There will inevitably be some of you out there whose sense of outrage is set aflame at a comic strip which draws its humor from Fourth of July car accidents.  Some people out there would love to corner me and erode my sense of hearing with torrid tales of how their mother’s best friend’s entire family collided with a tanker truck full of cat urine on I-10 last year, and it devastated their entire clan, and this is the first year without grandma Twiggy, and they miss her, and life will never be the same, nehnah neh nahnene nah….  Yeah… I don’t fucking care.  That being said, God forbid this happen to someone you love or, even worse, someone I love.  That’s right, everyone.  I’m capable of love.  It’s a rosary clutching surprise.

God forbid.  It seems to me that we invoke our deity all day every day without much thought as to whether she (yes- SHE.  God gives birth, that makes her theoretically female.  The only things that man can give birth to get flushed down the toilet) pays attention.  If I had people calling my name all day long without responding back to me, I’d stop trying to answer those assholes too.

I have concluded that since my last two… dissertations, if you will, have beaten politics thoroughly enough to impel nearly every acidic drop of coal black blood from its mephitic body, I should start working on softening the body of the close brother of politics: Religion.  I am not harping on God, mind you.  I have plenty of things to say to the supreme deity, but I’ll wait until I can unload them in a healthy face to face with my creator.  We’re all familiar with how flinty a woman can get if she hears third hand aspersions.

Allow me to begin the germination of my thoughts by stating a small but important fact.  I was born and raised a Catholic.  I also attended a murderously full and painful year at a Baptist military boarding school.  This did not endear me to the idea of religion, as some of you may have guessed.  I was invited by a young, non-molesting (I feel that it’s important to state this fact) priest at my former church to actively investigate the true nature of God and the church after I dropped out, or more accurately- was KICKED OUT, of CCD classes in my early teens.  That was a mistake on his part, I think.  While at that age I had already began the task of fabricating a rancorous shell of hate and rage that keeps me warm at night, I think that nothing on this Earth other than the nation’s coinciding inexplicable fascination with a gay retarded Muppet named Elmo has served to strip away my childhood innocence more than that research.  For those of you who weren’t drafted into the Holy Roman Empire during the process of conception like I was, CCD is like night school for the Catholic Church.  There are so many doctrines, caveats, rituals, rules, and saints that YEARS of classroom training are necessary in order for one to develop even a cursory knowledge of the ‘order of things’.  Basically, it’s like having to get a driver’s license in order to talk to God.  That’s right… it’s socialized religion.  One would attend seminars in the hopes of understanding why God forbid you, or more to the point ME, to slap ham to stolen porn magazines, and whether slapping ham was a worse sin than actually stealing the porn.  They may have covered other things as well, but I didn’t really pay attention. At the time things did not affect me also did not interest me, a trait that I carried well into my adult years.  I was mostly about finding out the sex stuff, and just let subjects that did not incorporate vaginas or boobs just slide off my cerebral cortex.  I could talk about boobs all night, so I digress.  At the priest who kept his damned hands to himself suggestion, I went to the library and unearthed a devastatingly interesting fact:  I’m actually a Jew when you boil it down to a broth.

Imagine my surprise.

The first thing I did was read through the Torah, which is a lot like the King James Bible, but… well it’s the same damned thing without the differing perspectives that tell the readers in really florid prose that Jesus of Nazareth was fucking AWESOME.  For the focus of my thinking youth, the main focus of Church had been on this really cool Jew named Jesus and how he basically didn’t have a job, but he would always stop and help people out so it was cool.  Sometimes he would do magic tricks and stuff, or heal someone who has the shits or demons too.  He was the Biblical Bruce Banner; a transient wanderer with extensive knowledge and a limitless power brewing under the surface.  Oh, and there’s some other stuff in the Old Testament too, but if it ain’t Noah or Moses, fuck ‘em, and if you ask me to tell you the story of Lot and his daughters again, I’m gonna wash your mouth out with soap!  The entire time that they were drilling this hippy superhero into my head, there were much more intrinsically sexy and adventurous tales to be told in the thicker first half of the ‘good book’.  Why the hell didn’t anyone ever tell me that, I wondered?  I’d think that would be the FIRST fucking thing you would tell the members of the church if for no other reason than to avoid the type of confusion that I was afflicted with.  Just a quick “Oh, by the way…  we, uh… we didn’t come up with this.  We basically stole the good stuff from the Jew.  Even the name of God.  But, uh, hey!  We can still eat bacon!  Just, you know… FYI.”  Oh no.  The Catholics pawned off the books of Moses like it was their copyrighted creations, and have been growing on that thievery for hundreds of years.  I didn’t understand why the Catholic Church would perpetrate such a falsehood until I traced back the true meaning of religion.

Money and banking.  Dozens are shocked, I know.

As we all know, banks are all run my fat white men in cloaks who obsessively twist their handlebar mustaches, and the Catholic Church is the one of the largest banks in the world.  It has been so for almost two thousand years.  Think about that time span… two THOUSAND years!    Western civilization lost and rediscovered CONCRETE in the past two thousand years, but the bank has steadily been there.  When the Roman Empire fell one Thursday afternoon, the Holy Roman Empire just relocated further south until Europe learned to read and write again.

In truth, this surprising information felt like a betrayal and I was more than a little pissed off. Being a spiritual youth, though not a religious one, it was indeed a metaphysical kick in the crotch berries to discover that the institution that I had placed so much trust in was build and ripened on a foundation of lies.  I then dug a little deeper closer to home and found out that was simply the nature of banks, and I felt a little better.  I don’t know if everyone is aware of this, but God banks are a much better prophet profit institution to run than the regular ATM and drive-thru banks are.  Churches neither have to claim income nor pay taxes to the United States government.  It is a completely autonomous business.  In fact, I’ll go so far as to claim that it’s the BEST fucking business in the country!  You don’t have to deliver a product, you have no government regulatory body that requires bribing, and most of your customers gain their market education directly from the one hour a week that you spend with them!  My God, it’s genius!

Of course you also have to contend with the homicidal insanity that seems to lurk in the long shadow of human faith.  You might think you have set up a tidy little operation in an abandoned strip mall, heaping glowing praise upon some Jewish carpenter to the swooning masses, but it could all come to an end when someone shows up who is so filled with the love and mercy of Jesus Christ that he just HAS to shoot you in the face.  It’s a roll of the dice, but not like in Role-playing games – ‘cause that’s a sin.  CCD taught me that too.