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."

​According to the Washington Post, “A $100 million effort launched this year is blanketing cities and the web, aiming to redeem Jesus’ brand from the damage done by some of his followers.”
 
The campaign will have a web site that allows you to claim free swag if you welcome a stranger or forgive someone.
 
The reason the Son of Man and the King of Kings needs a PR campaign, according to Jon Lee, one of the PR men who proudly proclaim themselves Flacks for Jesus, is the behavior of His followers, who tend to want to kill abortionists, gays and occasionally Nancy Pelosi. Jesus, the re-branders claim, does not want His followers to do any of those things.
 
The campaign is going to culminate with a Super Bowl ad next February.
 
Fortunately for our readers, this column was privy to a strategy conference between a Flack for Jesus, hereafter abbreviated FFJ, and the Savior Himself.
 
FFJ: So, My Lord, we want to make this a real game-changer. Like, we’re going to get the whole guns, God, and America crowd to lay down their weapons and embrace the Gospel of love.
 
JESUS: Huh? I don’t mind those guys so much. I mean, they’ve got the heavily-armed sincerity thing going for them. And they know who they don’t want to bake cakes for.
 
FFJ: Let’s look at the big picture here. (Seems slightly self-conscious about talking to the Creator of the Universe about big pictures, but overcomes it) Judgement Day is on its way, and You don’t want to preside over an Eternal Kingdom of fat, angry diabetics.
 
JESUS: (Musing) I did say that I do not bring peace, but the sword. Of course, I had changed quite a bit of water into wine that day, and I was a little edgy that Mary Magdalene had missed her period, but, still, there is a Biblical foundation for the Church of the AR-15, sort of.
 
FFJ: But generally, You rolled peaceful. That’s the side of You we’re buffing up, here. The Super Bowl ad is going to cost us a fortune, but there’s no price we won’t pay to spread Your word.
 
JESUS: Does it really have to be the Super Bowl? I’m already sick of the Super Bowl. Bills and Eagles fans are annoying the Holy Crap out of me praying for their teams to be in it.
 
FFJ: (taking notes) So, it’s really going to be the Bills and the Eagles? Any insights into the point spread, oh My Lord?
 
JESUS: (Coldly) I don’t see where that has anything to do with this business.
 
FFJ: Right. So, I’m just spit balling here. What if You appear at halftime?
 
JESUS: When? Following Rihanna? Nobody wants to follow Rihanna. I don’t like it.
 
FFJ: Jesus, babe, if You descend from Heaven in a fiery cloud, and start the Rapture right before the second-half kickoff, nobody is going to give a shit about Rihanna…
 
JESUS: No, no, NO! I already appeared to an elderly couple in Scranton and promised them the Eagles would get the second-half kickoff. I don’t go back on My word. Besides, I already ix-nayed the Rapture. The current plan for Judgement Day is I come streaking into the view of the James Webb Space Telescope on board the Sweet Meteor of Doom, like Slim Pickens riding the bomb in Dr. Strangelove.  The meteor will smush into Earth a week later and eliminate all life on the planet, except for cockroaches. Get it over with, is My motto.
 
FFJ: Wow, that’s really intense. Kind of makes what we’re doing here look insignificant.
 
JESUS: Does, doesn’t it? I hate to leave anyone cold, though. You want an introduction to Cockroach Jesus?

The latest Rapture scare is well behind us now (It was supposed to be September 25th) but the possibility of the Rapture occurring and being left behind as a non-Rapturee is apparently causing trauma issues for young fundamentalists.
 
From CNN: Thirteen-year-old April Ajoy had a sense something wasn’t right. It was quiet in her Dallas house. Too quiet. Her brothers were gone. Her parents were gone. On her parents’ bed, a pile of her mother’s clothes signaled something terrifying.
Ajoy’s mind began churning, trying to remember, trying to make plans. When was the last time she had sinned? Should she refuse the mark of the beast? At least, she thought, if she was put to the guillotine during the time of tribulation, it would be a quick death.
 
You can see that making your young, probably innocent daughter, terrified of being guillotined is probably not a best parenting practice. But the Rapture can happen at any time, and almost any sin can disqualify a young girl from being sucked up into Heaven by the Roomba of God’s love. What offenses against the Lord were racing through April’s mind as she struggled with the possibility that everyone she knew, except herself, had been popped off the surface of the earth like they were blessed kernels of Orville Redenbacher’s? Had that momentary burst of lust she felt when her phone accidentally exposed her to the latest Korean boy-band video disqualified her from eternal life? Or was it that tiny twinge of affection she felt for Snitty Hanson, the cutest boy in her Zoom Communion class?
 
April thought she had begged for God’s forgiveness abjectly enough for both these offenses, but to her horror, her bleak solitude said otherwise. Little did she know that her mother had merely gone to a fellow Christian wife’s house for a chaste afternoon of wearing modest clothing and baking pies, and her father was raising a barn and thinking about eating pie afterwards, and her brothers had not left the house at all, but had instead found private corners in which to masturbate, which young Evangelical men have to do even more stealthily than regular young guys.
 
Imagine her relief when she spotted her brother returning the box of Kleenex to its usual spot in the bathroom. Still, she could not be entirely sure that the Rapture had not happened until her dad came home, smelling of sawdust and her mother returned, reeking of pie, and also yelling at her for not doing the pile of laundry she had left on the bed.
 
I want to tell April that I know someone who felt a similar pain. It was the love of my life, who once came upon an empty chair with an empty pair of my shorts on it, and thought briefly I might have been blown aloft into the company of angels. You can read about her reaction here.
 
Her disappointment was far less than April’s, though, because she’s Jewish and immune from the Rapture. There was no pressure on her to regret her sins, because no matter how few they might be, Jesus is not beaming her up into bliss. She was a little upset when I returned and told her that. When God is sucking up the saved souls of Earth like they were a Big Gulp, even when He comes to the end of His list, and His divine straw is making that slurping sound on the bottom of the cup, no Jews are going to be included.
 
Hey, I don’t make the rules.
 
But before she texted me, asking where the hell I was, she did wonder if I had made coffee before God had whacked me into eternity with the pickleball racket of His love, and saw that I had.
 
And she saw that it was good.

Somehow, clicking idly along the Net the other day, I ran across a Fox editorial by David Marcus. I don’t know who David Marcus is, but I suspect he’s one of those people who look at all-white fundamentalist churches praying in unison against Democrats, critical race theory and Mexicans, and feels the power of their righteousness so deeply he almost pees himself.
 
Ol’ Dave had some arresting things to say, after averring that we were on the brink of a religious revival comparable to the Great Awakening, which no one beside him and Neil Gorsuch believes. “Never underestimate God,” he advises us, followed by, “God will start to operated more openly.”
 
All spoken as if he had a direct line of communication with the Almighty. I don’t know about him, but I do have a direct line of communication with the Deity. We Skype sometimes. He used to appear to me in person, but now I, at least, prefer Skype. By tilting the computer at the right angle, I can avoid Him seeing all the mess and empty beer cans in the background. I realize that He can see anything He wants—I’m just thinking He doesn’t need to see that.
 
So, I messaged Him, and about a half-hour later He got back to me. I ran Dave’s ideas by Him and He snorted. “Sure, you ought not to underestimate Me. I’m All-Powerful. But what people don't understand is that All-Powerful doesn’t mean the same thing as really interested. So, he’s kind of right, but it sounds like he expects me to care. I have had enough expectations foisted on me by donut-gobbling Baptists that I’m rock-bottom bored with them. And boredom goes a long way when you’re an Eternal Being.
 
“As far as starting to operate more openly, that’s a hard pass. Shady as fuck is the way I roll. And it’s all your fault. Not you personally—nobody cares what you say. Nobody cares what you pray, either, and nobody means Me, so if you start wafting some piteous yowlings aloft like some so many of your friends do, just because I take your calls, I’m changing my username, kapisch?”
 
Got it.
 
“No, it’s you guys in general. For every guy who’s praying for Me to cure them of cancer, there’s another praying to collect his life insurance money. For every quarterback praying for a touchdown, there’s a defensive back imploring me for an interception. For every war, there’s a bishop with a long dress and a funny hat on each side praying to Me to slaughter their enemies. For every plane crash—well, scratch that one. Nobody prays for planes to crash…well, the terrorists do sometimes…you see why the whole ‘operate more openly,’ thing sticks in My craw?
 
I’m starting to. What about this article, which says the opposite-- young people are rejecting church?

"That is My deal. That's why it's My Will that most of them have to work retail during the day and drive Uber at night just to survive. Keeps them out of the congregations. 
 
“But, for the most part, I’m continuing to stay on the down low. Every once in a while, I let a high school basketball team sink one at the buzzer. Or I grant some Buddhist Asian immigrant his wish to win the lottery, just so all the white people who lose can complain about real Americans never winning it. Or I let Rush Limbaugh die of cancer. No prayer really involved in that one. I just enjoyed it.
 
But what about Trump?
 
“WAS THAT A REQUEST?”
 
No. Sorry. Never mind.
 
“Better be Me-damn certain it wasn’t.”

I don’t know much about bitcoin, other than it hasn’t been treating its owners too well lately. Many people have made a lot of money on it in the past, but currently it’s down. I also know that there are other cryptocurrencies out there, such as dogecoin and Binance, and maybe even whipcoin and shitcoin if you dig around the bottom of the crypto barrel.
 
I’m not involved in the crypto market, because I really don’t have the means to invest in it. Being old means I spend most of my money on beer and medical co-pays. Apparently, though, it is greatly inspirational to at least some of its investors, particularly Tomer Strolight, who became convinced that Bitcoin was the invention of God, so much so that he converted to Christianity in a full-immersion baptism off Miami Beach.
 
Now I may not know much about bitcoin, but I know plenty about Jesus. Catholic Jesus, that is. He redeemed us by letting Himself get crucified, and we ate His body from the tender age of about six or so in order to thank Him for that. We didn’t really get to drink His blood—that was reserved for the priests, and in my altar boy days I noticed many a member of the clergy starting off their day by bolting down a half-bottle or so of His Blood.
 
Catholic Jesus was held up as an example of forgiveness and love to us Papist tykes, although He wouldn’t lift a finger if you accidentally chewed gum before Communion, which condemned you to Hell. So, okay, a tad shady, but that ran in His Family, particularly in the Holy Ghost, Who has spent all of eternity without a visible source of income.
 
Not chewing gum before Communion is not a tenet of the Church anymore, but unlike some states that have legalized weed, and pardoned people who were once convicted for owning it, there is no Catholic retro-forgiveness program that will let in you into heaven, once you’ve committed a childish mortal sin, and failed to confess it to a priest, which you were too frightened to do because, hey, some of them were pretty angry drunks. So, I’ve been on my way to Hell since I was ten. Any other sins I’ve done since that damning piece of Juicy Fruit have been a bonus.
 
Protestant Jesus is fairly similar, I think, except He wants you to go to church all day Sunday. That was enough to keep me and my dad Catholic, along with everybody else who liked football or had a yard to mow.
 
Bitcoin Jesus inhabits a whole new spiritual realm. As Tomar puts it, “The more I studied it, the more I realized that this (bitcoin) is an incorruptible system,” he says, “that this is a system that has justice built into it through math and truth…This is the genius of God.”
 
But bitcoin, somewhat like the airplane and the nuclear reactor, was definitely invented by a person. That person calls himself “Satoshi Nakamoto.” No one thinks that is his real name, but he has never claimed divinity. He (or she—could bitcoin Jesus be trans?) hides behind that pseudonym because he/she is probably rich enough to own his own island, where he has a private chef for every cuisine he enjoys and beautiful Polynesian girls to fan his/her* genitals with palm fronds when it gets too humid in the South Pacific.
 
And if bitcoin ever fully crashes and burns, and all the secular investors in crypto are wailing and gnashing their teeth in the outer darkness, their net worth reduced to that bucket of nickels on their dresser, Bitcoin Jesus believers will still keep the faith. They will wait for the Second Coming of Bitcoin.
 
Even if it takes 2,000 years.

*Probably being unnecessarily politically correct here. Crypto for sure sounds like a guy thing. Tell a woman you're giving her crypto instead of a diamond and you'll be swiping right again in no time.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said recently that he would tell parents of young children killed in the Uvalde school shooting that "God has a plan."--News item
 
God spit out His coffee when He heard that one, and flung the rest of His banana-and-manna muffin over the edge of Heaven in disgust.
 
“Who the Hell said that?” He demanded.
 
“Huh?” said Jesus, who was watching the remains of the muffin hit off an umbrella being held by a woman waiting for a bus on a rainy day in suburban Philadelphia. “I should have put My face on that one,” He mused.
 
“Who said it was My plan to massacre a bunch of third graders?”
 
“Ummm…Wasn’t Me, for sure. I’ve got enough problems with deceased children. I’ve got all these aborted fetuses swarming me. There’s another one, Youdammit (swats away another bleating pre-born) Last thing I want is another batch of dead kids.”
 
“And You don’t think it was Your Mother? Another one of those gotcha gimmicks her lawyer dreams up for her?”
 
“Not really her style. You know who it was.”
 
The Alpha and Omega sighed. “He’s really getting out of hand.”
 
“He is one bitter Eternal Being, that’s for sure.”
 
“I’ve got to have a talk with Him. ‘Ghost,’ I’m going to say…”

​“Stop right there. That’ll get You off on the wrong foot, for sure. You know He doesn’t want to be called that anymore.”
 
“Right. What are we supposed to call Him now?”
 
“I think He’s settled on ‘Ye.”
 
“YE?’ Does He know…”
 
“Don’t tell Him, is my advice. Or else we’re going to have another massacre. I mean, the Holy Ghost can hold a grudge for all eternity. We both know that. Let him focus on minor violence, like Billy Joe Billy shooting his toe off last night in Baregum Hollow while he was cleaning his AR-15.”
 
“Actually, that was Me.”
 
“What? I thought You were swearing off self-inflicted gunshot wounds.”
 
“I was, but Billy Joe Billy was starting to make his 11-year-old niece sit on his lap when he logged onto PornHub. Now Billy's worried that if he does that again, his pecker is going to be next. I was just radiating My Eternal Goodness when I did that. What are you going to do, sue Me?”
 
Jesus sighed. “Anyway, it was the Attorney General of Texas that said Uvalde was Your plan.”
 
“That prick. Him, Abbott and that Lieutenant Governor they have, Patrick…They’re like the opposite of us. The Unholy Trinity, if you get what I’m saying.”
 
“They have Ted Cruz, too, so that analogy doesn’t really work.”
 
“Before you were born, people told me that if I had a Kid, he would spend the rest of His life trying to make Me feel stupid. And they were right.”
 
“Come on, don’t get all pissed off. Nobody wants to deal with a plague or a tsunami today. I got that straight from the Admissions Desk.”
 
“I can’t just let this slide.”
 
“How about another heat wave for Texas?”
 
“Will they even notice?”
 
“Plus, a special disease that only afflicts air-conditioner repairmen. We’ll call it Carrierpox. That ought to get their attention.”
 
“Okay. Let it be so. And while you’re putting that order in, grab me another banana-manna muffin, will you?”

It was another big win in Uvalde, Texas a couple days ago for the bad guys with guns, as the score in the headline indicates, so back-to-back victories for them this week.
 
Despite there being armed security on the elementary school campus, we all know what happened. The good guys with guns failed to keep the bad guy from killing 21 people and injuring between 13 and 17 others. I can’t quite tell you for sure, as even a couple Google searches just now failed to be exact on the number of injured. This is probably unfair to the injured, the media acting as if lying in a hospital bed full of lead is at most, a minor inconvenience, but we’ll let the mainstream media have this one.
 
The right-wing media, on the other hand, immediately identified the shooter as a transvestite illegal alien, who swarmed across the border with an eye to killing Texas schoolchildren. This was reported by Candace Owens, whose source was apparently a known sewer of Internet sludge, 4-chan.
 
I’m surprised Candace didn’t have the shooter screaming, “After this, I’m getting an abortion!” as they opened fire.
 
Turned out the shooter was an 18-year-old male who had bought an AR-15 right on his 18th birthday, as he had apparently selected mass murderer as his career path long ago and was merely biding his time until the sun came up on his adulthood to embark on it.
 
It might be a good idea not to sell automatic weapons to people three years short of being able to legally chug a Lone Star, but don’t count on Republicans or the Supreme Court to go along with that. In their opinion, the Constitution protects the right of rage-filled rookie adults to own weapons that, if a single Revolutionary soldier had possessed in the Battle of Yorktown, could have cleared the field of Redcoats all on his own, muttering “King George my ass, motherfuckers,” while he changed clips.
 
The Uvalde guy, as well as the Buffalo teenager, wore body army, making it tougher on the good guys with guns. Who sells 18-year-olds body armor in Uvalde without at least asking, “What do you need this for, son? Worried about a rumble after the prom?”
 
Once again, the victims were not saved by Donald Trump rushing in unarmed to their rescue, as the former Caucasian-in-Chief once said he would have done to prevent a previous school massacre. The orange oozing sore on the nation’s body will be in Texas this weekend, though, protected by the Secret Service as he addresses the NRA, the organization that makes it possible for teenage balls of incoherent rage to buy automatic weapons.
 
I’m sure they’ll have a moment of prayerful silence over those dead babies.

 
I had already written this column below. I just failed to post it before the last massacre. My bad. It was titled, "God's Plan in Buffalo Was the Worst."

​
On the morning after the Buffalo racial massacre, the Governor of Oklahoma, a gurgling religious moron named Kevin Stitt, in a display of tone-deafness to any of rival Eric Trump’s, proclaimed “We believe that God has a special plan for every single life.”
 
He might have saved that for another day is our thinking here. God’s plan in Buffalo was to get ten people filled with hot lead while they were just trying to decide what flavor of Pop Tarts to buy.
 
But you’re not going to hear Stitt saying, “Well, in this particular instance, God’s plan sucked.” Stitt would never say that. It is up to this column to note how God’s plans often involved unarmed people getting shot. Some of us just need to have our organs surprised by multiple gunshot wounds, in the opinion of the Creator and Stitt.
 
Now Stitt may be just another secret atheist cynic clinging to power in Oklahoma by cultivating the votes of people who worship Republican Jesus. Or he may be sincerely religious. He may believe in God as fervently as he believes black guys shouldn’t date his daughter. And for sure he believes that. Click here for a picture of him with his family. I mean, this is a family so white they could easily be lost in a vat of mayonnaise. They could camouflage themselves in a blizzard by getting naked.
 
When holy idiots like Stitt go on about God’s plans, they never actually speculate about why God can be such a fan of random slaughter. Of course, there are reasons. We only have to go to Christian religious tenets to hypothesize why God chose to cut these ten lives short:
 
All the victims were going home to masturbate right after shopping, and sudden, violent death was the only thing that would let them get into Heaven.
 
Or people were slacking on thinking and praying. God knows that only the slap of bullets wakes them up sometimes.
 
Killing thirteen black people isn’t going to make the tiniest bit of difference in the white/non-white population ratio in this country. Sometimes God is just giving us a math lesson.
 
Sometimes people only find Him after they commit mass murder, so another precious shooter soul was saved. Praise be!
 
These are all religiously coherent reasons why God would let his spirit flow through a bloodthirsty young male and his AR-15. None of them speak well of His intentions, let alone His organizational aptitude, which is why the prayer crowd stops ruminating right after they say, “It was God’s will gettin’ done.”
 
So, it’s God’s will that the coroner stays busy. Stitt and his peeps are good with that. They’ve got other fish to fry. Stitt just got kicked off a commission dedicated to telling the truth about the Tulsa Race Massacre, because he signed a bill that would forbid teachers in Oklahoma from mentioning it. People in Oklahoma hadn’t mentioned the massacre for a hundred years, and the Republicans of that state want to keep it that way, because there’s no need for the white kids of OK to think their ancestors were less than perfect, and by less than perfect, we mean they enthusiastically participated in an orgy of murder and arson.  Hey, it was God’s will, so it must have been cool. The Commission’s response, “Are you shitting me?” was left unremarked upon by the gov.
 
Meanwhile, Stitt’s getting a boner over the forthcoming reversal of Roe vs. Wade. Oklahoma’s ready to ban abortion entirely, including in the event of rape.
 
So, the guy sitting in a bar in Tulsa, who just stirred a roofie into his Tinder date’s glass of chardonnay, can sit back and relax while he waits for her to come back from the ladies’ room. He’s confident that he’s doing the will of God, just as surely as his theological kin, the kid who’s in his garage converting his AR-15 into fully automatic mode in the name of Jesus.
 
Praise be!

​GOD and JESUS are sitting in the eternal throne room of Heaven. GOD is opening a few tabs on the Everlasting Internet.
 
GOD: Well, it looks like the USA, My favorite nation, is about to get its freedom-loving panties in a wad over abortion rights this summer.
 
JESUS: Your favorite nation? You mean “the nation I bitch about the most,” don’t you?
 
GOD: Yes, hijo. That was sarcasm. You’ve always been kind of immune to it. No, the Americans have been annoying me for centuries. They started out well, being founded by a bunch of agnostics, although mostly they were agnostic because they didn’t want Me disapproving of them having sex with their slaves. Then they got taken over by all kinds of born-agains and Mormons. Their latest thing is the Rapture. What, I’m going to suck up all of them at once? All of them with a church bake-sale cake in one hand and an AR-15 in another? That’d be a shit day at the front desk, wouldn’t it?
 
JESUS: My You, yes. But I’ll be glad when they ban abortion. A big fat Amen to that, Pop.
 
GOD: Ain’t gonna happen, boy. There’s already 8 billion people on Earth already. Anything to minimize their numbers, I’m all over it. Not that anything seems to work. That fellow Covid had a great sales pitch, but what did he really accomplish?  Just more begging to Me to spare the lives of anti-vaxxers. Why do humans think I have a special obligation to save the stupid? I sent the Prophet Darwin to them a century and a half ago to clear that up. That didn’t work. You know it’s the endless prayers ringing in my ears that blows my Eternal High. People will bother me about anything from land mines to Minecraft.
 
JESUS: You know you put in that special negative pressure system to keep prayers from penetrating into here, so you don’t have to listen to them.
 
GOD: Yes, and it costs a fortune. And You keep forgetting to turn it off when You leave.
 
JESUS: You’re such a cheap-ass, sometimes. Anyway, the sooner they ban abortions, the happier I’ll be.
 
GOD: And whose fault is your abortion problem? “Suffer the little children to come unto Me?” Who said that? Sure, it was back when you were turning way too much water into wine, but words have consequences, my Son. It’s not my fault you’re surrounded by the souls of aborted fetuses. You asked for it.
 
JESUS: Oh, You, and do they itch.  All the little fluttering's from their proto-limbs and blind eyes drive me crazy. It’s like standing under a porch light in South Carolina in the summertime.
 
GOD: You do seem to be under quite a cloud of them, now. Why don’t you go take a shower?
 
JESUS: Don’t you think I take a dozen a day? You know Mary Magdalene won’t lay a finger on me until I scrub them off?
 
GOD: Don’t let your Mother know that. She’d just laugh. You know how she feels about that girl.
 
JESUS: Well, she’ll be happy to know I’ve been side-chicking Joan of Arc. That smoky smell she gives off seems to repel them.
 
GOD: Well, good luck. I don’t know if you’ll like this, but I’m sending that old bastard Alioto to Hell, anyway. Let him think it’s for staring up Amy Barrett’s robes, for all I care.
 
JESUS: (scratching) No skin off my resurrected ass. Or Mom’s either. He prays to Her, like all the other You damn Catholics.
 
GOD: Yep, that’s one good thing about the Catholics. Between Her and that bunch of rummy old saints they make statues of, Catholic prayers to Me are considerably reduced.  Another great thing about Catholics is that they never seem surprised when they end up in Hell. Alioto will fit right in.

A few days ago, on one of the many atheist groups on Facebook that I belong to, someone was complaining rather bitterly about his child being forced to say the phrase “under God” while being required to say the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of his school day.
 
He told his child to say the phrase “under dog,” instead.
 
This man is trying to raise his child to be an atheist. I am afraid that he will find out that that is a mistake. I was raised a Catholic. This is the surest path to atheism that I know of. Send that kid to parochial school is my advice to that earnest Dad. Sure, he may be attracted to the pageantry and the swell robes at first. He may even develop a mild fetish for girls in short plaid skirts and knee socks. When he hits puberty, though, and is told an act he has no choice but to do several times a day is a mortal sin and makes him a prime candidate for Hell, he’s going to have his second thoughts about the One True Church, and you’ve got yourself a perfect little atheist.
 
But if that atheist Dad can’t go along with that program, my counsel is not to worry about the Pledge. It’s no more likely to make your boy more religious than it is to make him more patriotic. The nanosecond it is over, all thoughts of God and country have vanished from his head, to be replaced by fervid but unremarkable childish thoughts, like how to cheat at math, avoid getting bullied, and which of the objects of his boyish affections is least likely to laugh at him if wants to sit at the same lunch table as her/him.
 
Public displays of patriotism and piety are only enjoyed by those who arrange them, not those that are forced to participate. The authority that forces that atheist boy to recite the pledge imagines that he/she is encouraging love of the Almighty and America when they are, in fact, doing no such thing. They might as well tell those kids to open a tab to PornHub when they get home, which those kids are probably going to do anyway, whether you encourage them to or not. Porn has far more educational value than the Pledge. Children know that instinctively.
 
Having something crammed down your throat is liable to leave a bad taste in your mouth, to mix a gustatory metaphor. Atheism may be no exception to this rule. A kid raised in rationalism may rebel. No atheist parents want to hear, “Mom, Dad…I think I might be a Jehovah’s Witness.”
 
There’s no way to avoid religion in this world, and that’s not going to change for hundreds, if not thousands of years. If ever. People will always try to figure out ways to influence the unknowable future, whether it’s by rabbit’s feet, reading entrails, avoiding Scorpios, or making a novena, even if none of those ways has ever demonstrably worked.
 
I’m the only atheist I really know in person, and on some days I’m even an agnostic. All of my close friends have mild, tolerable forms of religious belief. The love of my life is vaguely Jewish, as is another friend I’ve had for thirty-five years. One of my beer buddies believes in God, because, in a moment of physical danger, he prayed and was saved. The other suffers from a case of Lutheranism, or something similar, left over from his childhood. Another will just say “I believe in Jesus!” whenever the question comes up, like a jack-in-the-box squawking when its handle is turned. He won’t say what Jesus he believes in, or what theology his Savior promotes.
 
Oddly, this makes his faith just about impregnable.
 
The only true atheist I know is my son. That’s because I let him go to Catholic school for a few years. “Might as well check it out,” I told him. "Always a good idea to see what the other side thinks."

He came out a committed rationalist.
 
Do what works, is my advice. Eggs and bunnies, everybody.

There are no doubt many complex geopolitical reasons for the war in Ukraine, but no matter how complex or geo they are, they will probably not be solved by shelling kindergartens and hospitals.
 
There is, however, another reason for the war, one not often mentioned, and that reason is waved like a banner by the Russian Orthodox Church, which supports Putin and the war, which is that Ukraine permitted gay pride parades.
 
Patriarch Kirill, the head of that Church and sometimes referred to as the Russian Pope has divided the world into two, unreconcilable camps of nations—those that allow gay pride parades (Ukraine) and those that do not (Russia, where a Moscow court recent upheld that city’s 100-year ban on gay pride events).
 
This is the kind of law and order that really juices up the Patriarch. In his mind, it supersedes all other differences between nations. Democracy vs. authoritarianism, socialism vs. capitalism, rice-eaters vs. potato peelers—all the possible sources of international discord pale compare to the gay pride parade divide, according to Kirill.
 
It’s hardly necessary to say that the Moscow-based Pontiff is way different than the current regular Pope, who is a genial old guy who has already let gays into Heaven, where, one assumes, they can parade eternally. Kirill is much more Old Testamenty, a wrath-of-God type Pope. He dresses the part too. Maybe he hates gays because some of them have criticized his fashion choices. “I wouldn’t wear a kitchen tablecloth with a crucifix stuck through it on my head, girlfriend, but you go,” is something one might hear on Queer Eye for the Orthodox Clergy. Or “That beard that looks like the corpse of a small mammal decaying on the steppes—let’s just sacrifice it to this can of Barbasol.”
 
So, out there in the vasts of Russia, there is a Church that thinks that allowing gays to exist and parade the fact that they do out in the open, is a sacrilege that justifies sending teenage conscripts to shell unarmed civilians. Dead babies and demolished hospitals are the price their God demands to stomp out the sin of gayness, or at least drive it into hiding, kind of like the Soviet Union tried to abolish religion, only to find it couldn’t be done.
 
Same thing going to happen with gay. Count on it, Patriarch.

​Scrolling along my Facebook feed a lot the past couple, as I’ve got a light fever and a minor cough and don’t feel like working. I get to merely worry about having a breakthrough case of the ‘rona, though, because you can't find a test around here any easier than Ted Cruz can find his spine.
 
Somehow Facebook has me pegged as a good Christian Republican. The Big Algorithm is constantly giving me ads that invite me to give my credit card numbers to the Slushy Money Against Critical Race Theory Fund, and to buy “patriotic” clothing that has various combinations of eagles, machine guns and flags on it. I get offers to “introduce prisoners to Jesus,” despite the fact that I don’t know any prisoners or Jesus.
 
I get invited to participate in surveys where the questions might be a tad loaded. Surveys with questions like “Do you think Joe Biden is a good President, for a pedophile?”
 
But I just stopped scrolling and stared when I saw an ad that said, “Will you read a daily verse with God?”
 
Yes. Oh, hell yeah. And I mean a verse of anything. As long as the Alpha and the Omega was sitting on my couch with me, from Amazing Grace to “Back That Ass Up.” Taylor Swift to T.S. Elliot. Gangsta rap to country western. Well, not country western. Well, okay. Thy will be done. Garth Brooks here we come.
 
So, I went to page two, which was a bunch of survey questions about whether I had kids, a job I was happy with, whether I had a relationship, and how often I wanted to l hear from the Almighty. I started answering them eagerly, until I had a bonus revelation, which was Shouldn’t God already know this shit?
 
That’s when I lost hope that God would actually come and get cozy over a little literature with me. God would already know that I had a kid. He would also know if that child was a wildly successful object of pride to me or if he was already known to the local cops as “Narcan Boy.” He would also know if I was in a relationship, or relationships, or if I belonged to a worldwide pansexual tribe that worshipped Miley Cyrus. He would know if I enjoyed my work or if I was planning to open fire at everyone on the loading dock come Monday.
 
Unlike God, algorithms know nothing until you start telling them. So, I quit filling out the survey. If God wants to find me, He can find me on His own. I’m usually at my local brewhouse on the weekends.
 
I’m the guy with eagles on his cargo pants.