Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

God popped up on my Zoom screen again. This time He was in a jovial mood. “I see you’re checking out the Facebook Prayer to End Atheism page,” He said.
 
I wasn’t going to participate.
 
“Good, because I’m planning to ignore it entirely.”
 
Isn’t that what you do with all prayers?
 
“For shizzle, ma hizzle.”
 
Oh, wow, is Snoop Dogg dead?
 
“No, just been watching him on YouTube. It’s true I ignore most prayers, from high school kids begging Me for a glimpse of calculus test of the nerd who sits in front of them to a guy getting his leg munched on by crocodile, and every prayer in between, but I’m really going to savor ignoring this one. I love atheists. They don’t bother me about anything. They know I’m not going to cure their cancer, help them pick Lotto numbers or stop them from being gay. Jesus loves them, too. Every time they sue to get a cross taken off government land, He’s behind them all the way. “Go atheists!” he murmurs. My Son is not big on crosses. He pretty much eternally resents Me for making him hang on one. It’s a constant source of family tension.”
 
Every family has its issues.
 
“Tell that to the Holy Ghost, would ya? That Being is just one eternal sourpuss. But I’m getting off the subject. Let My Believers know that I’m not going to convert all the atheists to groveling Christians just so they don’t get made fun of anymore, which is their real motivation. Remind them they’re supposed to love suffering, so when some smartass atheist starts flaming them on Facebook, they should just pray to me.”
 
Which prayer you’ll ignore.
 
“Me damn right I will.”

Upon hearing that a mural of murder victim George Floyd had been destroyed by lightning in Toledo, Ohio, Donald Trump Jr. said on Twitter, "It’s almost like a higher power is telling us something. When was the last time you heard of a brick building being destroyed by lightning? I am a builder and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of it."--News Item
 
God appeared to me again the other day. Not in person, but via Zoom, the way He has manifested Himself to me ever since the pandemic started. “And that’s the way it’s going to stay,” He told me in an aside. “Me, Jesus, even Mother Mary are going to appear virtually from now on. Mary bitched about it, but I told her, ‘Hey, even peasant children all have iPhones now. All that burning bush and weeping statues shit is so pre-millennial.”
 
Mostly, though, the Creator of the Universe wanted to talk about Donald Trump, Jr. “You tell that greasy little peckerhead to keep My name out of his yabbering mouth!” He said emphatically.
 
So, you deny destroying a mural of George Floyd via lightning bolt to send a message to humanity?
 
“Hell, yeah. First off, I don’t do lightning bolts—that’s Zeus, that crazy old Greek show-off. Secondly, if I was in the habit of destroying monuments to correct moral ambiguities, there wouldn’t be a Confederate general on a stone horse left south of the Mason-Dixon line. Thirdly, all this is part of My plan. I made George Floyd a very large black man with a substance abuse problem so it was inevitable that he’d be an angry white cop magnet. I made Derek Chauvin a sadistic murderer.”
 
And you made Donald Trump, Jr.
 
“Yeah. Why did I do that?”
 
Umm—it’s part of Your plan?
 
“Must be, although even I get lost in the details of that thing now and then. Why would I need an unctuous, insensitive, spoiled twerp like Trump, Jr.? I work in mysterious ways, sure, but why would I create such an obvious waste of human life? To make Eric look useful by comparison, maybe? I mean, I do have a plan for the whole Universe, but sometimes the details elude even Me. I have an archangel that keeps track of that shit for Me. It’s on a spreadsheet around here somewhere. Also, tell Trump Jr. to quit calling himself a builder when he can barely stick two Legos together.”
 
Anything else?
 
“Just let that grubby little prick know I’ve got more important things to do. I just collapsed a condo tower in Florida, remember? And flooded a good portion of Western Europe.”
 
Yeah. Why do you do stuff like that?
 
“Condominiums are creations of Satan. That’s pretty obvious to anybody who thinks about them. And I put Belgium underwater to remind people to never live in a country so small I can flood the whole thing. You know who’s laughing his ass off about that?
 
Umm—Noah?
 
“You got it, bud. Nice talking to you.”

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a compilation of old, mostly white guys that like to wear nice dresses, is getting ready to issue a formal statement on the meaning of Communion and, believe me, they are not going to come to the conclusion that it’s a meaningless piece of ancient Catholic drivel left over from the Middle Ages.
 
No, they are going to announce that Joe Biden and other Catholic politicians aren’t going to be allowed to get it, because they aren’t working hard enough to make Catholic theology into US law. In this they are joined by evangelical Protestants, who believe that the Gospel forbids abortion, even though it actually does not, and that this nonexistent provision of Scripture should also be enshrined into law.
 
Such a confluence of influence would have been unheard of in my Catholic youth, when we Catholics believed all Protestants were going to Hell, and they confidently believed the same about us. Good times.
 
Now the nation’s remaining Catholics and their Bible-belting friends have joined forces, and the hill they have decided to be martyred on together is women and how their uteri need to be controlled by the states. They have not decided that the states should try to get men to keep their dicks in their pants. They seem to realize that some causes are hopeless, even for God.
 
So, the President may be left tapping his foot at the communion rail pretty soon, while the priest busily stuffs wafers into the mouths of every other kind of sinner standing alongside him you can imagine, including members of his own brotherhood whose fingers reek of altar boy ass.
 
It is the existence of this band of underground pedophiles, which the Conference of Pointy-Hatted Pricks mostly chose to ignore for decades, that is causing the Church to lose membership faster than you can say ten Hail Marys. Yes, formerly reverent Catholics are saying, “I just don’t want to go to Church this Sunday,” and then, because they were raised in a faith that finds value in suffering, they say, “I think I’ll watch the Jets game instead.”
 
Fear not, Mr. President. There are plenty of faiths that will welcome your abortion-tolerating person. You won’t have to have some brave young priest sneak your wafer into the White House while Protestant soldiers with pikes lie in wait to chop his head off, like some Netflix drama about persecuted Catholics in Elizabethan England.
 
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster will be happy to have you as a member, and while slurping pasta may not be gourmet dining, it’s at least gustatorily superior to letting a tasteless wad of what seems like Walmart copy paper dissolve on your tongue. Wearing a colander on your head might cost you a few suburban swing votes, though, although the CFSM would not forbid you from taking it off your head and hitting Putin with it, next time you see that guy.
 
Personally, I’m a Dudeist, and all we have to do is abide. Sure, it’s recommended we bowl and drink White Russians, but I don’t do either of those things, and nobody’s excommunicated me yet. Abiding is good. Abiding in the White House is even better, and will help you keep your equanimity when that sewer clown Mitch McConnell kicks you in the nuts again.
 
There’s the Church of the Holy Taco, which I thought I just made up, but apparently was envisioned by another satirist before me. The Church offers Salsa Salvation, which sounds pretty tempting. Imagine standing at the rail of the Taco Church, sanctified, munching a consecrated Dorito while the Holy Hot Sauce runs down your chin. Just hope you avoid the dreaded Ring of Fire, which is that Church’s version of Hell.
 
Tacos also have a double-entendre meaning among the sniggering set (it’s vagina), which means you can cut into the Republican lead among Young Guys Who Talk About Sex Constantly but Hardly Ever Get It.
 
Even incels love tacos. 

I don’t know about the future of artificial intelligence, but I can assure you that artificial stupidity has already arrived, and it, or at least Facebook’s version of it, has decided that I am a racist, Bible-believing, reactionary Republican dripping with discretionary income.
 
A casual observer of my person might suspect this, since I’m an old white guy, but it is not true. The girl and I had a discreet “Biden-Harris” sticker in the window before the last election, but it was only discreet because our HOA prohibits yard signs. I wanted to spray-paint “FUCK TRUMP” on our garage door, and I regretted not doing so, especially after the damn thing broke down in December and a new one cost $2300.
 
I had to settle for naming our wireless network “fucktrump.”
 
Thanks to my research efforts intended entirely to sharpen my satire, I get offers for t-shirts that say “My Rights Don’t End Where Your Feelings Begin,” which is advertised as “Being for Proud Americans.”
 
Probably sell more of them with that tagline than by saying, “Being for Thoughtless, Agitated Assholes,” but what do I know about marketing?
 
I have to admit I also get ads for t-shirts that say “I Could Go a Day Without Beer but Why Risk It?” which seem to at least vaguely recognize who I really am.
 
But I am not sending money to Ted Cruz to help him keep the country from descending into a socialist hell. I am cool with the Biden plan of killing off the virus and restoring the economy. I can think of only one person I would rather give money to less than Ted Cruz, and that is Rand “Won’t You Be My Neighbor, Because My Last One Punched My Lights Out,” Paul, who wants me to send him money to fire Anthony Fauci, even though he is not Fauci’s boss. I would rather donate to Vladimir Putin’s re-election campaign than either one of those guys.
 
Or maybe Mike Huckabee, ex-governor of Arkansas and lying Internet hustler. He wants me to buy a book from him that teaches kids how to recognize “fake news,” which, surprise, surprise, teaches kids how to believe everything Hannity tells them. He also offers a book that explains to innocents how to argue back when confronted by atheist kids with the fact that Adam and Eve only had two documented kids, both of whom were male, so where did the human race come from? Mike advises kids that while the Bible is inerrantly true, it is also sometimes short on details.
 
Huckabee is missing the mark advertising to me personally as well as politically--my kid will turn 30 this year. He also doesn’t seem to realize that kids care very little about politics and theology. What kids care about is war and bloodshed, as I recall from my days of playing army in the dirt with a piece of wood as a pretend rifle, and today’s kids exemplify by fighting online combat games. Huckabee doesn’t offer any kid-friendly advice on these interests, although a book called, “Hey, It Really, Really Hurts When You Get Hit by a Bullet,” might serve as a helpful reminder to kids not to shoot themselves or others when they get a real gun.
 
Useful advice is not what Huckabee is accustomed to selling, though. He’s retired from politics now, although he’s gung-ho for his overweight daughter with two different-sized eyes to follow in his footsteps by becoming Governor of Arkansas, relying heavily on her resume as an unsurpassed prevaricator to appeal to the voters of that benighted state.
 
If Sarah loses, she can follow in her dad’s footsteps by writing kid’s books. “You Already Lie to Your Mom, But Nobody Pays You for That,” has a nice ring to it.

You can now pre-order the Lee Greenwood Bible, the latest hustle by the publishing Christian right to try and separate the evangelical base from another fifty bucks, and it will be shipped to you by the anniversary of the 9-11 attack on the US, so you can hold it reverently in your hands as you ask God if we’ve killed enough Muslims to avenge it.
 
This is not exactly how this Bible is advertised, but I’m sure you can use it for that. The Lee Greenwood Bible contains, besides the King James version of the same, a “readable” copy of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Pledge of Allegiance and the lyrics to Lee Greenwood’s sappy patriotic anthem “God Bless the USA.”
 
So, it’s easy worth the fifty bucks, even though you could get a Bible for free from that motel room you get to have sex with your second cousin while her husband’s working nights any time you want. That Bible doesn’t contain any of the thoughts of Lee Greenwood, though, just the standard mumblings and vague threats of various prophets and disciples. Lee’s a little more straightforward than the Book of Revelations, for example, when he writes, “And I'm proud to be an American/where at least I know I'm free,” which means that nobody else anywhere is free, even Europeans and Australians who vote for their leaders and have free speech and press, because they are yoked under the tyranny of universal health care.
 
See? Country-western musicians can be interpreted just like the words of Jesus. The Greenwood Bible has the advantage of combining stuff you never read (Bible, Constitution) with stuff you don’t need to read because you know it by heart (Pledge of Allegiance, country songs).
 
So, it doesn’t have to be opened at all. It can just sit there on your coffee table, proclaiming your religiosity and patriotism to whoever drops by, whether it be your pastor looking for his tithe or the FBI, wondering where you were on January 6th.
 
This Bible’s marketers seem to recognize that no one is about to buy one of these books for themselves, so the web page you can order it from has a list of people you can gift it to. Some of these suggestions are believable, like “The family,” because there’s nothing like a great big Bible/Constitution lying on the coffee table to remind you not to leave your sister’s underpants on it when you’re done having sex with her.
 
Others are not so convincing. “American History buffs?” The amount of American history in the Bible is negligible. “Grandparents?” They’re probably familiar with the Bible already, but you want them to remember what a good kid you really are when you need bail money, so maybe. “New American citizens?” Complete bullshit. You don’t know any, and if you did, you would be annoyed by them to the point of smacking them around. It’s not a hate crime if you just hate someone’s accent, right?
 
So, Lee Greenwood’s got a pretty viable product here. He’s probably going to make some money off of it, which will supplement the income he makes croaking out “God Bless the USA,” in some dank Vegas lounge six nights a week, which, like all musicians who had at least one hit song, is the way he’ll finish out his career.
 
But he’d better watch out for the competition. With the Country-Western Bible on the shelves, can the NASCAR Bible be far behind?

My late father, who was not exactly a font of wisdom, used to use the expression, “That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” when confronted with an inevitable event, like him losing at poker or the horse races.
 
That’s the only thing he ever taught me, besides using the lawnmower when I was old enough to reach the handles so he wouldn’t have to cut the grass anymore, so I suppose I should treasure it.
 
Cookies have a whole new meaning nowadays though, and Facebook cookies have crumbled so that the ad that pops up most frequently when I log on to FB nowadays is an invitation to donate to Prison Fellowship International, which wants $15 from me so they can “introduce a prisoner to Jesus Christ right now.” I am also told that the funds I donate would ensure that every prisoner who wants one would get a Bible.
 
What is possessing the PFI to spend its FB advertising dollars on me I can't say. To say that buying Bibles for anyone is among the lowest of my priorities would be a considerable understatement. Anything this side of undergoing chemotherapy would interest me more than shipping Bibles to convicts. Cynically, I imagine most of them would be hollowed out to conceal a shiv or other contraband. Equally cynically, I expect that prison inhabitants who actually want to read the Bible already have one.
 
Prisoners are actually more religious than the population at large, according to this post, although admittedly the data is murky. It’s easy to see why convicts are more religious than average, though. It’s the opposite of the reason that successful professional athletes are more religious than most. An MVP is religious because when he prayed to Jesus to hit one out of the park in the bottom of the ninth and did it, he thinks Jesus helped him swing the bat. Prisoners are religious because the turn of life that landed them in the pen, whether it was an abysmal lawyer, a partner in crime that snitched them out, planted drugs by a corrupt cop or actually having done something hideously wrong, was orchestrated by God to punish them for wrongdoings they weren’t caught at.
 
You can’t fix this forehead-smacking error in logic by giving cons more Bibles. I would rather give $15 to help the incarcerated obtain free streaming porn, which I suspect they would find infinitely more comforting, and would probably cut down on dropped-the-soap-in-the-shower foreplay in America’s penal institutions.
 
But I’m not going to do that, either. Instead, I am offering free Bibles to anyone currently in Facebook jail, of which I have many among my FB friends. I am seldom placed in FB detention myself. I wonder why sometimes, since I have as shitty a ‘tude as anyone else on here. Maybe it’s because I never post memes with bare titties in them, because if you want to be exposed to bare titties, that’s not my problem. Try Google. Acres of them there.

If you are mourning your errors in FB jail, though, bereft of the ability to comment on the frolickings of Smudge the Cat and his accusatory, tear-stained blonde companion, Leonardo de Caprio’s sardonic drunken smirk, or Pepe the Frog, and think that reading about Noah’s Ark or Jesus miraculously making Filet ‘o Fish sandwiches for a horde of followers out of a couple of mackerels and a half-loaf of challah bread will help you pass those sad, useless hours until Zuckerberg sets you free, contact me.
 
I’ll send you a Bible. *
 
*This offer is made completely sarcastically. No one is getting any Bibles from me. In fact, if you send me a request for a Bible, I will promptly sell your contact information to Nigeria and any politician begging for money who lives at least three states away from you.

​During an appearance on the QAnon program "Up Front in The Prophetic," Bishop Larry Gaiters declared that the deaths of Joe Biden's wife and daughter in 1972 and the death of his son Beau in 2015 were a "satanic sacrifice" to help Biden's political career--News item
 
This explains everything. Bishop Gaiters cuts through the crap of conspiracy theories about Venezuelan voting machines and millions of dead people casting ballots to arrive at the simple, Occam’s Razor tested, explanation for Donald Trump’s loss last fall—Biden sacrificed three immediate family members to the Dark Lord so he could someday be President.
 
So, simmer down, Mike Lindell. This is your chance to get out of being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for a billion dollars’ worth of pillows. Just say, “I take it all back—Bishop Gaiters convinced me that Satan switched all those votes to Biden.”
 
The same for you, Rudy. Lin Wood, too. The American people are off the hook, as well. When any one of the 85 million of us that voted for Joe are asked why we would want to do such a thing, probably by someone with Lawn and Garden bags full of gasoline in the back of their pickup truck, we can reply, “The Devil made me do it.”
 
The exact mechanism by which Tito Joe sacrificed his first wife, child daughter and adult son to the forces of evil is not detailed by the Bishop, although he avers that “two FBI agents” told him he was on the right track. Officially, Biden’s first wife and his daughter were killed in a car accident, and his son Beau by brain cancer in 2015.
 
It’s easy to see how the young Biden could don black robes, tie his wife and child onto a stone altar in ’72, ignore their cries for mercy, drive obsidian daggers through their hearts and drink their blood from a gold chalice afterwards, toasting Lucifer for making him a Senator, and fake the car crash afterwards. It’s more difficult to see how he could pull off the same deal with Beau, who was the Attorney General of Delaware at the time of his death and both younger and stronger than his aged father and presumably someone fairly well-watched, too.
 
But he did, according to the Bishop. And it makes sense, because Biden only has a single son left, and obviously the Devil already owns Hunter’s soul.
 
Questions remain, though. Why didn’t Trump counter last fall by sacrificing one of his own kids to the Prince of Darkness? Tiffany springs to mind, natch, although there’s little doubt that Trump would have happily killed any other of his useless, cloying offspring as well, and displayed their lifeless corpses like Don Jr. holding up the head of a dead cheetah, rather than lose the election.
 
Bishop Gaiter, whose title, as far as I can tell, is entirely self-granted, has predictions for future deaths as well. He is particularly keen on seeing Lady Gaga bite the dust, for singing the national anthem at Biden’s inauguration, probably, although publicly he says it’s because she is on an "American roster of witches" who will be decapitated by "the sword of God's word" in the future.
 
I’d be worried if I was Lady Gaga because God, unlike Satan, has a documented history of demanding human sacrifice. Consider the story of Abraham and his son Isaac. God demanded that Abraham sacrifice his son, and the patriarch had his offspring all tied up and ready to stab when God appeared again and said, “I was just shitting you, Abe.”
 
This is one of those Bible stories that confirm the thinking over here, which is that God can be shady AF sometimes.
 
But Bishop Gaiter can be shadier.

Pastor Rick Wiles, while channeling Jesus for our protection, has said that Dr. Fauci created the coronavirus while working with the Chinese Communists to destroy America, and needs to be waterboarded at Guantanamo until he admits it.
 
This is a fairly strong position, to say the least, but we’re not going to argue about it here. If it is necessary for the preservation of America to waterboard a diminutive, mild-mannered, 80-year-old man until he stops exclaiming “Oh, my goodness,” and starts speaking Mandarin, let’s get on with it.
 
The little problem standing in the way of God’s will re Dr. Fauci is that Guantanamo is currently under the supervision of Fauci’s boss, Joe Biden, and Joe is not likely to order his chief medical adviser there for a long weekend of Cuban sunshine and physical torture. Matt Gaetz’s zipper has a better chance of staying untouched at a high school dance.
 
How can the President defy the will of Wiles? Because, according to another spokesperson for Christianity, Mario Murillo, the head of Mario Murillo Ministries, an organization that probably exists for the sole purpose of funneling money to Mario Murillo, Joe Biden is surrounded by a Demonic Hedge of Protection, which, one assumes, is maintained by The Landscapers from Hell, a largely Spanish-speaking force of imps who specialize in greenscaping services for people like Biden, who are too busy doing Satan’s work to mow their own lawns.
 
Dr. Fauci no doubt labors behind the Demonic Hedge every day and is immune to Wile’s plans for him.
 
The Demonic Hedge reminds deep-thinking theologians like myself of the Prayer Shield that Christians liked to erect around Trump when he was President, and leads me to wonder: Which is the better fortification, a Demonic Hedge or a Prayer Shield? Let’s compare.
 
Prayer Shields are erected by Prayer Warriors, sincere beggars of the Almighty, who pause their beseeching of the heavens only long enough to give their debit card numbers to people like Wiles and Murillo. Prayer Shields, despite all the braggadocio about their invulnerability, obviously can’t keep you from getting impeached twice or having a virus sweep you out of office. They can’t keep you from spelling stuff on Twitter comically incorrectly. Hey, they can’t even keep you on Twitter.
​
The Hedge, on the other hand, can make a 78-year-old stutterer seem calm and coolly Presidential, give him a handle on a vaccination deal that promises to have us all at a beach party by summer, and lets him hand out free money, so that we can all enjoy living on tax-exempt cheese, like Wiles and Murillo already do.
 
So, right now, we’re giving the edge to the Demonic Hedge. Stay tuned.

Went off the grid when I visited my ancestral home, my peeps, if you were wondering where my hard-core sarcasm went for a week.
​
​I went to church on Easter. Not because of some sudden revelation, or because I needed to show off a new outfit, or even because I wanted to, because I never want to go to church. But my soon-to-be 91-year-old mom wanted to go, and she can’t go anywhere by herself nowadays.
 
Even she had her doubts about the project, because we couldn’t go to her parish’s Mass. She can’t handle the steps, which are many and steep there, any more. We had to go to another Catholic church, which, even though it is only a few miles away, my mother was suspicious of. “I heard the priest was weird,” she said of its pastor, repeating some piece of scuttlebutt she had picked up on the gossip chain of old Catholic ladies who judge the relative normalcy of priests.
 
“All priests are weird,” I told her. She still shoots me dirty looks when I say things like that, but she is stooped by age and instead of her hard stare piercing my faithless soul as she intended, it more or less bounced off the sidewalk.
 
The church was about two-thirds full, and there was a side room where, if you feared the covid too much to gather together with them, you could watch the Mass on Zoom with a bunch of other people. Everyone was dressed better than I was, because they had planned to be there and I hadn’t. The fact that young Catholic women tend to dress in skirts so short and heels so high on Sunday, that, if they were loitering on an urban boulevard instead of being in a house of God, they could easily be mistaken for prostitutes, was one of the few entertaining facets of that otherwise barren hour.
 
The singing was left to the choir, for fear of the virus, I imagine, and I was grateful for that, for the sound of a bunch of white people singing off-key is not pleasing to me, and I can’t imagine God likes it much either. The choir even belted out a song that was familiar to me, and I went through several rounds of Catholic calisthenics before I figured out that it had been on the soundtrack of one of my favorite movies, O Brother Where Art Thou?
 
The only other difference I noted between my last Easter Mass of about forty years ago and this one, besides the inclusion of a fundamentalist Baptist hymn in the Catholic service, was that the priest now sprayed holy water, which he called “Easter Water,” over the entire congregation. He did this by dipping a sponge on a stick in a bucket of the blessed H2O, walking around the perimeter of the crowd and flicking it at us. He hit me up once while passing to my right. My mother and I were sitting in the back of the church, in the handicapped section, and while finishing up, the priest soaked me again with a surprise shot of the sacred fluid, this time from behind.
 
Guess he figured I needed a second coat.