all i gotta say about a certain religion

Let's have an update.
I'm kind of drunk but that will do.
It's not like drunken updates have come back to haunt me, have they???!???
(yes they have. I have deleted several of them.)
This shall be one I'll try not to delete.
On CBC radio recently they had a report about one Dorothy Day, that got me thinking very much.
Dorothy Day, if you will point your interrogatives at wikipedia, founded the Catholic Workers movement.
She, according to my understanding, is up for sainthood, in that warped and esoteric way that the catholic church does basically anything.
Only thing is, her surviving followers don't want it.
She is in many *below* sainthood, having had an abortion in her youth.
In every other way, she is *above* it; sainthood could only disparage her memory.
Events worthy of sainthood are created by individuals, swallowed up and claimed by the frantic masoleum of organized church institutions. (All that marble, clicking and echoing into eternity...)
As a young child a babysitter tried to convert me to Baptism. One day, I remember distinctly, all the Berenstein Bears books disappeared, replaced by those religious Archie comics. That was the first week.
The second week, I went to Sunday school for the first time in my life. And flunked, I guess, for pissing off the teacher. I almost got beat by the babysitter's hubbie. (He beat her a lot- we heard through the walls, as we blew on our lunchtime meal of macaroni and cheese and ketchup.)
The third week my parents came home from their vacation, and I returned to agnosticism and never asked another question 'bout Jesus. I wanted, as early as eight years of age, to fucking beat the shit out of my babysitters' hubby. This would not have solved anything.
They say that the crucifix is a symbol much older than christianity itself. The horizontal represents the earth, flat and finite. The vertical represents the spiritual, bisecting the animal existence and tracing itself from perfection to abomination. (you are either with us or against us) It, too, if you look carefully, is finite. The margins are bare. The possibilities remain untold.
The pentagram is infinite. Its boundaries are forever deflected by the roundness of the earth. Life ends, becomes earth, earth ends, becomes fire, or water, or whatever... Everything rests in relation to its foils.
As Bill Hicks once put it, 'd'you think that the first thing jesus wants to see 'round your neck is a crucifix?!? Why not wear a sniper pendant when you meet Jacqueline Kennedy?'
A neat punchline, but it bears analysis. I still do think that the symbolisms of modern life speak volumes more than most academics.
What do christians feel and see, when their every orfice is confronted with the cross? Is it not a symbol of death?
Confront a bible thumper. What is the refrain? 'Jesus died for your sins.' It is an imperative call without any possible satisfactory response. The lessons are lost. I got the death of jesus thrown in my face when I was eight years old and I rejected it.
Christianity, thus, became a religion of despair for all but some. The defining moment of jesus, of a workable template of virtuous life, was in its destruction. This is christianity's perverted message.
I reject any philosophy that is defined by its ending. Socialism, without realizing it, has its own armageddon in the form of the worker's paradise. Now, books end, but history goes on. Are we so selfish that we will deny our children their right to history, to good fights? I can't believe it. Any book that promises an end to history is the work of a hack.
Is the definition of christianity the culmination of jesus' life, or of his death? if you see someone wearing a cross, they've already given up. Nothing to do but wait for armaggedon. Moreso, they've defined their possibilities by the culmination of life, by its restrictions rather than its possibilities. They've defined virtue and good work in relation to some other heavenly reward, rather than by its ends on the earth. It's nothing but adding another number onto a wholly abstract equation that's going to add up to their worthiness for paradise. In this way, it's another slimy liberal sham, another individualistic act you do to add to your own ethical capital. What if it isn't enough, christians?
Is the challenge to us as humans that jesus died for our sins, Or, that for a moment, he lived? Is he the historical proof of a closing of our possibilities as a species, or is his life a challenge that all but a few of us have yet to live up to?

Actually, according to all historical evidence, there never was such a thing as a jesus. But whatever. If you speak all this to one of those religious salesmen on your doorstep, I guarantee you some tears, or a really fun conversation.
alright. stay loose, y'all