I don't support the ridicule of Christians, just like I don't support the ridicule of Muslims, or gays, or blacks, or the Irish. It's open season on the Antarcticans, though.
That said, the other night I went to a program at IC called "Real People," in which a few Christian students got up and talked about their relationships with Jesus and what He meant to them. The more they talked, the more I realized that something fishy was going on, and the less I believed that these were typical Christian kids. Several of them spoke of beating their addictions to alcohol or coke with the help of the Big Guy, and now all of them were getting up and feverishly proclaiming their love, obsession, or total earthly desire for Jesus, which, y'know, is OK.
But something seemed amiss in the way they talked. It was almost as if they were....no, it couldn't be...were they.....addicted to Jesus? From the way they were talking, you might have thought Jesus was an opium poppy. I wasn't sure, though, so I pulled out my pen and began writing down suspicious quotes. I've included the actual quotes here, but in order to test my theory, I've replaced any instance of "God," "Jesus," "the Lord," "He," "Him," or the like with the word "Heroin."
"You could see the difference between me and my teammates in the way we were living."
"I was riding off the heroin high I got every week."
"It's amazing how quickly you can get off track if you give heroin control."
"I hate my life when I'm not with heroin."
"I lost a lot of friends, but I got closer to heroin."
"Heroin really revealed a lot of things to me."
"Everything makes sense when I put heroin first."
"I tried to fill the void with alcohol, sex, drugs, but when I filled it with heroin, it worked."
"He died on the cross so that I didn't have to worry about my French test." [I left this one the way it was]
"When you invite heroin into your life, you experience joy and hope that you can't feel without it."
"Heroin changed me, and it can change you. In a second, it can change you."
What's weird about these Jesus-addicts is that they haven't really beaten their addictions, they've just traded them in for one that is comparatively healthier. Sure, they're not on coke, but their minds are still totally dependent on something, and as long as that's the case they're going to be at a risk for the kind of poor decisions that marked the earlier stages of their addicted lives. And -though I feel sorry for them- those decisions are fucking me over.
For starters, they're missing the message. Christ never said "Hate the gays" or "Invade Iraq" (I think). What's worse, in their fervor, they call more attention to themselves than normal, rational Christians do, and thus paint an unfair picture of the whole religion. And if this didn't bother me enough, just like any other addict, they're always asking me for money.
It's hard to blame them. If my religion told me that I didn't have to pay taxes , that it was OK to hate people that made me uncomfortable, and that I had a right to consume limitlessly, I would probably be addicted to it too. But - hear me out on this one - that's NOT WHAT CHRISTIANITY TEACHES.
I'm not an ordained minister, and I'm not going to go about pretending to know what the hell God is thinking, but I know that as a kid I went to just as much Church as the next asshole, and I never wound up voting for Bush. Like a terrorist on 9/11, the Jesus-addicts hijacked Christianity and turned it around, ramming it not into the Pentagon, but into the White House instead. Now, as long as they're high on the J-man, they're going keep feeding their addiction with the blood of Iraqis and the rights of Americans.
Somewhere out there are sensible Christians who pick up on the whole "it's easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven" message (or any of the other "help the less fortunate"/"social responsibility" messages). If we're lucky, these Christians will take back their religion from the maniacs who are using it to do God-knows-what. Perhaps they can cure their peers of the addictions that cripple both them and our nation and put an end to this Religious-Though-Mistakenly-Right. People who are addicted to anything, be it crack or God, are bound to make decisions that are narrow-minded, one-sided, and self-serving. They're almost as bad as the fucking Antarcticans.
