I don’t know about you, but I’ve been busy all night, planning to ascend. Getting packed. Making sure someone will be here to take care of my dogs in case Jesus is a cruel, vindictive, animal hater, who wants all the pets to slowly starve to death waiting for their ascended masters and mistresses to come back, like Phillip J. Fry’s dog in Futurama.

Isn’t there something in the New Testament, Mathew 9:11, “As coming into Jerusalem he kicketh poodles for fun?” Or was that Inhumanus 6:66? If you’ve ever listened to some who claim we’ve been “given dominion” over the animals: “dominion” to do any cruel, nasty, sadistic act our blacker than midnight hearts desire, you might think so.

Back to ascending…

Isn’t there also something in the Bible about no one knows the date? Clever believers: always outsmarting even the book they claim they believe in. Kind of like how “turn the other cheek” was re-translated into preemptive action.

“Shock and awe, baby!”

Thus saith the Lord right after he climbed off the cross firing his celestial machine guns.

Given the immediacy of the moment, I thought of taking Mike Malloy’s advice and set out clothes everywhere, as if believers had ascended… left their earthly possessions behind for that great nudist beach up high. Let someone else have the leisure suit you married your wife in: guilty as charged. Might as well make sure those disco disks are “left behind:” no way in Hell would I have ever bought that crap. I hear you go straight to Hell if you have a single recording of Disco Duck. The demons use you like some pinata-disco ball: the “candy” drops, you heal, and the game starts again.

Only I would have set those empty clothes of the ascended out in front of Jewish Temples, Unitarian Universalist Churches, Muslim Mosques, the homes of atheists and abortion doctors… just to make the more Fundamentalist leaning folk who believe such gunk think twice about their narrow minded ways.

Not that it would work. I’ve hit my rhetorical head against that wall one too many times. They just keep wailing nonsense.

But speaking of “gunk,” what makes some people so damn clueless: eager to swallow anything as long as it has Jesus frosting slathered all over it, just to provide one example?

I suppose it’s not only an extreme left, right, believer or not, thing to be so damn clueless. For example, being more left leaning I still remember my father’s comments about the whole earth crowd…

“‘Natural” isn’t necessarily always “good.'”

He, being a food technologist and somewhat of a chemist and a biologist; far more familiar with various chemical compounds and such than his young son, would list things that exist and were “natural” that no one should touch, or consume. He also would list man made compounds that were quite healthy and one should touch, or eat.

If I had that list now I’d slap it down on the page, or screen, so all could read. Of course you might fall asleep like his son did. The list was very long. Sometimes he’d make you try to pronounce the words and critique your efforts.

“Fun” times.

Not.

But, to be fair, Dad was always about teaching us to challenge assumptions, though like all of us he sometimes made one too many. He always told me, more than anything, he wanted to teach me to think for myself. He succeeded, perhaps beyond his own politically Conservative wishes. Challenge him on anything and he would admit he could be wrong. So I suppose even Dad would have admitted that there are some things folks believe that just seem so off the map you wonder if they fell off the edge of planet, or at least think they could if they move one iota away from “the straight and narrow.”

A few small examples…

Like an all knowing, all loving, all powerful, God who makes bets with Satan. Betting that by destroying the blessed life of a believer they can turn him into an angry, God hating, cursing disbeliever… or not. What, they were so damn bored they had nothing else to do but torment someone, brutally kill off his family? One almost wishes one could tell either of them to stop playing with their toys, grow up and get a… Job.

Birthers? Deathers? 6,000 year old Earth?

Even stranger… the mindset that people must be held to strict rules, harsh laws, with mandated sentencing, but when people form corporations they collectively become so pure of heart that all regulations should go away and everything will be peachy keen. Even after Enron or bankers giving huge bonuses to themselves provided by our tax driven bail out money? It’s a religion, I swear, and a crackpot: follow the tail of the comet to heaven kind of religion.

Obama’s a socialist, fascist; brainwashed by the Kenyan father he hardly knew? No matter what evidence is provided?

After years of a plummeting economy and tax breaks heavily tilted towards the rich, more tax breaks for the rich will make it better?

It’s all a little too much like a man plummeting to the earth wearing a parachute who claims, instead of pulling the cord, if he just flaps his arms faster he will fly.

There’s no polite way to ask it that explains how out there their beliefs are. Do they really believe the vile, slimy, septic tank sludge matter that pours forth from their own mouths? So sad… the answer often is, “Yes.” The God from heck with the face of Beck hath said so. Blessed be the Glen.

Faith, or even lack of faith, at its best, is an inward journey, a humbling one, when we don’t use it as yet another excuse to float our over bloated egos on seas of rhetorical manure. But these days it seems we no longer follow Jesus, walk with Muhammad, listen for God, respect Science, look for Nirvana… we worship overstatement, hyperbole and beliefs that in a more sane age would get us a lot closer to wearing the straight jacket and living in a rubber room.

The list is endless. I argue with them all the time on a site called Volconvo and the pattern is always the same. Show them how what they say makes no sense and they simply focus in on some other catch phrase, non-truth, outright filthy lie. Later on they’ll simply sneak right back to spouting stupidity…

“Free enterprise regulates itself.”

Without regulations? Yes: by exterminating the “free” and then the “enterprise,” creating corporate Gods: monopolies; often fascistic monopolies since government and corporations have their hands in each others pockets.

I admit, like gravity and the edge of the cliff, sometimes you have to take some things on faith. But when faith is more important than reason, logic, common sense or common decency, pardon me if I step away from that edge.

Well, you do have to excuse me now, I’m getting ready for the next event. Maybe, if I bring some goodies for their rides, the four horsemen will take pity on me?

-30-

Inspection is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for over 30 years. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks and into the unseen cracks and crevasses that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.

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Ken Carman and Cartenual Productions
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