Jesus, Shut Up
This morning when I got home from taking my son to school, the cleaning lady was in front of the building. It was a bit awkward, because she had just finished mopping the floor and my shoes were, as all of the streets and sidewalks of the city, wet and muddy.
She is generally a friendly sort. She usually smiles and says hello when you meet her which is more than a lot of folks around here. But, she’s nuts. Jesus type nuts.
She asked me if I could wait a bit before I walked in so I said sure, even though that struck me as a bit unreasonable. I do live here, and the floor is going to get dirty at some point, but I complied. And was subjected, of course, to a lecture about religion. Not just religion. End times religion. The snow, you see, which fell so softly during the night, which is lying over the city like a blanket of purity, which is gracing the branches of the trees like christmas cotton that doesn’t want to go away, is a sign that the world is about to end because we have offended God (and Jesus, which is more or less the same thing) with our wicked, wicked ways.
Religious people see it as their obligation to persuade everybody else to be religious. If I did the same, pushing my interests on them, they would be quite disturbed.
I like to watch porn, but wouldn’t do so in front of women. I am interested in poetry, and go to poetry readings, but they really have to be held in places where the only people present are those who are interested in poetry. When they try to hold the readings in a pub where people want to drink and talk, it doesn’t work. As a teenager, I quite liked Frank Zappa (still do) but I knew better than to play his music in front of my mother.
Some religious people do not have that sense of compartmentalization, that shut off switch which allows civilized society to exist without us tearing each other apart.
Eventually, I got up to my flat, opened up Wonkette, and found a link from Sayitwithwookies leading me to an article about Michele Bachmann. In a recent speech to a group of Republican Jews, she said that America was blessed by God because it supports Israel and would be cursed by God if that support were withdrawn.
Michele Bachmann is just as nutty as my cleaning lady.
www.gurukalehuru.com 
Yes, I so agree with you on all this. I was raised super strict fundamentalist Baptist, like soap in the mouth for cursing, choose my own willow switch for whipping, “get the razor strap” for ‘spanking’ Baptist. That treatment, and the nasty, mean people at church who insisted we attend all 3 services a week…so they could ignore and criticize us….pretty much destroyed any self esteem I could have possibly had as a child. When mom died of cancer, I promised her I would go to “Bible College”…hoping to put her mind at ease as she died. Four years at an ultra conservative Bible college was the frosting on the sad little cake that I was. However at college and in Christian work, people were at least ‘nice’ as long as you ‘acted right’. So, having that as a background, and having worked at an outreach to Jewish people hoping to convert them to Jesus, I know what you are describing. I have learned a lot since those depressing days long ago. The meanest, most arrogant, greedy, self-absorbed people I know are ‘religious’…made up of all religions. This thing with the Christians and Muslims and Jews is pathetic. Logically, if, as they believe, there is one God they call by different names, one creator, would He want us to all be killing and hating each other ? Not logical. Giving the Jews a ‘free pass’ on anything they want and being afraid to contradict them fearing ‘God’s wrath’ is ignorant and superstitous and unfair, not to mention diplomatically arrogant and ignorant….I think the Jews have made their profit off of Americans enough already due to first charging interest in the old days, while Christians did not, in compliance with the Bible. As far as personal living habits and styles, recent revelations about many religious people and leaders speak for themselves….they just make more effort to hide their actions some might find objectionable. Why can’t people just use their brains, science, logic and simple human compassion for other humans ? A college prof. teaching Philosophy at Berkeley recently addressed the issue of ‘dualism’. A student defended spiritual existance as providing comfort to those who need to believe in something existing after death. The prof. replied, “but where is the comfort if it is only an illusion?” Perhaps your cleaning lady needed some comfort and purpose in her life….saving you from the fires of hell. I thought Europe was more progressive than the U.S.