aemencetew

Op-Ed

November 6, 2002

So you think you're a big time bowler? A billiard bandit? Here’s your chance to prove it:

Bowling for Victory

A fundraising event for COPE candidates Lyndsay Poaps for Parks Board and

Kevin Millsip for School Board.

Date: Sunday, November 10th

Time: 7:00 to 9:00p.m.

Place: Commodore Lanes & Billiards @ 838 Granville Street.

Cost: $10 (cheap).

Pull out your best bowling duds, sharpen your cue, and prepare to bust out.

Contests throughout the evening will include: brashest bowling shirt, best

bowling’form, highest and lowest scores, sharpest and dullest pool

shooters, and— yes—the coveted Team Spirit Award for Excellence.

Come join us for this all you can bowl and billiard eve at this low, low, price. Tix may be available at the door, but get yours early to be safe. We are also

selling sponsored tickets for those who would otherwise be unable to attend.

Order your tickets on-line now at <http://www.cope.bc.ca/index.cfm/fuseac-

tion/evt.home/pageID>

Reserve tickets by phone at 604-255-0400.

Stop by the People’s Co-op Book Store (1391 Commercial Dr.) or Cherry

Bomb (843 Granville St.) Come to the COPE Campaign office at 2501 Main

Street (at Broadway) to pay by cheque or cash.

J.J. McCullough OP Cartoonist

the other pres

The Sins of the Church

Bryan Johnson

OP Rant-o-rama

The Other Press does not necessarily con- done or support the views expressed in this article, as a matter of fact some of us quite like astrologers, concepts of divinity and mythological doctrines.

My daughter wanted to go to church because all her friends do, so my partner took her to the local Anglican church figuring the Anglicans are so bland the worst that can happen is she'll get turned into a social worker—social work being the main occupation of the Christian churches. (And the only prob- lem with being a social worker is that it’s a lousy job in a Christian society that doesn’t really give a f*%# about the poor but can’t face the guilt of not doing any- thing and so has to do something but is too God-awful cheap to spend enough to make a difference.) Sure enough, they stole my daughter, carried her off, down into the fiery furnace room in the bow-

els of the building within ten minutes of the service beginning. When she re- emerged 45 minutes later she had been Christianized, cultified, impregnated by the Lord, brain-washed into believing in angels and arks. Christ, it has taken us six weeks of serious deprogramming, counterindoctrination, and mind sur-

gery to get the reason-devouring suc- -

cubus out of her head, evening after evening in front of the television watch- ing videos on evolution, reproduction, and the Big Bang, just to kill the life- sucking idea that God created all the lit- tle animals (except as lunch for the big ones, HA!).

I will not let my daughter be exposed to these kinds of virulent lunatics again:

not Christian, Muslim, Hindu,

© pases

Buddhist, or bloody anything else. Not even astrologists! (Especially not astrolo- gists.) These metastatic colonies of fluff- headed freaks resemble nothing so much as coral: blind, insignificant, veg- etative organisms huddled together in hopes of achieving an unattainable safe- ty, sucking in even smaller, more- defenceless creatures to satisfy their own pathetic needs and turning their victims’ bones into a calcified, crusty, institu- tional shell guaranteed to prevent any true growth and lasting much much too long after the life has gone out of it.

Churches survive only on fear and faithlessness. The fear is that of stepping beyond the infantile illusions they are founded upon. Their members can’t imagine life without the security of completely unsupportable, illogical, unscientific, hopelessly childish fan- tasies about the nature of life, death, God, and their own bloody souls. Better to go to sleep under the mountain of horse manure that was piled upon them as children than to have to shovel it away in hopes of seeing the light. And that is why my daughter will not be going to church until she is old enough to have already conceived an honest vision of reality based upon fact and rea- son for herself and is emotionally secure enough to not need some imaginary father-figure as a crutch. And I’m all the father figure she needs until then, thank you very much!

The faithlessness of the church lies in the acolytes’ belief that they have to inseminate the children with God lest Beelzebub does it first with his own vile spawn. This creed shows so little faith in the inherent holiness of humanity, in

the inescapable reality of our spiritud nature, capacity, anatomy—whateve the hell you want to call it—the blin seeking for which is precisely wha drives these damned fools on their fruit less quest and which the church exploif in placing them in an orbit of vai needy, forever-unfulfilled, unweaned dependence.

Well I know better! There is no doub in my mind that as organic being$ wholly and completely of the Earth

pure mortals—we are nevertheless capa

foreve

ble of experiencing, expressing, and li ing in every gracious moment the fad that the totality of our conscious exper ence right now is nothing less than God Buddha, Mind—and it is human, pey fect, immediately and eternally pres ent—and inescapable if you don’t Iq someone stuff all kinds of humbugger into your head. I have no doubt m daughter will discover this when she ha finished playing with her stuffies, he Lego, make-up, boys, and all the thing she is going to get up to. And I have n doubt because I can protect her fro the banshees of the church screaming aj endless Christmas day sale of plastic ang sugar. I must protect her because th Christians prove it is possible to b utterly lost despite believing yourse] saved. I will protect her so that the fa she is in God, of God, and is God, a fad so self-evident to me in her every lumi nous smile, can eventually penetrate th horny carapace she must build to pro tect herself into her maturity ang become once again self-evident—s self-evident that there is no need for m to ever mention it.