequently, we did not talk for a while.

Thankfully I have other friends who have no legs in Christ’s shackles. But the funny thing is that I do not mind many of the things that Jesus supposedly preached (oh yeah, I am also one of those weirdoes who is not completely convinced that Jesus ever really existed). I like the idea of turn the other cheek. I adore that the meek shall inherit the earth. I enjoy the miracle section—the loaves and the fishes, the water into wine. The water-into-wine story gives me enough pause, however, to draw some connections here and there. I call it the “Miracle Hypothesis”: there is the walk-on-water story and then there is the water into wine story. There is a tidy little parallel, because when you think about it, people in the old days—even to this day—use their feet to stomp grapes to make wine, right? Well, we all know that no one can actually walk on water unless there is a very long dock submerged just under the surface in the shallow end. Sooooo . . . maybe Jesus was making wine at a party for some people who had never seen how wine was made before. Different people told the story enough that it really became two different stories: walking on water (or grape juice really—it would have never had time to ferment) and turning water into wine (because these confused ignorant people might have assumed the liquid was water before the truth came out). Is it a stretch? Of course it is a stretch, most assuredly so. But that is what religion and the Bible are all about—stretching stories into scripture and, hundreds of years later in America, the Official Land of the Gullible, turning scripture into “fact.” Just to recap: it is possible that a person named Jesus stomped fruit for wine, people saw this being done, and through an ancient version of the game Telephone, a tale of one man making beverages for a soiree becomes two miracles that have the feel that they were mutually exclusive.

Before you ask: yes, this is what I do with my time when there is nothing on TV and I have had too much coffee. I debunk outlandishly dumb religious tales in an even more outlandish way. To quote the Christian Sasquatch: judge not lest ye be judged yourself.

Between the Council of Nicea and the nineteenth-century advent of Dispensationism, it really is a wonder that more Christians do not sit up, put their newspaper and coffee down, and say, “Wait a minute . . . what the fuck?” It all appears to be based on faulty math. Where does this leave us then? I will tell you: it leaves us in a climate in which everyone has a different interpretation of that book, and it is not specifically relegated to Christianity. Muslims fight Christians openly because they are convinced Christians are wanton agents of the Antichrist. Both team up on the Jewish culture for no real reason other than they feel better when they both have a common enemy. I have not seen a collaboration this juvenile since the fourth graders teamed up with the third graders to beat the fifth graders at kickball.

Maybe it is because religion is not sexy enough for me—or for other atheists while we are on the subject. Mind you, it is not like ghost stories get teenagers running for the bathrooms, embarrassed by the sudden tightness of their pants. But the God Chronicles have never inspired heavy petting either. That could be the issue, and I believe I have a solution for that. It is an idea I had years ago while writing my columns for Rock Sound in the UK. You see, even though I am not a fan of the cloth, I am a fan of certain bits of its mystery, like the whole God vs. Satan storyline. I really dig “good versus evil” because I like it when things feel right while other things are clearly wrong. In my first book I pointed out that it is only when the waters get muddied with the gray areas that we have problems as knuckle-dragging human meat. However, it is a bit tired. We get it—the theological throw-down will tear us to shreds with all the might of a million Hiroshimas and whatnot. So it is a foregone conclusion. But when we think of these opposing deities, they are always male. You think of Morgan Freeman from Bruce Almighty as God and Robert De Niro from Angel Heart as the Devil, and you send them spinning toward each other for cosmic battle. My suggestion is: What if they were female?

Imagine Elizabeth Hurley from Bedazzled as the Devil—mmmmmmm! Then conjure up Alanis Morrisette as God from Dogma—ooh! Now, drape them each in their own leather bikinis: Hurley in flat black and Morrisette in shiny white. Now, we are fucking getting somewhere! Okay, now that we have our outfits, where and what would the battleground be? I would like to assume that we would all agree some place tropical—the Caribbean, for example. That just leaves us trying to sort out what the arena would comprise. Some would immediately run for mud wrestling, but I disagree. Mud tends to obscure the, ahem, obviously interesting mishaps that come with moist wrestling. Interestingly, I have several other alternative solutions (yes, the pun is incredibly intended). What if our lovely Lord-like ladies tore at each other in honey? I know, right? I like that because it brings to mind Ann Margaret in Tommy. The viscosity is great, and it is not too opaque that we cannot readily see where the heat is coming from. Another delicious idea is Jell-O! Ah, I recall the grand days when gelatin wrestling was a risqué melodrama, and I do so with a faint and knowing smile in my heart. Pudding would follow that train of thought, but we run into the same problems we had with mud (just not as edible, admittedly). Alas, I feel I must bring this conundrum to a screeching halt with the obvious answer, an answer that will give our competitors the desired (snicker) and wonderful immersion that an epic conflagration such as this truly deserves. Friends and enemies, the only real answer is oil. Yes, corn or veggie, motor or olive, I do not know about you, but my God and Devil will fight for the lives of saints and sinners clad only in biker bikinis, completely saturated in warm oil. It may not be where the Bible was heading with the Armageddon thing, but as Mary Poppins belted out as she brainwashed the children: “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.” If that is where religion is heading—two beautiful mythical forces going at it dressed in cow hide, drenched in melted oleo—I just might sign up for the Jesus bed and breakfast myself.

Then again, to quote George Clooney, “I may be a bastard, but I’m not a fucking bastard.”