On Writing & Religion
The two topics that people ask me the most about are why I write and why I choose not to be religious.
The two topics that people ask me the most about are why I write and why I choose not to be religious.
I think both questions are legitimate. After all, I come into your homes every day. You deserve to know whatever you like about a guest under your roof.
I have often admitted I know my writing doesn’t influence events, so why do I bother?
Well, for one thing, it gives me the opportunity to vent and enlarges the number of like-minded patriots I get to engage with around the country and even a few beyond our borders.
Two, the subscriptions help to pay my bills.
Three, it is my hope that you will share some of my pieces with those in your circle who are in favor of what they ignorantly imagine Socialism to be. Because I tend to sugarcoat my serious beliefs with humor, I figure it will help the medicine go down. That is especially my hope where your brainwashed grandkids, nephews and nieces, are concerned.
Those who used to be referred to as the hope of the future can now be best described as the hopeless. If something isn’t done to shake them out of their comatose state, America will soon resemble one of those scary movies where famished zombies go clumping through the countryside searching for their favorite food: human brains. Except the reality will be that all the brains will have disappeared, just like vestigial tails, from non-use.
When it comes to religion, I receive an enormous number of well-meaning messages from well-meaning people who are worried about what will come of me after I die.
Since by now I think you all know that I have no ill-feelings towards religion and, in fact, think the world is a better place because of religious people, I appreciate their concern.
I certainly acknowledge that our Founding Fathers built our nation on a solid foundation of Judeo-Christian values and those are values I share. If America was a religion, I would sign up for it. Heck, I’m already tithing every April 15th.
It is the things that separate one religion from another, the myths and parables, that I can’t accept.
Frankly, something I can’t get my head around is the certainty that some people express about God, about Heaven and Hell, and about what lies in store for those of us who aren’t bad people, but who can’t accept what we regard as unfounded rumors as the final word.
I mean, I am grateful as a non-observant Jew that I was born in such an accepting Christian nation. But except for having had the good fortune of having two sets of grandparents who had the guts to leave Russia for America, I would have been born and raised in a godless Soviet Union.
But what about all the decent people born in other parts of the world. Are those who are Hindu or Buddhist also doomed to eternal damnation or at least darnation because they weren’t raised to accept Jesus Christ as their savior?
That doesn’t seem quite fair.
I know that in California, because both Jerry Brown and Ronald Reagan thought that shutting down mental institutions was a good way to save tax dollars, we have had a homeless problem for several decades.
Because along the way America has suffered financial meltdowns, particularly the popping of the real estate bubble, that forced some hard-working people to start living in their cars temporarily, we began lumping them in with the crazies, the druggies and the drunks.
But along came Donald Trump, who pumped up the nation’s economy for blacks, Latinos and women, but not for the homeless. That’s because they aren’t looking for jobs; they’re content to continue living off welfare and using our streets and sidewalks as their bedrooms and their bathrooms.
Kind-hearted, empty-headed, people feel sorry for them and usually refer to them as harmless.
I might feel some sympathy for them if they were cleaned up and stashed inside a state institution where they could be looked after compassionately.
But until that day, I feel no sympathy for people who have so little self-respect or respect for others that they will defecate in public like dogs and cats. If they prefer to exist like animals, I would treat them like animals. I would round them up and place them in cages. If those kind-hearted people wished to adopt them, have them spayed or neutered, and take them home within 30 days, great.
If not, I would provide them with a painless exit from this vale of tears, heroin needles and human excrement.
Although I have spent the past four years singing President Trump’s praises, I know that some of my readers have been terribly annoyed with me on those rare occasions when I have taken him to task. I never thought it was my job to be a cheerleader in the mode of Sean Hannity. If I were a close friend or relative of Trump’s, I would tell him some things to his face.
I would have told him to start wooing the suburban housewives who handed the House back to Nancy Pelosi in 2018. I would have advised him to show his softer side, maybe visit children’s hospitals once in a while, not just those caring for members of the military, and to get a dog and hold a nationwide competition to name the First Dog.
Instead, because he so loved hearing the cheers of the crowds, he kept appearing at rallies and appealing time and again to people who would have walked across broken glass to vote for him.
If I’d had his ear, I would have advised him to come across as presidential as possible at his first debate. Instead of coming across like a hulking bully, leaning across his podium like a gorilla, I would have advised him to treat Biden respectfully, but with the sort of humor Reagan used to disarm Walter Mondale. Trump might have even gotten some mileage out of being younger (74 to Biden’s 78), and suggesting the job called for a younger man.
Yes, I know that the Democrats cheated. But if Trump had behaved differently, just a little bit differently, he might have made it impossible for them to cheat enough to defeat him.
As it was, he ran the worst campaign since Michael Dukakis.
I would also have advised him against calling for his supporters to show up in Washington. Again, I know that Antifa infiltrated the crowd and helped turn it into a mob.
But, really, was that really so difficult to predict?
Bob Hunt passed along a meme that suggested the Cleveland Indians might consider changing the team’s name to the Caucasians.
That would seem benign enough, but I suppose some would say that it was flaunting white privilege while others, who wouldn’t know what the word meant, would glom onto the last syllable and assume the team had gone from demeaning Indians to doing the same to Asians.
While doing some research on Pope Francis, I got sidetracked by the folks in the fancy costumes whose job it’s been to protect him and every other pope since Pope Julius II created the Swiss Guard, also known as the Pontifical or Papal Guard, in 1506.
To be a member of the Guard, you have to be an unmarried male between the ages of 19 and 30, at least five-foot-eight and a half, and have completed military training with the Swiss Armed Forces.
Although the 107 members are mainly ceremonial, which helps explains the Renaissance-style uniforms, they do serve as the pope’s bodyguards and therefore concealed somewhere among the fancy blouses and bloomers are loaded firearms.
The guardsmen receive free room and board and a tax-free salary of 1,300 euros ($1,584.72) a month.
I’m not sure why the positions are only available to Swiss citizens. Perhaps they thought that Italian males between the ages of 19 and 30, or 12 and 92, for that matter, would be too easily distracted by a pretty woman or perhaps, too prone to lay down their weapons if a Vespa backfired.
