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."

​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.

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, bored with his Presidential campaign, which currently consists of shutting up while the Caucasian-in-Chief flails around like a monkey tap-dancing on a hot griddle, took Trump's suggestion and got in some him-time this week by vandalizing religions icons and institutions, admitted a spokesman for the Biden campaign.
 
“First, the ex-Veep set out to hurt the Bible. It’s tough to tell when you’ve succeeded in causing an inanimate object physical pain, but Joe’s a determined guy. He’s also a Catholic, so he doesn’t actually own a Bible. He had to borrow one from Obama to hurt. First, he doused it with lighter fluid and put a match to it. Then, when it was fully aflame, he put it out by beating on it with a Quran, which he also got from Obama, natch.
 
“Satisfied that the Bible was in agony, he set out to hurt the Church. Not his Church—like I said, he’s a Catholic, and the Catholic Church knows how to hurt itself. Smell the altar boy ass on your favorite priest’s fingers if you don’t believe me. First, he emptied out the poor box at an Episcopalian church. Then, after dark, he went out to a Methodist graveyard and pushed over a couple of tombstones. He had Hunter help him with that—at his age, Joe can’t topple a tombstone like he used to.  Finally, he went over to one of his favorite Evangelical haunts, the Church of the Ever-Flowing Waters of Christ’s Love, and let all their snakes loose.
 
“When it came to hurting God, Joe was in a bit of a quandary. How do you hurt Someone who is either the omnipotent Creator of All Things or else an entirely delusional being? Joe finally settled on dropping trou in the middle of his driveway and mooning the sky, thinking that exposing his grizzled, white-guy-flat old hiney to the view of the Almighty might hurt Him, especially since God gets credit for making that extremely unappetizing product of Creation in the first place.
 
“Joe then went back to his basement in Delaware, where he and Jill enjoyed a relaxing threesome with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. After that, he got a great night’s sleep. He woke up this morning refreshed and got busy with his week of napping, occasionally picking a Vice President and letting Trump capsize his own candidacy like a Philippine ferry.
 
“Next weekend he’s going to confiscate all your guns.”

In a recent interview, the Cantaloupe Dope claimed that if the voting public chose his opponent in November, “religion would be gone.”
 
Wow. So cool, is what you’re thinking to yourself, and vow to mail in as many fake ballots marked for Biden as any foreign power looking to fix the election will let you have.
 
I urge you to calm yourself, even if that requires taking or smoking medication. This may come as a seismic shock to you, but Trump is lying. Biden cannot abolish religion, thanks to the First Amendment, which promotes freedom of it, on account of our Founding Fathers, a bunch of white guys in wigs and pantyhose that are ordinarily depicted favorably in the media. They even have musicals made about them, despite them having left us such dubious inheritances as slavery and the Electoral College.
 
You can’t really say they were wrong about religion, although many of them were not particularly religious but if they were clear-minded about it, they could have given us freedom of religion only for the religions that existed at the time, and spared us uniquely American religious concoctions like Mormonism, Dianetics, and Jim Jones, batshit faiths that developed in the fertile soil of native religious lunacy in later years.
 
But you can’t think of everything when you’re starting a country from scratch, especially when you can’t wait to quit pondering about equality to get back to banging your favorite slave girl after work, so we’ll let the FF’s off the hook for letting religion flourish here.
 
Another whopper by Trump was that Joe wants to abolish the suburbs, but if you read into that carefully, what Trump means is that Biden can’t be counted on to maintain suburbs as lily-white enclaves where you have to go to the 7-11 to get a Slurpee if you want to see a person of color.  We don’t really have those kinds of burbs out here in California now, and our property values are truly bodacious anyway. We're not worried about the urban hordes invading us. We'd like to keep out the cousin-fuckers and meth labs that dot Trumpland first.  
 
And, it turns out that by “abolishing religion,” Trump just meant that Biden would merely require people to maintain social distancing while praying. This theory, that God will not listen to the prayers of people who are not snotting viruses all over each other, represents theology at its most dubious, with the exception of the concept of prayer itself, which, even if it is muttered with the utmost sincerity, like a kid begging for a snow day because he didn’t do his homework or a guy getting his leg chewed on by a crocodile, is never answered very consistently, if at all.
​
Being required to stand six feet apart while begging God for a vaccine that science will eventually deliver, and then praising Him lustily when it happens will not destroy any religion, although the illogic of thinking this way may hurt your brain. You can’t organize a congregation to stand outside the CDC and chant “Yay science!” anyway. It would just distract those guys.
 
But churches will still thrive. They just need longer handles on the collection baskets.

A shocking act of vandalism occurred over the weekend in my own library. My personal religious icon, Dollar Store Camouflage Jesus, was pushed over on its side, possibly by an angry mob of social justice warriors.
 
Maybe this was a result of BLM activist Shaun King’s call to topple statues of “white Jesus” as symbols of racial oppression. I was cool with this, since, even though I am white, statues of Jesus had had been omnipresent during my childhood, when, despite my European-Americaness, I was regularly oppressed by ruler-wielding nuns belonging to the Order of St. Theresa the Not Even Remotely Attractive Sadist.
 
Or maybe it was a result of the Cantaloupe Dope’s threats against statue-topplers, in which he claimed that people, most notably Shaun King, were threatening to yank down statues of the Savior in which he was depicted with Caucasian features. Intimidated by Trump’s threat to imprison anyone who toppled a statue for thirty years or so, his enemies decided to start small by toppling DSCJ, because He is only about seven inches tall, base included.
 
Ironically, Dollar Store Camouflage Jesus cannot be 100% percent confirmed as white. Although His features are Caucasian, his skin color can be described as a light caramel. His knife, automatic weapon and combat boots are the same as an American soldier of any race, patrolling the parched corners of the Middle East, drawing a bead on Muslim children and keeping a wary eye out for IEDs, set to suppress any threat to American freedoms with a withering burst of small-arms fire, even while holding the Dove of Peace in His hand.
 
My head spun when I saw Him lying there. While we have a couple menorahs lying around the house and a mezuzah on our doorway because my Significant Other is Jewish, DSCJ is the only reminder of my Catholic boyhood that I keep in our home. The only other representation of the Christ that means anything to me is a huge statue of Him on a peak above the toll road to Ensenada, which I reverently refer to as Great Big Fucking Jesus (GBFJ).  A feeling of numinous joy always envelopes me at the sight of Great Big Fucking Jesus, because that means that I am halfway to that picturesque seaside town, brimming with cold, creamy cervezas, excellent restaurants, and abundant sportfishing opportunities.
 
How the angry mob got in my front door without waking me up remains a mystery, although it was a weekend night, and I am prone to spend those sampling craft brews. They even made it past my Chihuahua, Cujo, who ordinarily is whipped into a barking frenzy if the Amazon person so much as rustles a package on the doorstep. He’s getting old, though, and I might have slipped some CBD oil into his kibble for his arthritis.

Or maybe it was just an earthquake. It remains a divine mystery at this writing. I just propped Him upright again and went to make the coffee.

We Apocalypse fans are always ready for the world to end, and there’s no better time than now, what with a world-wide epidemic, depression, racial unrest and locusts, locusts, locusts all roiling merrily along. There’s no question that the human race deserves to come to a full stop. Like a deer that’s been hit by a timber truck and is lying in the road gasping to force some air into its punctured lungs, we deserve to be put out of our misery.
 
Sadly, the there has been a dearth of world-ending news at this moment we need it most. All the asteroids seem to be missing us by a million miles. Biblical prophesies predicted a plague, natch, but nobody in the Bible punched each other out over facemasks. Likewise, white supremacy is not mentioned in the Good Book, because there are no white people in the Bible. And Jesus is not coming back. Let’s face it, Jesus is the Cleveland Browns of world-ending, always rumored to be on the verge of a good season, but never fulfilling His promise. Likewise, Nibiru, the Death Planet. Fuck Nibiru.
 
There’s always global warming, but let’s face it, there will always be global warming, but right now even that’s on hold, as tons of people are still staying inside and resisting the pull of two-buck-a-gallon gas.
 
That’s why it’s so heartwarming to see the Mayans make their comeback. Sure, we left them for dead in 2012, when they predicted, in a fashion we have always deemed to be cowardly, the end of the world after their civilization had safely vanished, but now a drunk astrologer has figured out that they really meant 2020 instead of 2012, and in fact meant this week in 2020, which leaves us tingling with excitement, because it's already Thursday.

The error occurred because of the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars, which means we have to add an extra eight years to the original Mayan prediction.
 
It’s very complicated, especially since the original prediction was based on neither the Julian or Gregorian calendars, but on the Mayan calendar, but here we are perfectly willing to grasp at straws. This is a world which deserves to end. The Mayans weren’t very specific about how it is supposed to happen. Probably a huge rocking worldwide earthquake which causes the Indian Ocean to slosh over the Himalayas, as depicted in the movie, will do the trick. But the Sun blowing up, or us getting all fried from a gamma-ray blast from deep space, will work as well.
 
Of course, some people are not ready for the world to end. People with lots of cheese in their 401(k)’s, for example, or kids who haven’t had their birthdays yet this year. It’s kind of unfair to black people, too, because white people just figured out black lives do matter, but black people are used to getting over unfair, and everybody being dead will only accelerate that process.
 
But most of us are just thinking, “Hot damn! Bring it on!” and will be content with whatever flavor Apocalypse we are treated to, as long as it wipes out every locust, covid and bad-tempered cop as well as the rest of us.
 
Everybody except Jesus. You just know He’s not going to show.