Aquarian Weekly 3/27/02
REALITY CHECK

HOLY HELL
FOR HOLY WEEK

It's been another banner year for God and all of his servants in the cause of ugliness.

If it isn't Islamic extremists ramming airplanes into buildings or seventy thousand choruses of "God Bless America" as fighter planes pile up the death and destruction in Afghanistan, then it's the molesting of children and cover ups by the Catholic Church or the daily maiming and pillaging between Jews and Palestinians in Israel. The Hindus and the Muslims are ten minutes from annihilation in the Indian/Pakistani border war, and right now somewhere there is ethnic cleansing going on somewhere in the holy name of extinction.

The week we go to press with this one, it will be Passover and Holy Week for the Jews and Christians, and everyone will recall the Lord's murder of innocent Egyptian children and the assassination of a Nazarene first century mystic. But no one seems to really know what any of this will do for the plight of humanity, except create more boundaries and kingdoms and ways for us to be different and feel better than each other.

It's funny. Every time I'd read some screaming headline last week about these revelations of child molestation by priests, I could not help but think of the night Sinead O'Connor tried to make a stand on Saturday Night Live against the Vatican's cover-up of rampart child abuses in Ireland. And how anyone with verbal motor skills wanted her lynched and burned at the stake for it.

Before the singer tore a photograph of the Pope in half, she recited an a cappella version of a Bob Marley song infused with lyric about the church's silence to the continued mistreatment of races and children, ending with the infamous statement, "Fight the real enemy."

A victim of child abuse herself, O'Connor decided to use her art and freedom of expression to reveal the terrible secrets no one could admit, and it effectively ended her career for almost a decade.

That was ten years ago now. At the time I defended it as not only an act of compassion, but also a reasoned protest against the repeated violence in Ireland between Protestants and Catholics, ostensibly a religious war which had raped that country and taken countless lives for decades.

Little did I know. Little did anyone know.

One thing I did know, and have known for most of my adult life, is that anytime more than two people are gathered in the name of God there had better not be any sharp objects available.
We are so evolved, us humans, you know. We conquer and invent and politicize and socialize and cram and jam and pursue that money. And we hang onto our stuff, don't we? And sometimes we put labels on that stuff, like country or color or gender or God.

Yeah, God.

Because you know that it's God's will that our stuff is safe from the other stuff. And all the silly talk of what God wants and needs and what God told the other strange people, that's just evil or wrong. We know what God wants. Can you believe that some of these other people don't even have a God? They're blinded by intellect and science and skepticism, and they blot out truths with power and greed and drugs.

Of course, that really doesn't matter much, because we're all screwed. Nothing we can do about that. We grew up in this twisted arena of misjudgment and fantasy wherein our stuff and our God were somehow more on the nut, and by subjugating our will and reason to reverence and superstition we reserve the right to belittle and castigate and kill and shove people out of their homes and countries and bury their traditions.

Manifest Destiny is the Inquisition is the Holocaust is the Potato Famine is Slavery is Tibet is fill-in-the-blank.

As a recovering Catholic, I think it is imperative to point out, especially this week, that all this self-serving, egotistical bullshit that is done and said and rationalized in the name of Jesus has to stop.

Will it stop? Of course not. Let me repeat, we're already screwed, but it's time our children get a quick lesson, or perhaps it will be your kid that's too afraid of God and his handmaidens to ask why the soft-spoken man with the white collar keeps touching them down there.

And don't expect these cretins who run this line of propaganda up the flagpole to blow any whistles. They have to keep the gravy train stocked with coal for the engines to chug along unimpeded with no one asking any questions or too bloated with fear to dare point any fingers.

Yeah, they know all about it, these big business religious hypocrites. They have a blueprint somewhere in the war torn corners of Israel, where the martyrs who tried to stop this mess are buried. They know all about what happens when you try and halt the cycle of hate and ignorance, for every Sunday there is the lifeless image of a man hanging from a cross above their heads to remind them.

And so we march on…

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