Never Trust Them Bible Thumpers

"I honesty believe that in my lifetime we will see a country once again governed by Christians . . . and Christian values."

"What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time, and one state at a time."

"We've learned how to move under radar in the cover of the night with shrubbery strapped to our helmets,"

"They call them extremists. We have our own names. We call them senators, congressman, governors, mayors..."

"I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night."

- Ralph Reed

Ralph Reed is running for Lieutenant Governor of my state of residency. He is one scary dude. I have no doubt that he was lining his pockets with the rest of those criminals in the Republican Party, but it has yet to be proven. It will be a happy day for me to see him indicted, and I am hopeful that it will be soon.

My father was a cynic. My father was a realist. My father was an intelligent-anti-intellectual. He had some really good sayings. On of my favorites (in retrospect of course) was often said to me when I’d return empty-handed from a mission to find a tool or some other necessary object to his current task saying, “I can’t find it, Dad!” He'd look at me and say, “You couldn’t find a horse-turd in a stable.” He might even say, “You couldn’t find your ass in the dark with both hands!” Some of his other favorites (which of course turned out to be true) included “You get nothin’ for nothin’ and damn little for a dollar,” and “Life is earnest, life is real.”

Then there was one that I don’t really agree with, but ranks among one of the funniest things he ever said: “I don’t like dogs. If they can’t eat it or bleep it, they’ll piss on it!”

He really did say “bleep it.” I only ever heard him use the “F” word once, and that was when a friend of my brother’s changed his oil in front of our house after my father had said he didn’t want him to do it. The guy tracked oil onto the carpet. Funny, because there were many other instances where I believe that word would have been more appropriate, but that was my father. He was really angry that day.

My mother was a devout neo-Catholic. She believed in God and Jesus and Mary, but didn’t believe the Pope was infallible. She taught me at a young age to not believe the nuns when they said that Jews couldn’t go to heaven. She said that God didn’t care what religion you were; he only cared if you were good.

My father, at least for a time was an atheist. I never heard him say it around my mother, because he didn’t like to upset her. He dutifully went off to church with her every Sunday, because he loved her and it made her happy. His mother was an old-style Italian Catholic, but his father was an atheist. When my grandfather was a boy in Sicily and his father was on his deathbed, the priests came to the house and had him sign away his property in exchange for forgiveness and a ticket to heaven.

I remember one time when I was in my 30’s, we were watching the news and they reported that a church somewhere in the south had caught fire during a Sunday morning service, and half the congregation perished as a result. The next Sunday the survivors got together at a barn and prayed for the dead, and thanked God for their lives being spared. My dad looked at me and said, “Can you believe these fools?”

Like me, he was raised a Catholic by his mother, but unlike me he fought in a war. The big one. The good one. Except it wasn’t good it all. In fact it sucked. He told me you’d have to be an idiot to believe in God after seeing what he saw during the war. I think as he got older, he mellowed a bit and started to believe in something, but he never believed in the big bad bogey-man sending people off to hell.

One of the lessons that he taught me, which to this day I have never found an exception, concerned religious people. He said something like this:

“Never trust them Bible thumpers, the ones that have this ‘Holier than thou’ attitude, always talking about Jesus. Those people are dangerous. They will either want to pick your pocket, steal your wife or molest your children. Stay away from them and never be fooled. If they are constantly talking about God and religion, they are up to no damn good.”

I loved my father, and I wish he was here today, watching these criminals go up in flames with that cynical grin on his face saying, “See, I told you. Those Bible thumpers are up to no damn good!”