As someone who went to Catholic school with crazy nuns dressed up like penguins, I found that fearing God was not the beginning of wisdom but of fear.
Unless you think of the wisdom part as consisting of rejecting the whole deal, growing my hair long and smoking weed until it came out of my ears.
Okay, that may have not been wisdom exactly but it was for sure better than allowing my natural instincts as a human being to be subverted in favor of the rather specific dogmatic imperatives of some alien being which by some strange coincidence was always just out of reach of my peripheral vision.
Mother Earth, now that I can deal with, but I draw the line at eternal wafq’s or everlasting covenants, especially when they claim the same ground; that would seem to be proof that someone is goofy or is there a theological way out of that bag?
Oddly, I was always more scared of H.P. Lovecraft stories about the Elder Gods and stuff as a teenager than I was of hell although hell is pretty scary if you think about it enough. I guess if they’d had Catholic books that were only about the demons and devils and stuff I might have gone to church without being forced to just for insurance if nothing else. I think that’s kinda the way it works anyway.
I never actually felt that cleaned up after saying 10 Hail Mary’s and 10 Our Father’s after confessing to a guy in a booth that I said ‘f–k’ that week or wished that my 5th grade teacher would mysteriously never show up again.
Those priests should’ve had someone like H.P. Lovecraft write the Catechism manuals – I never would’ve cursed or disobeyed my mother again if I thought some shambling thing with frog eyes out of the dark might start scratching at my door at night.
And if you read stuff about Mohammed flying around to the moon and stuff, it ain’t exactly Lord Dunsany or Clark Ashton Smith. These people need some writers. Yeah I know, they’ve captured the imagination of a large part of the world but just between you and me, using the word ‘imagination’ with some of these folks is kinda stretching it and some of the stuff they do like cutting off heads and mutilating their little girls kinda reminds me of Lovecraft’s frog people if you know what I mean. I mean, if they’re the good guys, then what do the bad people do? When they think of going to heaven or whatever do they just become regular folks? Hell, they could renounce Islam and move to Iowa and do that without blowin’ shit up and yellin’ all the time. I think the problem is that there’s nothing really scary for muslims that trumps their real life.
I think if you put some 12 yr. old muslim kid all alone up in a belfry at midnight and had him watch Robert Wise’s “The Haunting” that he might feel somewhat more secure in the belfry than in real life.
