What I Believe...and Don't Believe

 

When I was a little kid in school and we had to pray every day, I wondered why? I did it in church and in Sunday School. Why in school?

As I got older, I thought about people of different faiths. Why weren't they allowed to pray too? It didn’t seem fair to me.

I asked a lot of questions about religion when I was younger and nobody gave me any good answers. They got mad at me or told me I shouldn't ask questions.

Why not?

I saw and heard a lot of things that I knew wasn't right.

Supposed religious men were saying and doing things to me that I knew were wrong. My very religious Mama told me I must have misunderstood or that I was lying. So, I stopped talking to her about it. Later on, she saw that I was telling the truth and she apologized. Sort of.

As I read more and tried to understand, some folks told me I didn't need to go to college because they would teach me things.

What things?

Again, no answers.

I heard more homophobic comments, more prejudiced discussions, all kids of hateful and mean things that shouldn't have been going on in church. I won't even talk about the sexual wrongs.

But I began to think as I got older that I didn't need to be involved in all that stuff. I didn't feel comfortable. I didn't feel at home.

I went with my mom to some of her Baptist conferences. The preachers were straight up showing their asses. They weren't acting like leaders. I wasn't seeing very many people who were real leaders at all. So, I started distancing myself from it all.

But then something really awful took place at the church I belonged to and I was appalled. And my Mom, the one who had always told me to not judge people and to be open minded and love everyone made some horrible homophobic comments.

I felt stunned, shocked and hurt. How could this be? She taught me to not be a bigot and here she was, sounding like a bigot.

I stopped going to church that very day. I began to mistrust so-called Christians. The people who displayed the most hatefulness, who told the biggest lies and were the biggest hypocrites sat their butts right there in church every Sunday, trying to tell others how to live.

I sat down and evaluated my own feelings and thoughts and came to the conclusion that I didn't want to be a part of that number.

I know that God and Jesus an'nem know we have a complicated relationship and I know They are ok with it. I know They don't require this blind, stupefying devotion that many seem to display. I don't think They mind my questions. Right about now, looking at these folks down here acting a straight up fool and blaming God; They probably have questions too.

Religion is one thing. Politics is another. Mixing the two is wrong and causes trouble. And it's not fair. These people here think that being a Christian makes them superior. They feel like they have a right to force their beliefs down everybody's throat.

But the problem is that since the beginning of time, everyone thought their religion was better than the other one. How many wars have been fought; how many people have died because of misguided religious beliefs?

Christians thought slavery was all right and took some stuff from the Bible to prove they were right. They said Black people weren’t even human to justify their treatment of us.

Someone said years ago that the most segregated hour is in church. For the most part, it’s still true. Some of the most horrible bigots alive thought themselves stellar Christians. Even the KKK claimed to be a religious organization.

Right now, there are Christians wanting to kill people because they are gay. They justify rape and child abuse and many more still worship and follow known pedophiles.

What are we supposed to think or believe?

I’ve studied the Bible both as a religious document and as a mere book. I’ve listened and learned. I’ve been in class where Christians got angry because we learned philosophy from people who weren’t Christian and wanted the professor not to teach it.

Why not?

If your faith is strong, you can stand criticism, right? If you know what you believe is right, what others think shouldn’t matter, should it? Does it shake your faith?

Why is what you believe more important than what others believe?

I have friends and relatives who are Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, etc. I have friends and relatives who are atheists or agnostics. I have friends who have questions like I do and like me, never got answers.

But I also have friends who are Christians and others who claim to be Christians. I don’t have a problem with them as long as they know the boundaries.

I don’t force my beliefs on you, so be kind and do the same.

The one thing that sticks in my craw is how can you claim to be a Christian and then support and embrace Donald Trump who is as far from a righteous man as one can be? How can you follow him and worship him and then hate Barack Obama, who is everything Trump is not?

Ok, I know the answer to that so don’t protest.

You know what you are.  

Separation of church and state is a great thing. It is how this country was intended to run and how it should run.

If you get elected and you represent a constituency that does not agree with your beliefs, you should put that aside and vote and support them. That is why you were elected. Your job is to represent their beliefs, not yours. Don’t bring your church to your job.

Same with school.

Parents, it’s YOUR job to teach your children about religion. You are supposed to teach them morals and ethics and all that. Teachers are supposed to teach them reading, writing, math, etc. Oh yes, and history and science. Ugly as it might be, yes, they are supposed to teach them history. And science. You can tell them your beliefs and then let your children make up their minds about what they think and believe.

You pray with them before they go to school. Pray with them before they go to bed.

Prayer does not belong in school unless you take the whole first hour so that the Christians get their prayer and then the Jewish kids and then the Hindu kids and then the Muslim kids (and they pray 5 times a day!) and then the Buddhist kids and then the Native American kids…

See?

If you get to pray, everyone gets to. It’s only fair. Don’t want to do that?

Then no prayer at school.

Now you might think you want to argue or debate me on this.

Save it.

You will not change my mind anymore than I will change yours. Keep it to yourself. If you don’t like what I say, that’s fine.

Live with it.

I have a right to my beliefs just as you to yours. Let’s just agree to disagree.

But if your beliefs butt into my life and try to decide my own choices and decisions…well, we have a problem.

And I will fight you.

 

 

The Real Dirty Deal

I have been thinking about this a while. I don’t know that it’s true, but I also don’t know that it isn’t.

The ones who do aren’t talking.

Meanwhile, we are all struggling, trying to understand what has happened to us.

There was a time when political differences didn’t matter that much. We just took it for granted and agreed to disagree.

There was a law that said if one position was presented on television/ radio, etc., the opposing side had to be presented too. But then that law was gone.

And then came Fox News. Rush Limbaugh had been a terrible dee jay on a radio station in Missouri and suddenly, he was spouting all this ridiculous hateful stuff on the radio. Folks saw that he was getting rich and famous and since that was the goal of almost everybody, lots of them jumped on the bandwagon and started saying the same kind of stuff.

Meanwhile, the people who had thought history and political science were boring when they were in school, suddenly had opinions. Lots of them had not graduated from high school, probably had never even seen a college textbook, but wanted to talk to you like they were smart. You just looked at them in disbelief because you couldn’t believe they were saying that stuff to you.

They were against everything you thought we stood for. And while a lot of the had always been racists, they had never been bold enough to come right out and say it but now they were.

I remember one night driving back to New Orleans from Florida we put the radio on WWL from New Orleans. We listened in shock because it was some conservative preacher saying the craziest stuff like liberals were aliens from another planet and that if you agreed with them, you were going against Jesus and other madness I don’t even remember. We laughed about it then, but a few days later, at the casino where I worked, I heard some older people repeating that stuff to each other. I got chills.

 It didn’t matter how far out that stuff was – folks believed it and were repeating it.

Things went downhill from there.

All this time, these republicans had an agenda. They wanted to get rid of Roe v. Wade. The so called evangelicals aligned with them and so did the racists and the Klan. They wanted to go back to the “good old days” when women and Black people “knew their place.” They wanted to force their restrictive brand of Christianity on everyone.

So, all these folks who thought they were getting a rough deal in life – the ones who thought they should have been rich and important lapped it up like milk.

It wasn’t their fault they didn’t have that job or live in that house or got that woman/man they wanted.

It was “their” fault. They. You know. Them.

They took everything from them and these people understood and they loved it.

Didn’t matter that those folks were rich and were getting richer preying on their lack in education and gullibility. They were saying what they wanted to hear.

And then Barack Obama had the nerve to win the Presidency.

And these folks lost their minds. The racists took off their robes and capes and began to openly express all the mess their parents and grandparents had been allowed to say and do.

And the so-called pro-life folks? Well, they didn’t think they were racists, but if aligning with these people meant they could get what they wanted, they would hold their noses and stand with them. There were “Christians” there too, right?

So, things got really bad for us. Liberals. “Snowflakes,” they called us. They decided it was time to go to war with us.

They were quietly planning to do away with all our liberties and drag us back to the Dark Ages, but no one paid any attention. We just lived our lives and tried to go on and ignore them.

Couldn’t have been that many of them, right? And they were just the lunatic fringe. Most folks didn’t go along with that – did they?

Then this fool Donald Trump got insulted with something Barack Obama said about him. Didn’t matter that he accused the President of not being American and came up with this whole ridiculous “birther” thing. The unwashed masses grabbed it like gold and ran with it. Trump decided he would run for President.

Most folks laughed and said he had no chance. They didn’t think folks were stupid enough to vote for him. He said and did every possible thing wrong and still, he was considered a viable candidate.

We thought that he would lose in a landslide and boy, were we surprised when enough folks voted for him that he won the electoral college and was elected.

Hillary Clinton was a far better candidate with experience and great ideas and would have been a great president.

But the misogynists and the folks who hated her husband and the whole group of uninformed, uneducated and misled people rose up and voted for Trump.

What then?

Well, this is what I think happened.

When trump was running, he had a meeting with the republicans, they talked about what they wanted. They had a long-term plan to do away with Roe v. Wade and if he agreed to help them take it down, they would swallow their dislike and mistrust for him and support him.

So, they agreed.

He would help them get the conservative trash they needed on the Supreme Court. And those people knew what was expected of them and they would lie during hearings, but they had agreed to the republican agenda as well.

This has been in the works for years.

They would pass bills that would help their corporate buddies get past regulations and lower their taxes. They would help the people running in the local elections win so that they could bolster their evil plans. They would keep quiet and let Trump run roughshod on the nation. They wanted what they wanted and he would give it to them.

You tell me in what other instance a man who accused of rape can sit before a Congressional committee can lie and cry and repeat over and over how much he likes beer and still get on the Supreme Court, let alone get a job.

Let a Black man have tried that one.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg hadn’t even gotten cold before they dragged up a woman who is part of a cult who had almost no judicial experience and BAM, she is on the Court too.

So maybe the republicans hadn't counted on trump being as bad as he was.

Maybe.

But they knew he was incompetent and selfish and ignorant and perhaps criminal. They knew he didn't care about anybody but himself.

But because of their hellish agreement, thousands of people died from Covid.

Children were taken from their families and "lost" somewhere but we know they were probably sold into slavery or worse since then.

Millions wasted on a piece of crap wall that little kids were climbing before they were 6 years old.

I don't need to run down all the stuff he did or caused. You know it just like I do.

They knew he was wrong and should have been impeached and convicted but they kept quiet and still supported him. Twice.

January 6 happened and they still stand by him.

Why?

He’s got something on the republicans and they can’t back out now. They know he is dirty enough to do what he said he would and they are too weak to admit their duplicity and they have gone along with his every move.

What do you bet he told them you'd better stay with me or I will tell the American people about our deal and you all will go down. I'll destroy this whole damn thing if you don't support me no matter what.

It's too late to think any of them aren't complicit. We know the ones who have spoken up.

But the rest of them?

He went way too far and they know it, but they still don't have enough hair on their butts to be honest. It's all past them now.

Almost everyone in America has some form of PTSD. We’ve been through enough horrors in the past 5 years – things we never thought would happen.

We thought we were better than that.

We’re learning now that these people who are among us have dragged us down to their level. What did we do to let this happen?

How did it happen?

We look around and we are sick inside.

People that we loved and trusted have shown us a side of them that we didn’t believe existed. They look at us as if we were their enemies and they do unbelievable things and don’t seem to care.

They accuse us of being elitist and call us names and they get together in their “rallies,” and call for us to be killed. They threaten to kill us if we disagree with them. They hate us and treat us all like garbage and then whine when we speak up. They act amazed when we withdraw and refuse to engage with them.

Families have been ripped apart and friends don’t trust each other and some don’t even speak anymore.

We look at them and wonder what is wrong with them. How could they believe that stuff that any reasonable person would know is not true? How can they show so much disregard for other people?

What happened?

Don’t touch their guns.

They want their guns with no restrictions and they don’t care how many people die.

Black people tend to vote for Democrats so they want to make sure they can limit how many of us can vote. They openly admit it’s the only way they can win so we have to be ready to stop them.

Immigrants come here to have a better life just like their immigrant families did years ago. Why punish them?

Keep their uneducated hands away from books and they have absolutely no right to decide what schools can teach. They don’t even know what CRT is but they know they don’t want their kids to know that them or their parents helped lynch an innocent Black person.

Women are going to die because of them striking down Roe v. Wade. And they aren’t doing it for the children. That’s the lie they tell us.

They hate this multicultural world we live in and they fear they will lose their power position and they are willing to let millions die to keep their grip on the world.

We need to get together and stand up and let them know that it’s time to take our country and our lives back.

We need to support each other.

Black folks and Asians and Mexicans and Gay/Lesbian/Trans/Bi/Queer…white; all of us. We need to be there for each other. We need to help and love each other.

There are more of us.

These restrictive laws are harming us all. People will die because of them.

We need to ensure that everyone who can vote does vote. And we need to educate them on who supports us.

Confront these candidates and demand that they tell you where they stand and if they won’t be honest, don’t vote for them. If they say they support these laws, don’t vote for them. And then go tell others not to vote for them either.

We have to speak up and fight back or we will continue to be victims to their hateful agenda.

They got Roe v. Wade and now they have their eye on taking away birth control, any reproductive rights and the rights of gay people. They won’t stop. They think they have the power now.

Trump gave them what they wanted and he has got them over a barrel and not a one of them has the decency to tell the truth.

Why else do they blindly support him when they know he’s the worst thing that ever happened to this country?

 

You think I'm wrong?

Time will tell.

But I bet I'm right.