Ya Gotta Have Faith-Part One

He’s back. He’s rested. He’s ready to attack more of the seemingly innocent. Innocence is really more a perspective nowadays anyway, isn’t it?

Ya Gotta Have Faith—Part One
(I’ve been told I tend to be verbose, so this one’s in two parts)

To clarify—my dumb ass of the week did not qualify based on her finding the Virgin Mary in her grilled cheese sandwich, she qualified for tattooing her grilled cheese sandwich on her chest. ‘Cause lets face it, people are going to see what they want to see, even if it may not make any sense to the rest of us.

People have been finding ‘signs’ to support their faith for hundreds of years. Whether it is the shroud of Turin or a grilled cheese sandwich, our individual gods have been finding a way to manifest themselves in our worlds to appease our question of their existence. Faith is a strong thing. We all have faith in something; it’s just that some of us are a little misdirected in exactly what we should do with it.

I’ve heard countless numbers of the faithful preaching at work, mostly Christians, about what their gods want them to do while they are in essence nothing more than misguided hypocrites. They incessantly quote the Bible regarding how one is supposed to live their lives while they cheat on their wives, steal from their employer and hate with the relish one usually saves for those times when one stomps a cockroach. I have a different view, big surprise, at just exactly what faith has evolved into these days.

People have an inherent need to explain things. Oh, they say they don’t, they say that they accept things as they are but deep down inside they have a need to qualify the things that have happened to them—call it our intrinsic need for logic. A child dies, a horrible natural disaster occurs and people like to call it “God’s will”. If an athlete makes a touchdown or hits a home run, they thank God, like God doesn’t have anything better to do that day than make sure that Sammy Sosa hits a fucking home run, especially after he allegedly beat his wife the night before.

We have some bizarre need to explain things rather than just accepting things as they are. At funerals people will tell you it was God’s will or God’s way of testing us because it couldn’t possibly be that our 102 year-old grandmother died because she was, well, 102 years-old. People wear their faith like armor and use it to deflect those things that happen each and every day in the worlds they’ve created for themselves. They bury themselves in it when things don’t turn out the way they wanted, they praise it when they do, and when there seems there is no explanation they create justifications in the name of their faith.

You see these folks on the news all the time, “God is testing me”, “It was God’s will”, “God decided to call him/her home”. One question---which God, which home? (I guess that’s two questions) When the terrorists flew their planes into the twin towers, they did so in the name of Allah, does that make it right? Holy wars have been raging in the Middle East since Jesus left his sandals in the middle of the desert. All in the name of their own personal Jesus, perhaps Allah appeared in their hummus (as Allah often does).

We go to work, we play, we raise families and tragedies occur daily. Hitler’s god didn’t like Jews, the Al Qaida’s god doesn’t like Americans, and Al Sharpton’s god doesn’t seem to like anyone that Al Sharpton doesn't like. So which god is which?

With this many gods, how can one be sure they’ve chosen the right one and how can one be sure that one is acting on this divine individual’s will? Well, we’re told we gotta have faith; faith that God will show us the way, faith that God loves us, faith that God had a reason for allowing a deranged psychopath to go crazy at Virginia Tech—to wit: What possible fucking reason could God have had for that??? One thing is for sure; if there is only one true God a lot of us are going to be pissed off when they realize that they should have been Zen Buddhists all of their lives.

**Tune in tomorrow for part deux before you tear me a new one!