If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. –James Baldwin
Brenda noticed me and grabbed my hand to join her for a drink. What’s up Push baby? Nothing much, ’bout ta get my head straight. She knew that meant relaxing with friends over drink, smoke and talking plenty cash-money shit amidst thick billowy smoke-rings. I really did not want to sit with Brenda because she was going to want to talk about Jesus, church, and how I needed to get saved and get married and settle down and stop smoking. Hey Push! I want you to check out this new book I bought the other day! I was down at Biggby Coffee, at Coffee, Arts & Entertainment, and I listened to this wonderful lecture by a woman named Dr. Janice Connor. She was on some real positive stuff about taking care of your body, spiritual healing, faith…she gave a real good testimony about her children having cancer, and all that kinda stuff. I stood over her and glanced at the book. Interesting, I thought. Cool! Let me check it out when you’re done with it, Brenda! I took it from her to look at the cover again: Propelling Faith it read. Brenda turned and looked at me: you need to get right with the lord, Push.
I hated when she got all self righteous with me, while sitting up in Willie’s Place drinking as much liquor as her belly could hold, looking for a man to take home while her daughter spent the weekend with dad. That’s the type of hypocrite Brenda was, telling me about my sinful ways – in one breath – and asking me to come and spend the night with her – in another breath. But tonight I really wasn’t in the mood to waste any time bullshitting around with her. She got primo pussy and her head-game is decent, certainly worth the trouble of spending the night with her, but I did not want to endure the price it wrought to get to the inevitable. It simply made no sense when I knew that, by the night’s end, I was going home with somebody if I so chose. So I did not have to listen to Brenda’s shit, but I sat down with her for a few minutes just because I figured she would be a good guinea pig to test some new lies on.
I quickly bussed my l0ad and turned over to light a fresh cigarette. Brenda fell asleep, thank goodness. Fucking Brenda for more than twenty minutes bored me. Actually, anything beyond her sucking my dick rather repulsed me because she always wanted intimacy and touching and holding and caressing and kissing. She was pathetic like that. So I grabbed the Connors book from her cheap purse – while looking for that hidden box of cigarettes this closet smoker kept in the side zipper of the inside flap – and noticed Dr. Connor’s book, Propelling Faith. I took it with me to the toilet and finished the 50+ page book in no time. It tickles me that folk still believe in this stuff. To me, there was no god, and if by chance there was, he was nothing more than a sado-masochistic, self-righteous, devilish, scornful, hateful, and loveless beast of burden, which made him no better than Hitler, white folks, or the devil himself (which seemed to be the only logical thing one could really believe in because that reality is omnipresent). In other words, I knew the devil’s work because I had seen it all my life, but I had never seen any of the loving, caring, compassionate, and healing that people told me god had for people.
Up to this point, all I’ve ever seen is people doing their best to survive against the cold, cruel and vicious elements of the world. As far as I was concerned, god—if he existed—never did anything but watch people suffer, babies die, men kill each other for money, land, and power, people enslaved for centuries, madmen govern whole countries that starved while he got rich, women unable to feed their babies, men reduced to disenchanted and emasculated children bent to the mercy of economic repression, systemic oppression and perpetual greed, while god sat on his mighty throne and watched. How sick and demented can you be to watch such tyranny, madness, and human suffering, claiming to have the power to end it all, but do nothing? To me, god was full of shit (just like Brenda).
As for the erudite Dr. Connor…well…I’m more inclined to believe her children’s fate lay at the mercy of skilled, brilliant physicians rather than something else. But I guess to think otherwise would be too complex…which would bring great, exhaustive amounts of mental agony and psycho-turmoil….and the crucial question: why would god save my children and not all children?
3/5
what about the kennedys 