I judge my life - Part 1 - Making a start

Has it been worthwhile—your life, I mean?

I will answer with a story.

Long ago, I watched a girl eating in the school cafeteria. Everyday, I watched her. She would raise each forkful high, turning it this way and that, savoring the fragrance, watching the steam rise; then, finally, she would take a bite. At 5’11” and 150 pounds, I regarded eating as a nuisance, and I was charmed by her love for her food; that and her gentle face, brown eyes, shy demeanor, and shapely body. The year was 1971, and we were students at Mississippi College.

A few months later, my roommate, Lynn, introduced me to his newest girl, and it was her, Peggy. I asked Lynn if he minded me asking Peggy out, and he said no. Later, to her, he said, “Turn him down.” Maybe she would have dated me anyway.

Three dates later, school was out. While I was getting graduated at Jackson’s Civic Auditorium, Peggy was next door at the Greyhound Station waiting for a bus back to San Antonio. I also left town that afternoon.

I didn’t much care about Canada, but another student lived in the Canadian Rockies, and I was riding home with him just for the hell of it. I anticipated hitchhiking back to Mississippi almost as soon as we got to Edmonton. On our second day out, we stopped in Trinidad, Colorado, former home of Doc Holliday and present home of my half-sister’s husband’s father. Just enough of a connection for a free night’s lodging. When the lime-green Canadian Gremlin left the next morning, I wasn’t in it. I was on my way to San Antonio to surprise Peggy. We had been apart two whole days. My host worried that the Colorado cops would hassle me, so he drove me just over the border into New Mexico. I stepped out of his car at 7:00 a.m., and figured I would call Peggy if I made it to San Antonio before midnight. Otherwise, I would sleep on the ground.

I called at 11:55. Her father answered. He had been asleep. He didn’t know who the hell I was, so I figured it would be a bad time to tell him that I had come to marry his daughter. My last ride had been with an encyclopedia salesman, and when Peggy and her father pulled into the truck stop, the salesman was dutifully trying to sell me a set of encyclopedias, using his car hood as a table on which to display his wares.

Peggy’s parents moved her 13-year-old sister into another room, and gave me her bed. Pam woke up the next morning, and wondered why she wasn’t in her own bed. When she found me there, she screamed. I nearly screamed too. After Peggy accepted my proposal, I said I would ask her father for her hand. No way, Peggy said. She didn’t want to spring it on him until I was long gone.

We were married on December 19, four months after we met. I wanted to do it sooner, but weddings take time, or so I was told. Father Hale—that would be Episcopal Father Hale—warned us that he had never performed a wedding during Advent that lasted.

Did you ever have any qualms about marrying so quickly?

Only once. Peggy and I went out to eat one Sunday, and she asked me what I thought she should order. I suggested a t-bone. This was my idea of joke because we had just been trying to convince ourselves that we had enough money to get married. Peggy ordered a t-bone. Worse yet, she didn’t eat it all. I naturally concluded that the woman was a spendthrift and that our life together would be an endless cycle of deepening debt and bankruptcy. We had a big fight, maybe our first. Peggy said that she hadn’t even wanted a t-bone, but had gotten one to please me.

Our honeymoon meal was at a “family restaurant.” Our honeymoon destination was the 8’ by 35’ hardly heated trailer that we had rented near Mississippi College where Peggy was still a student. The bedroom was all bed, and the only way we could be in the bathroom at the same time was if one of us was in the tub, but mostly it was the cold that drove us out. After a few months, we moved into an upstairs’ apartment in what had once been a large house. We had already added a stray kitten to our family.

We lived cheaply. Fortunately, we shared a talent for it—Peggy having proven to be anything but a spendthrift. I immediately showed myself unable to hold a job. Between the summer of 1971 and the summer of 1973, I worked first as a funeral director/ambulance driver at Adkin’s Funeral Home, then as a schoolteacher for Hinds County Public Schools, then as a sporting good’s salesman at Miller’s Discount, then as a funeral director at Wright and Ferguson Funeral Home, and finally as a respiratory therapy technician at University Medical Center. My biggest employment challenge was that I feared and hated anyone who gave me orders or had power over me. I considered myself too good for every job I ever had.

Meanwhile, Peggy was finishing up her degree in secondary education while working at Gibb’s Pizza Parlor. She had no trouble holding a job. The other girls at the pizza parlor were black, and they called Peggy princess. It was meant as a compliment.

How did your parents feel about Peggy?

My parents loved Peggy. My mother loved Peggy more than she loved me, and my father loved Peggy equally as well. Anyone who is with Peggy for five minutes would have to be a moron to not notice that here is a woman who is honest, gentle, intelligent, loyal, and modest. If you were in a crowd of strangers and found it necessary to ask one of them to hold onto your life’s savings while you went someplace, you would just naturally choose Peggy. Unlike me, she completely lacks treachery. I’ve never known a better person.

Ms Magazine appeared in January1972, two months after we were married. I subscribed to it in Peggy’s name because I got it into my head that she needed to be liberated. Women libbers seemed sexy to me, maybe because their goal was to make women think; and intelligent, thinking women drove me crazy, libidinally speaking. I made a point of keeping Ms in the bathroom because that’s where I did much of my reading, and where I assumed that Peggy would learn to do much of her reading. Funny that I failed to take it in that Peggy NEVER, EVER read in the bathroom. I attributed this failure to an insufficient variety of reading materials. After 37 years of supplying her with books and magazines, Peggy still doesn’t read in the bathroom. I am beginning to worry that there’s something wrong with her, and that our marriage was a mistake.

In any event, Peggy had zero interest in women’s lib in general or Ms Magazine in particular. What Peggy did have an interest in was good milk, and I had been making her drink powdered milk because it was a lot cheaper. I told her she would get used to powdered milk. She persevered for months. Then one day she came home with a jug of real milk and powdered milk hasn’t passed her lips since. This senseless rebellion wasn’t what I had in mind when I set out to liberate her.

In 1973, I joined the Air Force, and was sent off for training in San Antonio. Peggy’s parents were still in San Antonio where Peggy’s father, Earl, was a Lt. Col at Randolph. The plan was for Peggy to live with her parents while I was in boot camp.

Why did you join the Air Force?

Because I lacked direction. I had a B.S. in education (K-8) but no desire to teach.

Why did you get a degree in something you weren’t interested in?

After my third year in college, I decided I needed a major that I could complete during my fourth year (I don’t remember why), and education was the only thing that fit the bill. I did, as I mentioned, try teaching during the fall before Peggy and I were married, but I felt like a misfit at the elementary school that hired me because every student and every teacher but myself was black. More importantly, I had contracted hepatitis (probably from the girl to whom I gave my virginity two months before I met Peggy), and was feverish, lethargic, and dropped from 150 pounds to 125. I finally walked off the job. The superintendent threatened to sue me, but I had purposely neglected to sign my contract. Promising that I would be in certain spot at a certain time on a certain day months in advance seemed like a jail sentence to me.

Earl said he liked the Air Force, and I liked—and wanted to please—Earl. Since he was a weatherman, I decided that I should be a weatherman too. I mean, what’s not to like about fluffy white clouds and rainbows? Peggy and I drove to San Antonio a week before I was supposed to report to Lackland for basic, so we took a few days for a proper honeymoon in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. We still have a painting on velvet of the desert by moonlight. Years after we bought it, Peggy said it was tacky, and that we should get rid of it. Not likely. It reminds me of our honeymoon, and that makes it holy.

I lasted 17 days at Lackland. The sergeants yelled at me and hurt my feelings, and they did all kinds of other obnoxious things like waking us up before dawn each day by beating garbage can lids together. At 23, I was the oldest recruit among the 70 in my “flight” and the only one with a college education. I felt like a misfit and a failure just by being there instead of at Officer’s Candidate School where everyone else with my qualifications had apparently gone. I concluded that the Air Force was like all the other jobs I ever had only worse. I also spent a lot of time worrying that I couldn’t run the mile fast enough to avoid having to go through boot camp a second time. I was a good runner, so there was no reason for my fear, yet it was a big fear. I have always been a person who blossoms before praise and wilts under criticism, and the whole premise of boot camp is that you remold ordinary people into warriors by tearing down who they used to be.

The Vietnam War was winding down, and the Air Force apparently decided that it had too many people, so one day they took about half of my unit to a building where second lieutenants called us in one at a time and asked us a lot of questions. I didn’t realize until later that they were looking for an excuse to get rid of us, but it wouldn’t have mattered. One of the questions was whether I had ever smoked marijuana. I said I had. The next question was how many times I had smoked it. I think I said three, which was about right. I was to smoke it a lot more in coming years.

The next day, a few of us were called away from our unit, and put together with a lot of other guys. Then we were all lined up and contemptuously ordered to leave our last names on our uniforms (they had been sewn on) but to tear off the U.S. Air Force insignia. It was like a court martial scene from an old cavalry movie except that we weren’t sent through the gates of the fort to wander the desert. Also, we weren’t all being dishonorably discharged. My discharge was what was called a “general discharge.” It’s considered honorable, but not too honorable—just a little honorable, I guess you could say. The expulsion process took a week during which we were housed in some old barracks at the edge of the base. My roommate said he was being discharged for attacking his drill instructor. He looked crazier than shit to me, and I tried to stay clear of him.

We rejects had to stay on the base, but we could move around a good bit—Lackland is the biggest military base in the world, probably bigger than a lot of countries—and nothing was expected of us. We could also have visitors. Peggy and her parents came to see me and, by so doing, to witness my disgrace. That was hard for me, and no doubt hard for Earl and Doris, although they never said anything. My relationship with them was pretty much bereft of either praise or criticism. Peggy didn’t say much either. It was a time to look ahead rather than behind.

I wish I could do those years over. I took trivial things too seriously, and that kept me from taking the rest of my life seriously enough. Like a dog, I only saw what was in front of my face. But I’ll tell you something that I often ponder. Let’s say that I had been able to use my abilities to the fullest. That would have set me on a whole other path, and who knows where that path would have led? Because I can’t see where other choices would have taken me, I can’t know that they would have been for the best. I do know that a person’s smallest act can dramatically alter the rest of his life.

After all these years, I am still alive, and I still have Peggy to hold and to love. My life has been worthwhile.

Growing up with booze, guns, and fast cars

All I can say in defense of what I’m about to share is to give you my word that it is the truth as I remember it. You might reply, “Friend, why should your word mean jack to me?”

If you were to say that, I would have to concede, friend, that you had a good point—a brusquely made good point, but a good point nonetheless. After all, I could really be a sixteen-year-old girl from Denmark for all you know. I would just request that you read what I’ve written, and when you are done, ask yourself what the odds are that anyone, much less a Scandinavian teenager, could have made it up. Now, it is my very great pleasure to recount history as I lived it.

Mississippi repealed Prohibition in 1966, making it the last state to do so. This created a grievous obstacle for underage drinkers because bootleggers hadn’t cared who they sold to. I should pause here and clarify what I mean by bootlegger. I’m not referring to men who made whiskey, because I never knew any of those. I’m referring to men who drove the forty miles from my town in Baptist controlled Mississippi to Catholic controlled Louisiana, bought liquor legally, and then returned it to Mississippi and sold it illegally.

I knew of two white bootleggers—I was largely ignorant of the black ones—in my town of 12,000, but you could have picked them out easily even if you were a newcomer. Bootleggers were invariably on the edge of town, and had high wooden fences across the front of their property. A bootlegger’s fence would be interrupted by a one-way driveway that entered on one side, circled around to the back of the building, and exited on the other side. The customer would park abreast of the back door, and someone would come out and take his order. I even knew a kid who bought booze on his bicycle. Whiskey, vodka, rum, gin, tequila, you name it as long as it was hard liquor and in a bottle (I preferred gin). As you might expect, service was more prompt than friendly since no bootlegger wanted a line of cars backed out into the street.

I never heard of a white bootlegger being raided by the law, although I suppose the prospect of a raid by the Feds must have ever hung over them (pun welcomed though unintended). The local sheriff raided the black ones from time to time, presumably because they didn’t pay him enough not to. I wouldn’t be surprised but what in this, as in most things, racism prevailed, and the sheriff demanded more money from the blacks. The sheriffs in Brookhaven Mississippi during the 1960s were so lax that I even bought my illegal fireworks—cherry bombs and M-80s—from one of them (he stored them in his garage). I would then drive the strip, and sell them from my car to other teenagers.

You must remember that all this happened in a Baptist controlled area and that Baptists are—in theory—teetotalers. I should think that one or two law-and-order sermons from the pulpit at First Baptist would have gone far toward making it impossible for everyone to ignore the elephant of iniquity that stood astride the refreshment table of righteousness at Baptist coffee klatches, but none was ever offered. The silence on the part of the Baptists—all of the Baptists—was, as the saying goes, deafening. But then my own church, the Church of Christ, was equally silent. We were taught that the church should stay clear of such affairs, which just happened to be the safest position because it was the position favored by a great many potentially dangerous people. Lucky us.

Drunkenness was as open as booze with a good part of the teenage population driving wasted on weekend nights. Such things simply were not taken seriously back then. I was so drunk on one occasion that I would have driven off down the railroad tracks in my two-tone ‘56 Fairlane (312 cu inch, 98 mph in the quarter-mile) one night if some friends hadn’t alerted me to my error and gotten me back onto the road. Other times, I woke up at home and found my car full of puke and bottles, but with no memory of who I had been with or what we had done. If you had asked me if drunk driving was a bad idea, I might have said that it was, but I don’t remember ever worrying about getting hurt. I didn’t worry about a ticket either because I had been stopped several times and had only gotten one ticket ($17 for reckless driving). Most cops went out of their way to be protective of errant teenagers, white teenagers anyway. I can’t speak for the black ones.

My parents were no threat either. If I had actually wrecked my car, my father would have been terribly distressed, but only because of the financial loss—assuming that I hadn’t been hurt too bad. My parents considered themselves good parents because they provided for my sister and me financially, and they never made us do a lick of work. I guess the truth of the matter was that, beyond material comforts, they simply didn’t think they had anything worth giving. Being poor, they worked long hours just to buy us things.

You might think, given my laissez-faire attitude toward highway safety, that serious accidents were somehow rare, but quite the reverse was true with multiple fatalities being a common occurrence. Brookhaven was at the intersection of two major highways. U.S. 51 ran from below New Orleans all the way to Canada, and U.S. 84 from Savannah to San Diego. They were narrow, curvy, hilly, two-lane, and had little right-of-way. U.S. 84 was the winner for wrecks at the same spot because, just before it entered town, there was a sharp curve directly at the top of a steep hill. It was one of those hills that made you to feel like you were on a roller coaster when you got to the top. If you crested that hill from the west without knowing about the curve, you had to be really alert, and preferably below legal speed, to avoid flying across the other lane and running off the road—and that’s if you were lucky and nothing was coming. Much of the time, something was coming. If a highway engineer had deliberately set out to kill people, he could have scarcely done better.

The fifteen-year-old driving age combined with the easy liquor, bad highways, a 65-mph speed limit, and heavy, high-powered cars with no safety features didn’t help matters. I was in two wrecks in one night with my friend, Penny, driving. First, we ran off a dead-end road into a mud bank; next we slid backwards into a dentist’s office; and then he went on alone and flipped his car, crushing himself beneath it.

Dead teenagers were honored with big photos and gushy sentiments at the front of the school yearbook, and then everything went on as before with no lessons learned. People just seemed to accept that this was how life was. Not that they tried to hide death. If anything, they celebrated it by towing the grisliest wrecks to the center of town and leaving them there for days so everyone would have a chance to drive by. For many of us, driving by wasn’t enough. We would crowd around the cars with flashlights—this being primarily a nighttime entertainment—sniffing the blood and craning to see the guts.

I could scarcely get enough of guts, so I became an ambulance attendant at 14, and went to work at one of two local funeral homes at 18. I would often drive an ambulance and a hearse on the same day because funeral homes commonly ran ambulances too. Few of us even had a rudimentary knowledge of first aid. Because autopsies were done at the funeral home, I got to see one my first day. I had seen butchered animals, and that was what an autopsy looked like. To see that a fat man—and he had been fat—looked no better than a slaughtered hog when his parts were all laid out, lowered my estimation of what is called “human dignity.” At one level, we are just meat, and that was pretty much the level I was focused upon.

Seeing death never gave me the least notion that it might be my car that was towed into town and my picture in the front of the yearbook. The first word I ever spoke was car, and I thought I was simply too good a driver to die. I came close occasionally, although I never realized it at the time. One icy morning, I picked an acquaintance up on my way to school when I saw him waiting for his bus. We were going fifty (double the limit) down narrow North Jackson St. when another school bus turned onto the street a block away. My Ford spun around backwards on the slippery asphalt, and would have slid into the bus had my rear wheel not fallen into a street drain, knocking the cast iron cover into the air. My passenger was pale and speechless; Ray Laird, the bus driver, was pale and speechless; but since my car was undamaged except for the loss of a hubcap, I took off as if nothing much had happened, which was how it seemed to me. The acquaintance wouldn’t ride with me again, but that was his loss as I saw it. I never took him to have much in the way of guts anyway. As I look back on all that, I can but wish I had lived better, and I can but be glad that I lived at all.

But I also feel nostalgic about that era because it was a little like pioneer times. Despite Mississippi’s reputation for oppression, any white person who didn’t moon the mayor, marry a “nigger,” or call Jesus a faggot, was free to do pretty much as he pleased. Taxes were low, cops were mellow, building codes were ignored, fenced yards were the exception, people carried guns if they wanted yet killings were almost unheard of (at least among whites), and even dogs came and went as they thought proper (which meant that there were a lot of dead dogs lying about).

Here’s how wide open things were. When I was ten, my family moved to 133 East Chippewa, which was two blocks from the courthouse/jail/sheriff’s office and six blocks from the police station. I had hunted, by myself, with both a .22 rifle and a .410 shotgun since age eight, and I saw no reason to give it up, especially now that I was living in what appeared to be a squirrels’ paradise. I would blast squirrels out of the tall water oaks that grew in my front yard, and my girlfriend’s grandma would cook them for me, yet no one ever complained, and no cops ever came racing around the corner.

I also carried a .22 H&R revolver to school in my car everyday and left it under the seat with the doors unlocked. Yet, even with guns readily available, I daresay that no one ever thought of shooting another student. Such things simply were not done—they were literally unthinkable. You had to be one hardcore badass to run afoul of the powers that ruled, at least if you were white. Compared to the freedoms that I grew up taking for granted, the liberal city where I now live is like East Germany before the wall came down; I feel constantly oppressed. It’s as if the self-righteous bastards are forever watching me, forever looking for an excuse to interfere with my life.

I’ll offer another example of the freedom with which I was raised. I was more than thirty years old before I ever saw the first person pick up dog shit. Maybe some did—maybe a lot did—but I never saw them, and no one in my family ever did, although we always had one or more dogs. When I did see a person pick up dog shit for the first time, it was my dog’s shit. I was visiting a commune near Summertown, Tennessee, called “The Farm.” The Farm had 1,400 residents in the early ‘80s, and all the many visitors stayed together. So, there we were, ten or more of us, sitting in the shade shooting the breeze, when my little dog Wendy relieved herself right in the middle of our happy little group, as dogs are wont to do. After five minutes, a woman scooped up Wendy’s shit, and put it in the trash while I sat wondering whatever had possessed her to do such a thing.

I know that must sound strange, but a tolerance for dog shit was like a tolerance for all of the other bizarre things that I grew up with; if it’s all you’ve ever known, it seems normal. When I’m tempted to judge people who have different customs, I try to remember this. I often miss the South, or at least the freedom I once had there. God bless Dixie.

Old men and their whopping Bibles

“Your grandpa was one man who loved his Bible,” people often told me. It was high praise in the rural and religious Mississippi of the ‘50s and ‘60s. For an old man, the highest. Anything more would have been redundant because to love the Bible was to love the source of all virtue.

Grandpa was a Church of Christ preacher, and so was his father. My father set out to be a preacher too but mental illness caused him to lose his way. As he drew nearer to death, he clung to God ferociously, and God spoke to him in bed each night. Mostly, God gave my father messages (blistering criticisms really) that he was to deliver to whatever church he was attending (you can imagine how popular this made him). God also told him that he was going to win the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes and would appear with Ed Mahon on “The Tonight Show” to claim his prize. Unfortunately, God kept changing the date until, wouldn’t you know it, Dad died. When I asked him how he felt about God putting him off all the time, Dad said that God was testing his faith.

So do God’s children ever excuse his failures. No matter how screwed-up a situation gets, depend upon it, the one being who has all the power in the universe to make things right yet fails to do so will get a pass. Then if a mere human being comes along centuries later and fixes things—as with polio—God will get the credit. God will even get the credit if 499 people burn to death in a plane crash and one escapes with third degree burns. I wish people would cut me that much slack.

But back to Grandpa. The image of a stooped old man—the wisdom of eight decades lighting his face—sitting in his rocker with a leather bound King James Bible across his lap is, for me, like a Norman Rockwell version of the Buddha. Kind of.

I’ve been reading the Bible during my convalescence. I like “The Living Bible” version; Grandpa wouldn’t have read anything but the King James. Why? Probably because it is way old (1611) and uses an outmoded form of English. The yeas and nays, the thees and thous, the concupiscences and the fornications sound more like a special God language than, for example, Valley Girl talk.

My father left school in the eighth grade, and my Grandpa and Great Grandpa sooner than that. I’ve had twenty years of formal education, and I still find King James English daunting. I picture these old and uneducated men—my forbearers—sitting in their rockers, reading their big old Bibles, and I wonder what it all meant to them. They knew their preaching points (weekly communion, baptism by immersion, the infallibility of the Scriptures, no organs or pianos in church, certainly no loquacious women in church, and eternal hellfire for everyone who didn’t join our happy little sect); and they no doubt understood many things about the stories of Ruth, Moses, Jonah, King David, and so on, but what else did they see, and what did they think of it? I randomly opened my Bible last night (to Deuteronomy as it turned out) and found the following without turning the page.

“If a man rapes a girl…he must pay a fine to the girls’ father and marry her; he may never divorce her.

“If a man’s testicles are crushed, or his penis cut off, he shall not enter the sanctuary [place of worship].

“A bastard may not enter the sanctuary, nor any of his descendants for ten generations.

“Any man [soldier] who becomes ceremonially defiled because of an seminal emission during the night must leave the camp…

“If two men are fighting and the wife of one intervenes to help her husband by grabbing the testicles of the other man, her hand shall be cut off without pity.”


The next time someone argues that the Constitution of the United States was based upon Judeo-Christian values, ask him if he means these. He might even be able to find the part of the Constitution that says women who give birth to girls are “unclean” for twice as long as women who give birth to boys. If he does, pass the information along, will you?

John is an old man in one of my Sunday school classes. He could pass for a retired GQ model with his moustache and three-piece suits. John is ignorant of scholarly analysis of the Bible, but he knows the Bible itself so well that he can recite much of the New Testament, and is eager for any excuse to do so. He led class a few weeks ago. His intent was to lecture from his vast store of wisdom and knowledge without interruption, but I interrupted him anyway. We were on one of those passages that most Sunday school teachers avoid at all costs because it makes God look way, way bad. Specifically, it contains God’s orders to the Jews about how they were to treat the previous inhabitants of the Holy Land: “Do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them...as the Lord your God has commanded you...” (including domestic animals).

“John,” I asked, “how do you reconcile this passage with your belief in a God who is just and benevolent?” John didn’t hesitate, “You have to assume that those people deserved to die.”

I didn’t ask him why, then, God allowed the Jewish soldiers to “keep the little girls” for themselves following other raids. How could it be that it was only the girl children (all of them!) who deserved to be raped and enslaved? How about the married women or the old men in three-piece togas—didn’t any of them deserve to be raped? For me to have pushed John that hard would have been completely impolitic yet, as I see it, completely fair. But alas, even in my usually liberal class, we are expected to cut people more slack when they say moronic things in the name of God than when they take responsibility for their words. The watchword is respect. Respect for what, exactly, I don’t know, and, to be honest about it, I shudder to think. Even as I sit writing, people are being murdered because religious people think God wants them murdered, so we’re not just talking ancient history here. Picture him, John, the apparent symbol of decency, courtesy, kindness, wisdom, rectitude, gentleness, and propriety; John, saying that nursing babies and family pets deserved to be impaled on Israeli swords.

So what? What harm is there in people believing that God is a bloodthirsty monster? Well, they do seem to follow his lead. The Dutch in Africa, the U.S. in North America, the Spanish in South America, the Russians in Alaska, and the British on every continent of the world save one, were all Christians who used the God-ordained atrocities of the Bible to justify their own atrocities. They even claimed to be doing the peoples they raided a good deed because telling them about Jesus completely out-weighed such inconveniences as slavery and death—I’m serious. And how about today? Would the United States be conducting what George Bush called a “crusade” in the Middle East if George Bush hadn’t regarded himself as an appointee of God? I will just offer that men are seldom THAT stupid without guidance from above.

The most notable thing about evil is that, in it’s worse form, it looks very different from what I expected as a young man. The Charles Mansons with their swastika tattoos, insane eyes, and wild hair can’t do nearly as much harm as the men with the pressed suits and the fresh haircuts, because the Charles Mansons can’t win our trust. People like John can. We give them a pass based upon how well they dress and how gentlemanly they behave—unless, of course, they’re trying to excuse rape, and even then we might smile benignly if the rape occurred in the name of God.

My grandfathers would have answered me as John did. Either that or they would have said, “There are some things in the Bible that we are not yet allowed to understand, but we must have faith that the day will come when God will reveal them to us.” Either way, the bottom-line is that murder and rape are okay if God says it’s okay because God created morality, and God is free to ignore morality. I say to my grandfathers, “Shame on you. Shame on you a thousand fold for bowing before such a fiend. I moon your Jehovah. Verily, I would do worse than that if he were beneath my bottom rather than above my head.”

If you were to be marooned upon that proverbial desert island, what one book would you take? I would take the Bible. It’s long; it contains a lot of interesting stories; a good bit of poetry; some history; some wisdom; and it spans many cultures and centuries. I can’t say that I love the Bible, but I sure do like it a lot—I just wish that people didn’t take it so seriously.

The Bible is both a book and a symbol. When I hold one in my hand, I think of how much it has meant to so many over the past 2,800 years or so since it was started, and it’s as if the book itself hums with power. The only other symbol I own that is even nearly so powerful is a Nazi flag. How many millions of years would I have to live before I got through every story of every person whose lives were destroyed because of other people’s allegiance to these two things?

“There is no comparison, you object, “The Nazi’s did nothing but evil, whereas Christianity has done some bad things but a lot more good things.” This is not a point that I will concede as self-evident. So, tell me, please, exactly how much good has Christianity done—in proportion to the evil? Twice as much? Half as much? A thousand times as much? Why it has never taken a breath from evil during its 2,000-year existence, compared to which the Third Reich only lasted twelve years. And even if Christianity has done more good than evil, the ground is no less full of corpses that were put there in the name of Christ, and no amount of doing good can offset that. Only the victims of Christianity can forgive Christianity, and they are mostly dead.

“Ah, you say, but most of the evil you’ve mentioned was in the Old Testament. God later cleaned up his act.” Did he really?

“I came not to bring peace but a sword…

…whoever has no sword is to sell his coat and buy one…

If anyone…does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children…he cannot be My disciple.”

Jesus won disciples by threatening people with eternal torment. He cursed a fig tree for having no fruit out of season. He continually made sweeping generalizations about whole groups of people calling them fools, snakes, vipers, children of hell, whitewashed tombs. He called non-Jews dogs. He considered belief without evidence a virtue. He said he spoke in parables so that only the chosen could understand and be saved, but then he threw duck fits when the chosen didn’t understand him either.

You’ve got the sweet Jesus that liberal churches prefer, and you’ve got the hell-fire Jesus of the fundamentalists, and the latter is more true to the text. Sure, you can pull all kinds of lovely sayings out of your red-letter New Testament, but you can find just as many hateful ones. The man was a walking contradiction, which means that he was like a lot of us.

If I had a group of followers (well, I do actually, but they’re not that kind of followers), and they decided to take everything I ever said and build an infallible religion out of it, they would get something as screwy as Christianity because they would be forever contorting my statements into incomprehensibility in order to prove that I was wise, peaceful, loving, and consistent. They might say that I was speaking metaphorically when I said something cruel; or that I was exaggerating to make a point; or that I spoke differently then than I would today because my audience was different; or that some of what I supposedly said was added to the Bible later by people with private agendas. The question is, why would they want to? I would argue that people are so psychologically desperate to believe in an infallible protector that they are willing to invent one, no matter how pitifully transparent the attempt.

If this ancient and global structure that we call Christianity were not already in place with its cathedrals, universities, hospitals, monasteries, state churches, and solemn processions; if the Bible was discovered for the first time today in some old crock jar in Palestine, how many people would read it and become Christians? When millions of people over two thousands of years take something seriously, the assumption is that it must be worth taking seriously. I can but say that I haven’t found a basis for this assumption, and I can but offer that belief should rest upon something more substantial than how many other people buy into something.