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."

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.

The Pope crushed many gay wedding plans last week when he announced that the Church would not start blessing gay weddings.
 
Gay wedding planners had held out extraordinary hope for this Pope. After all, he came out in favor of gay civil unions a while back, and he’s shown extraordinary theological flexibility in the past by letting Jews and atheists into Heaven.
 
A lot of atheists have turned down the Pope’s eternal offer, saying huffily that they prefer to molder in the ground instead, but I’m going, if for no other reason than to see the looks on the faces of all the blessed souls that confidently expected, and have even told me, to go to Hell.
 
But I digress. A lot of gay people are Catholic, although I cannot tell you what for. There are way more gay Catholics than black white supremacists (None. All right, Dave Chappelle, but that was satire) or Jewish Nazis (only Stephen Miller). Probably most of them were hanging on just to have a Catholic wedding, because Catholic weddings are the gayest. The clothes! The incense! The music! The men in dresses! It’s to die for, but, unfortunately, it will have to wait for the next Pope, if not longer.
 
The irony, of course, is that the Church has been a refuge for gay for millennia. Gay might not even have survived the Dark Ages without its cold stone monasteries to huddle in, and to this day, when a devout Catholic family suspects one of its boy children to be on the verge of turning out “that way,” a rush to send him off to the seminary, where he can frolic within other young gay Catholic men, is considered a perfect solution to the problem. This has inevitably led to the Church’s main problem, persistent pederasty, with too many priests holding the Communion wafer high on Sunday with fingers reeking of altar boy ass.
 
The Church has always promoted this idea of a God with an intense interest in human genitals and what their owners are doing with them, a Creator of All Things who spends every minute on His throne, scrutinizing the Earth closely and deciding, “This boner good! That boner bad!” and arranging sanctity or punishment for each erection. This doesn’t seem likely to me. I left the Church when I began to experience my first boyish hard-ons, and realized that I had no choice what to do about them.
 
Yes, I became a rationalist rather than go to Hell for an act I committed two or even three times a day, some days, with nothing more than the bra and panty ads in the Sears catalogue for stimulation. I definitely didn’t want to talk to a priest about that. Whether that was pleasing in the eyes of God I can’t say.

I’ll let you know when I get to Heaven.

America’s latest accused mass/racial murderer, a poorly-groomed white man by the name of Aaron Long, was a long-time churchgoer and apparently a deeply religious man before he made the news by icing eight people in three separate massage parlors last week.
 
Long allegedly killed his victims because he was tormented by the temptation they represented, so they say, even though he was a regular customer at those spas and paid the service charge to be tempted by his victims often. He describes himself as a sex addict, although he sounds like a regular twenty-one-year-old man afflicted only with the priapism that afflicts all men of his age, the vast majority of which relieve it by streaming porn rather than chilling Asian sex workers.
 
The ironic thing is, Jesus actually had advice for Long, for there is a verse from the Sermon on the Mount that says, “If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out.” This is one of Our Savior’s least frequently followed pieces of advice, but it’s there. Apparently the crowd at the Sermon was pretty thug life, so the Savior was trying to make a stern impression on them. Nowhere in the Bible, though, does it say, “If a Korean woman gives you wood, buy a handgun and chill her.” Although there’s plenty of advice on who to kill and when to kill them in the Old Testament, that piece of wisdom is not contained in its pages.
 
Of course, the counsel to yank out your own eyeballs is better suited for those porn-watchers. Long’s target would have to have been an even more personal one, but the words of the Bible are plain. It’s a rare, one might even say a non-existent, event for a good Christian man to shoot off his own pecker to avoid the temptation of plunging it into another prostitute. Capping your own dick is usually reserved for drunk guys exercising their Second Amendment rights. Long could have been a pioneer in this field, and been hailed for solving his issues in a fundamentally Christian manner.
 
Instead, he went on a killing spree against sex workers, which has been done so often it’s a cliché, at least here in the USA. He was excused by a local sheriff captain named Jay Baker as “being at the end of his rope,” and “having a bad day,” which resulted in Baker getting nearly as famous as Cooper all of a sudden.
 
We’ve all had bad days. Some of us are being audited by the IRS, some of us are getting our screenplay rejected once again, some of us are finding out our wives have been having sex with their bosses. Very few of us say to ourselves, when encountering a run of bad fortune, “The only thing that might possibly make this day shine for me is to kill every woman that’s ever yanked me off.”
 
Baker, meanwhile, has been fired from his job as spokesman for the Sheriff. Currently, he couldn’t get a job as a spokesman for a poultry farm.
 
So, there’s no happy ending for him, either.

​God spoke to me today, as He sometimes does. I was doing a little Valentine’s Day shopping on the Net, when He materialized in my favorite armchair. “Put a mask on!” He snapped.
 
I hastened to obey. “Okay, Oh Lord, but why? You surely can’t get the virus.”
 
“No, but you look better with a mask on. Most people do. I’ve come to tell you I won’t be interceding to put Trump back in the White House on March 4th. I mean, what’s so special about March 4th anyway? The best day in March is the 15th. The Ides of March are fun On High, because everybody in Heaven gets a chance to stab Caesar again. I mean, it’s not fun for Caesar, but…”
 
“I have heard some Christian types and Q-Anon peeps saying that You would, Oh My Creator. In fact, several of them have said Jesus told them that You would restore Trump to power.”
 
“Yeah, well, Jesus has been drinking again. And the Holy Ghost took the Chiefs and the points in the Super Bowl, so he’s been one moody Eternal Being all week. Frankly, I’m appearing to you just to get away from the two of them, and also Mary’s—the wife, not that Magdalen woman-- eternal pear clutching over their antics.
 
“So, write this down--I gave up politics after choosing a couple kings for the Jews. Talk about a pair of disappointments. Well, the Jews were disappointments in general. It’s like any long-term relationship, I guess. You always end up asking Yourself why did I get involved with them in the first place?
 
“A lot of kings since then have claimed I appointed them, but I didn’t do diddley. You wanted to be a king in the Middle Ages, you went to the Pope. It was a good idea to kill all your siblings, too. When electoral politics came into vogue. I threw My hands up and walked away even further. Talk about a bunch of babbling miscreants. And by babbling, I mean praying.”
 
“I know how you dislike being prayed to.”
 
“Why can’t you people just STFU for a few minutes? That was one thing about Trump—he never prayed, not even for a hard-on. This new guy is in Church every Sunday.”
 
“What does Biden pray for?”
 
“Oh, his family, including his dogs, wisdom to lead the nation, the usual shit. I just stick My fingers in My ears. Figure it out for yourself, Joe.”
 
“Don’t You think You owe him some guidance? Isn’t America Your favorite nation?”
 
God furrowed His white, lightning-bolt shaped eyebrows. “Why did I make you such a sarcastic old bastard? I guess there’s some things I don’t even know. America? Give Me a break! Try the Netherlands. Jamaica is pretty chill, too. America is just a bunch of yammering yick-a-doos, constantly fawning and begging Me to lead them. Even though I don’t do shit for them, they continue to worship Me.”
 
“You are kind of like Trump that way.”

One of the ways 2021 will be better than this year is that the world will have its first Christian airline says its founder, Everett Aaron.
 
Mr. Aaron is the founder of Judah I, a small aeronautical firm flying out of Shreveport, Louisiana, on a Christian mission to export missionaries all over the world. Aaron had a vision, apparently, of a fleet of planes stuffed full of Bibles and other missionary goodies, lined up on runways in America, being boarded by godly guys and girls eager to fly off to deep jungles to give indigenous peoples books they couldn’t read and modern Western diseases they wouldn’t survive.
 
One of the things Aaron is proudest of is that Judah I will be able to fly into countries that otherwise wouldn’t let Americans in, because currently we wheeze out more coronavirus particles than any other people on Earth. Other nations have to let missionaries in, he insisted, because of the Godly nature of their work.
 
For all I know, some nations may do this. Others may say, “Are you fucking stoned?” when Everett approaches them about flying in planeloads of coughing Americans in the middle of the pandemic.
 
Aaron drops hints about a future Christian commercial airline, which may not be a bad idea. Praying has always been associated with air travel, from the moment Wilbur prayed Orville would get off the ground in Kitty Hawk to the last people who flew in a 737-Max praying they wouldn’t merge with it, which only goes to show that prayer has as mixed a record in aviation as it has in any other field.
 
I’m not much of a prayer myself, though if I was in Shreveport, I’d be tempted to pray to get out of it. But I’m sure there’s a market out there for an airline where they start off with a Hail Mary before they tell you where the life preserver is and serve you Communion wafers instead of little bags of equally tasteless snacks. Sharing a chalice of wine with the other passengers instead of selecting a cocktail from a well-stocked beverage cart wouldn’t be to my liking, though, and the in-flight entertainment might be a little chaste for my taste.
 
My opportunities for getting one of the female flight attendants to commit adultery with me would be even fewer than they are now, and all the male flight attendants would be rugged men of the cross instead of fashionably gay, so that would take getting used to.  My chance of getting crammed in coach next to a Christian who’s been to too many church bake sales would probably be about the same as getting wedged in next to a guy who weighs as much as a taco truck on an agnostic carrier, so no advantage to Jesus there.

So, I’m probably not going to book a flight on a Christian airline for the foreseeable.
 
Unless I could fly in first class, or as they call it on Jesus Air, Holier Than Thou.

​In his most earth-shattering announcement since he let atheists into Heaven, the Pope signaled his approval of gay civil unions last week.
 
Mind you, he also said this years ago, when he just wore a cardinal’s pointy hat in Argentina. Mostly the Pope approves of gay civil unions because he doesn’t approve of gay marriage. A real marriage is reserved for a Catholic man and a Catholic woman after they and their family and friends have endured an interminable, fairly expensive ceremony in a Catholic church, followed by a massive party where everyone gets shitfaced. This is the only form of marriage of which God approves. At least that’s what I was told back in the day.

Any other form of marriage, be it Protestant, Buddhist, Muslim, courthouse, shotgun, Vegas wedding chapel or gay, doesn’t count. The nuns who taught me were pretty hard-core about this, as well as being firmly against sex in general, and Catholic boys trying to get it from Catholic girls in particular. Regretfully, in terms of my early love life, they had the Catholic girls mostly on their side in this opinion.
 
But things change. Most of those nuns are dead by now, and if they’re not, they’re nearly as old as the Pope. Now, Francis is not likely to be saying anything like, “Hey, people like to grab each other’s genitals. Whaddya gonna do?”  so he's not going to approve of you meeting another intoxicated person at a bar and clawing each other's clothes off at closing time anytime soon. And he’s especially not going to favor civil unions between a priest and his favorite altar boy.
 
He’s getting heavy criticism from his fellow religious leaders, nonetheless. Soulless fraud Franklin Graham, perhaps jealous because the Catholic Church has been soaking pious peasants for their last penny for centuries while his family has only been doing it for a couple generations, said the Pope was “normalizing homosexuality.” Graham believes that all gays should be living lives of internal torment, squashing their sexuality between shut legs or marrying an opposite sex person so they can both be miserable. Only then will God be happy with them.
 
What makes God happy is a mystery to me. The coronavirus, from all available evidence, just rolls Him, but Graham has different ideas, and the cheerful young guy with the lilt in his voice and a sharp haircut who just brought you your lunch is what pisses Him off, according to Graham, along with abortion, being against the death penalty and the government trying to take away your guns.
 
The Pope is still not cool with abortion, but he’s good with gays and atheists, and he hasn’t given any encyclicals lately on the importance of oversized ammo clips. This is a remarkable evolution on the part of the Church, considering that, back in its heyday, which was before the invention of any size ammo clip, it used the weapons it had, namely wood and fire, to routinely burn Jews, heretics and astronomers at the stake.
 
Or Protestants. Bet the Pope he wishes he could bring that back for Graham.

In the stream-of-incoherency that passes for national leadership nowadays, it would be easy to miss Second Son Eric Trump’s claim last week that his dad had “literally saved Christianity.” Easy to miss, because Eric was chirping it in the North Dakota hinterlands while his dad was being Mussowheezy, gasping Covid particles over a small crowd that was paid to expose themselves to him on the White House lawn.
 
“So what?” I hear you say. “Lots of people smarter than Eric Trump, which is almost every English-speaking person on the planet, have misused the word ‘literally.”
 
True dat. I mean, people have literally saved Christianity—Charles Martell did it in 732 AD by defeating the Moors in the Battle of Tours, thereby keeping Muslim hordes from invading France. If the noble Frank hadn’t won that battle, Charlotte McKinney would be spending her whole life wearing a chador, which would be a tragic waste of bikini-modeling talent. There probably would have been a couple of other effects, too.
 
But Trump hasn’t saved Christianity, literally, figuratively or metaphorically. America would remain vibrantly Jesusy with or without the Caucasian-in-Chief. I mean, he’s not saving it from Joe Biden, who is as Catholic an old guy as ever shook a pedophile priest’s hand after Mass. He’s not saving the Catholics, period, because the One True Church proved it knows how to hunker down and survive a plague back in the Dark Ages.
 
No, the Christianity he’s saving is the Church of We Won’t Bake Gay Wedding Cakes or Let You Get an Abortion After Your Uncle Fucked You. People wouldn’t pay near as much attention to that congregation if Trump wasn’t President. Also, people wouldn’t pay attention to Eric Trump at all, knowing that if he didn’t have the Secret Service to protect him during his travels to North Dakota, Eric would probably stumble off into the prairie and get stampeded by a herd of buffalo.
 
But, on a more gracious note, we would like to formally welcome Melania Trump into the ranks of we who War on Christmas. Before the first shot of this year’s War has been fired, which is traditionally the issuance of the Starbuck’s pagan holiday cup, the First Lady was overheard shouting our battle cry, FUCK CHRISTMAS!
 
Melania hates the holidays because she has to decorate the White House for it, and has been roundly criticized in the past for her efforts in doing so. Not without reason. But one look at her husband, even clothed, should be enough to convince any observer that Melania has terrible taste. She should no more be forced to decorate anything than Danny DeVito should be forced to do the high jump.
 
But, whatever their reasons for enlisting, we welcome any new recruits into the War on Christmas. We’re excited for it, because this might be the year we finally win out.
 
Because this year, it’s going to be A Very Covid Christmas. Ask the Hallmark Channel, if you don’t believe me.

​God appeared to me the other day. He does that sometimes, but it had been a while.

This place isn’t its usual mess,” He said.

“We have a woman who cleans once a week now,” I said.

“I KNEW THAT! I KNOW EVERYTHING!”

When God speaks in His all-caps Voice, the earth shakes. This is California, though, so nobody would notice, I hoped. The Almighty was obviously upset.

“It’s Trump, isn’t it?”

The Creator nodded. For the first time, I noticed His eyebrows are shaped exactly like little lightning bolts.

“You gave him the virus.”

“So many people were praying for Me to. I just gave in.”

“I thought ignoring prayers was your policy?”

“It is, so don’t you start. But after the debate, the chorus of people begging for it was really deafening. Plus, I was already sick of getting stinkeye from Ruth Bader Ginsburg. So, I gave that bloated bag of self-regarding shit the ‘rona.”

“But it’s not working out?”

“IF IT WAS WORKING OUT, DO YOU THINK I’D BE HERE?” The condo rocked again, and I started really worrying. Our HOA has rules against rowdy guests.

“Calm down, oh my Lord. Do you want a beer?”

“No, thanks. It’s Jesus that’s the alcoholic in the family, not me. No, the minute I did it, I knew I’d start hearing from the other side. Not that I don’t hear prayers for Trump all the time anyway—they’re a constant background buzz. People pray for his health. People pray for his hair. After he released his taxes, people actually prayed for his money. I even heard one guy praying that Trump’s dick wasn’t shaped like a mushroom.”

“Did you grant that one, oh my God?”

“I don’t do rebuilds. But now that Trump’s got the covee, everybody who tunes into Fox is praying for me to cure him. Every single person in every trailer park in America is begging Me through their missing teeth to have mercy on Trump’s fat ass. Every Patriot Prayer is shaking their AR-15 at Heaven, demanding that I get Trump back on the golf course before Election Day. All the Evangelicons--Joel Osteen, Franklin Graham, Paula White—they’re all in the pulpit now, telling people to send them money so they can pray to Me on behalf of Trump.”

“Do they do that, Oh Lord?”

“No, thank Me. They just build another mansion or buy another car. But it’s still infuriating. It’s enough to make Me want to smite, and smite and smite again!”

“I’m trembling, oh Almighty One.”

“Don’t worry. I gave up on that. Never really improves humanity anyway.”

“But can you tell me, Oh God, if Trump will live?

“No, and by that, I mean I’m not telling you. It’s for your own good. Put that out on the Internet, and see how long you last.”

"At least tell me if Chris Christie is going to become the white Herman Cain. Maybe just give me a hint? Just enough to place a little bet?”
​
“You want to bet, talk to the Holy Ghost. He’s the one with the gambling issue in the Trinity.”

Chuck Parry, the spiritual leader of the Bethel Church in Redding, California, has claimed that he has brought two people back from comas via the video app Zoom.
 
This is less impressive than one might think. Thanks to the pandemic, we are all familiar with Zoom. I doubt that there’s anybody out there who hasn’t been a face in one of those little Zoom boxes since March, and we are all powerfully aware of the ability of Zoom to render participants comatose. Nothing like a sales meeting that was supposed to last 45 minutes but is dragging on past an hour thanks to that one salesperson who keeps asking stupid questions that everybody else already knows the answer to, to put you in a state of stupor so advanced that you can only be brought out of it by the boss saying your name.
 
I handle Zoom meetings like any intelligent adult would, by claiming that my camera doesn’t work so I don’t have to put on clothes or quit drinking, throwing my headphones to the floor so that the other participants’ voices became tinny, far-away and blissfully irrelevant, and opening a fresh browser window to something moderately entertaining, like TMZ, Facebook, or porn. The only hazard to this approach is forgetting to mute the sound on whatever web site you are actually on, and everybody else on your Zoom being able to hear the love cries of the Hot Big-Ass Stepmom.
 
That woman knows how to keep a coma at bay.
 
But back to the Bethel Church. Presumably, someone else logged in a comatose believer to Bethel Zoom, and during the course of whatever theological spouting was occurring on it, the unconscious church member responded by sitting upright and abruptly shouting “Hallelujah!”
 
Or even, “I think I filled up my bedpan!” Really, when you’re in a deathlike coma, you can say almost anything when you come out of it and people will be impressed.
 
There is some doubt among the cynical and sinful this miracle actually occurred, because the Bethel Church has some underpinnings of its faith that are really out there, and I mean out there like the left moon of Uranus. They were the congregation that tried to pray a dead two-year old back to life last year, only admitting failure after it became apparent that the child coming back to life would be basically an episode of the Walking Dead.
 
Instead of acknowledging what is obvious about God (there’s nothing He enjoys more than pointless tragedy) the Church buried the child with full religious honors.
 
Zoom, meanwhile, instead of being an app used only by distanced geeks, has taken over the world. Various conspiratorial fantasies have sprung up around the ‘rona. That it was deliberately created by the Chinese is something the CIA is investigating. That it was deliberately created by the CIA is something China is investigating.
 
But who is benefitting the most by the virus? Is it Zoom?
 
Nope, it’s Amazon. Forget I said anything.

"You know what that is? That's right. That's God testing me. He said, You know, you did it once. And I said, 'Did I do a great job, God? I'm the only one who could do it.' He said that you shouldn't say. Now we're going to have you do it again. I said, 'OK. I agree. You got me.' But I did it once. And now I'm doing it again. And you see the kind of numbers that we're putting up. They're unbelievable. Best job numbers ever. Three months, more jobs in the last three months than ever before." Trump on talking to God. News item.
 
While Trumped bragged about bragging to the Almighty while campaigning in Minnesota last week, he did not release the full transcript of his conversation with the Creator of All Things. Fortunately, this column has been able to obtain it. It follows below.
 
The scene: Golf course, Bedminster, New Jersey. The President is playing his third round of the weekend.
 
TRUMP: Dear God, please let me not slice this shot, for then I couldn’t do any better than two over par.
 
The Lord appears, in a golden golf cart powered by flames.
 
GOD: (Thunderously) Don’t you have better things to pray for, Donald?
 
TRUMP: Not currently, Oh Lord, because I’ve had to cheat to break 90 all weekend. (looking at the Supreme Being. Suspiciously) How do I know you’re not Obama trying to punk me?
 
GOD: I am the Lord thy God, Donald.
 
TRUMP: Swear?
 
GOD: So help Me, Me.
 
TRUMP: Are you coming to thank me for tear-gassing people so I could hold a Bible backwards in front of a church? Or are you here to answer my prayers about Ivanka? The Bible is fairly pro-incest is what I told that girl after she became Jewish, especially the Old Testament. Or are you here because one of Paula White’s visions, where I ride next to Jesus in the Apocalypse, is coming true?
 
GOD: The one where you’re riding a white horse covered with jewels, your mighty sword in hand, and your vast swelling manhood is covered by a condom made of woven gold?
 
TRUMP: That sounds about right.
 
GOD: Hell no. I just give Paula those visions to gross out Jesus. It really pisses Him off. Guy that got crucified once ought to be able to take a joke, don’t ya think? But no, He gets all sulky about it. But I’m getting off the subject. I came by to tell you you’re going to lose big in November unless you get more like Me.
 
TRUMP: You mean wise and merciful? (looks a little queasy)
 
GOD: No! That wise and merciful stuff is just spin. I mean work in mysterious ways. You’re constantly kissing Putin’s ass, even though nobody knows what he’ll be up to next. You admire him because he kills whoever he feels like and has a job for life. AND I DON’T? Think about it. Same goes for Duterte and Erdogan. Why do you suck up to brutal dictators? They’re just puppies compared to me.
 
TRUMP: Oh, Lord, now I see the error of my ways. But why did you have to send the pandemic to screw up my re-election?
 
GOD: I just love a good plague. If it was possible for me to have any weaknesses, it would be that. Nothing personal.
 
TRUMP: I think I’m getting the picture. But if You really want me to change, I could use a little supplication. I’m already You-like in that department, You know, demanding worship, begging and praise before I lift a finger. A few wet kisses on my hiney goes a long way with me, as it does with You. How about you write me a beautiful letter like my boy Kim did? (Hits ball. It slices wide right, into a thick clump of hedges.)
 
GOD: There’s your answer.