So pleased to see more of this street wisdom from you, Curtis. I sincerely hope that it turns into a book someday; I will be one of the first purchasers.
I particularly liked, "I said that if there was one thing I have learned it is that there is a compelling human tendency to mistake the fervor of one's beliefs for the solidity on which they are based." Amen. So to speak. :-) I've found that this is as true with Newagers and wannabee Hindus like TMers as it is with Christians or fundie Muslims. It's as if they never got any training in how to tell the difference between overwhelming emotion and actual spiritual experience, or in the difference between just being a drama queen and being a saint. Thanks for taking what could have been just another cock and bull story about glassy-eyed proselytutes and turning it into something more. [http://i.huffpost.com/gen/703033/thumbs/o-COCKANDBULL-570.jpg?4] --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" <curtisdeltablues@...> wrote: > > Cutting a jaunty jib in his flowing robes, the Lord proclaimed: "their mouth hath written a check, that their asses cannot cash." > > I was having a delightful conversation with an extremely bright young bagpiper while breaking down my rig. ((It has taken me this long alive to be able to start a post with this fey a line!) Along came a gangly dude with a big smile who told me he was a drummer and was interested in my drum set-up. I perform with a bass drum on the right and a snare drum set up sideways on the left. I replaced a bass pedal beater with a drum stick to crack the snare, and I have a board connecting it to a high hat so that every time I step on the left side after the boom of the bass on the right, I get a very satisfying snap of the snare drum combined with the metallic sizzle of the hit-hat cymbals. Drummers who usually play a snare with their hands are often fascinated with this set-up, and I usually let them take my seat and give it all a try. So he sat down and made a passable attempt to get something going. But there was some passion missing in his interest that I clocked. He told me that my set-up was great and he wanted to tip me and then tried to hand me one of those phoney Christian million dollar bills full of dire warnings to get on the boat of Jesus or else. As a busker who can spot a five dollar bill out of all the ones coming at me from fifty yards while playing three instruments at once and still having enough cortical activity left to check out the way the sun is streaming through a sun dress like the pair of X-Ray specs in the back of the comic books promised, I recoiled as if he was trying to hand me a Gabon Viper. > > "Oh no, I said, legal tender only here. I've had my fill of that gypsy trick." > > "But you should really read it" he implored. > > "I've not only read it, I've read the Bible many times" I bragged. > > "Oh, then have you accepted Jesus as your personal savoir?" he asked. > > We have all been here. The dance is so predictable. Anyone reading this probably has fifteen different versions on a continuum of polite to "get outta my face" responses. And frankly I am an old codger and he was me one hundred years ago, so I will try to refrain from the most obvious narrative that I was able to put down a young person with my crustiness. Since I had to pack up anyway I let him run his spiel while trying to hid the red glow of my eyes as my dark Lord attempted to step in and deal with him directly. (I hate when he does that it just scares people.) > > You all know the drill so I wont bore you with his pitch. Anyone here could run it themselves from memory I'm sure. Let's just characterize it all as presumptions, assumptions and baseless assertions on parade. And not the cool kind of parade with those mostly naked samba chicks trying to shake off what little they have on. This was an artless recitations of the assumptions of Christianity. It was accompanied with the earnest but dead-eyed stare of a true believer who was reinforcing his own internal surety rather than a sincere attempt to understand me as a person. Of course it is also true that I had little interest in him as a person at this point especially compared to my new bagpiper friend. (Did that just make me sound too much like an old queen? I have to watch that!) > > My response was to fall to my knees, repent my sins and immediately accept Jesus as my Lord. (Damn why do all the really good ideas only come to us so long after the fact! Wouldn't that have been the most entertaining response!) > > No, I am not that clever, I just asked him how he could possibly claim to know such things with such confidence. He responded that the Bible was the word of God and it told him these things so he knew they were true. I told him that he reminded me of a particularly devout cab driver I had in New Delhi who gave me a rap about the virtues of the Bhagavad Gita and asked him if he had read it. > > "No" he said. > > "Wait a second" now in full crusty codger mode, "you mean to say that you are claiming to know that the Bible is the most important revelation of God to man and you haven't taken the time to even consider some of the other religions claims to the same high ground?" > > "Well no I don't need to because the Bible is the most popular book in the world, the biggest seller, so it is the most important." He was seeing my soul slipping away in front of his eyes. > > "Well Mcdonalds is the most popular food joint, but I won't be stopping by there on my way home. And in what other area of human knowledge could you proudly state that you had no exposure to the other versions of that field, like music. Could I really claim that blues is somehow the best or most "whatever" in the world never having listened to any other music? It defies common sense that you can claim such certain knowledge of the Bible's primacy in matters eternal while exhibiting a provincial disregard for other claimers to the throne. (OK, I am writing this more eliquantly than I said it, so sue me for being my own PR department!) > > I asked him if he believed that the earth was 5,000 years old and he said "yes" and on further probing told me that the dinosaurs had all died in Noah's flood. He told me that the scientists were wrong about their dating techniques of fossils and his eyes began to cross as I attempted to explain how many different ways dates are determined in archiology. He was dead sure that all the scientist were wrong but didn;t have even the most rudimentary understanding of how they determine dates. We agreed to disagree on that point. > > Then his handler came by and I realized it was actually a whole group of them working the boardwalk. His handler was more unpleasantly confident about his superior knowledge of man's ultimate condition. He tried a few more advanced maneuvers like the bogus Pasquale's wager, which of course gave me an intellectual boner demolishing. (Oh wait the self-congratulatory tone is creeping in. Let's just say he had never opened up such a can of intellectual worms in his life. The wager is that if the rewards of heaven are so great, and the cost of belief is so small, why not just believe? The problem is that there are literally thousands of versions of Gods man has believed in, so you really aren't improving your odds of being right much at all to pick one. Pasquale got more milage out of this trick pre-Google.) > > I asked them if they read the Bible in the original language if it is so important a book, and they told me God guides them in any language. I asked why the Bible didn't even get slavery right and he had a convoluted selective reading that made is seem as if the Bible was implying the opposite of what it directly states many times. > > Then he tried the Raganeesh unblinking stare on me to compel me to accept baseless assertions as fact. Good luck with that with an old rounder like me. I've stared drunks off their bar stools. > > I wanted to shift from the young lions trying to tame the old lion dance we were playing. I wanted side step out of the new guy's ultra confidence about his surety into some real connection. I was trying to get out of the doctrine over person trip we were laying on each other. > > I said that if there was one thing I have learned it is that there is a compelling human tendency to mistake the fervor of one's beliefs for the solidity on which they are based. I don't know the ultimate reality of life and I don't see any reason to accept that you do. You don't seem to have done even the minimal due diligence in the field of religion. So there is no way to distinguish your surety from the guys who are so sure of their knowledge of their scriptures like the Koran. Humans suck at this. We have a horrible track record of using faith over reason and it continues to cause mankind much pain. (So THAT was my way of making a more genuine human connection? I wonder why that didn't work!) > > At this point the rest of the group came by to rescue them from my codgerhood, and I noticed that they had a couple of young babes who were doing some flirty fishing. At first I felt a bit ripped off because I though I could have been laying my crusty rap on a young girl instead of a geeky guy while vampirizing the hydration of their skin with each lingering gaze. But then I saw the flintiness of their eyes, so similar to the hard looks you get in strip clubs as they extract dollars in return for their hungover darshon. I realized that I wanted nothing to do with this kind of chick. > > They told me they would pray for me, which they did in a group to get the last one-upsmanship with the big Guy, thier big invisible rabbit God, a collage of myths swirling around their minds including some Holy Ghost (knocked up Mary so must have ghostly naughty parts), Jesus (S and M fetishist extroidinair) and the Holy Father himself (whose pastimes include torturing his own son to eliminate the sins from the creatures whose natures he himself created) > > As I trundled off to my car and as I was loading, I caught a glimps of some movement out of the corner of my eye. Good Old Johnathan (NO ITS JOHN PAUL NOW) was stopping by to collect his rosary of repetitions from me. >
