room for two people to stretch out, and whilst Father may be taller, you’re all the same height lying down.
‘I never even felt you,’ said Mother to Father.
‘Your dick shrinks when you’re highly tuned,’ replied Father. ‘It’s well known.’
‘You serious?’ said Mother. ‘Wow, you must have been super highly tuned.’
Often, to fend off Mother’s criticism, I’d remind her of this incident. I’d remind her I was born, because of what she and Father had done, hence my birth wasn’t my fault, and therefore she should lavish gifts and goodwill upon me. Mother wouldn’t have a bar of it.
Instead, she would say, ‘No, no. it’s your fault I got pregnant. You were the one who swam. You didn’t have to, you know; you didn’t have to swim.’
Father was different from Mother. What you saw is what you got. He was born during the Great Depression when there wasn’t much of anything for anyone. This made him a man of few needs and wants. A noble tradition he insisted I follow whilst I lived at home. Father was originally a Catholic, but for reasons best known to him, he sacked the Catholic religion from his life and married my then pregnant mother in a Baptist Church. In case the Catholics misunderstood his message the first time, Father also became a Freemason. The Roman Catholic Church has long been an outspoken critic of Freemasonry; this suited Father. If the Catholics didn’t like the Freemasons, then the Freemasons must be all right. Besides, Father never trusted a man who had never rattled one off, hence his distrust of Catholic priests.
‘It’s not right,’ Father would say. ‘It’s not right at all. A man has to unravel his Johnston every now and again. Otherwise you get headaches. You know, play humpy humpy, trip the lights fantastic. A man who doesn’t root and prefers to wear dresses is messed up in his head. He needs a good root to get it right.’
In my younger days, Mother made me read the Bible every day.
‘You little tadpole impersonator, you. I’ll learn you not to dart off to my womb,’ she’d say. ‘Now read and pray for forgiveness for your sins, you wicked boy.’
Before the Adopted Ones came into being, every Sunday morning Mother frogmarched me to church with her and Father. I had to sit in a pew with old people who smelled and dribbled through their oversized false teeth when they sang or spoke. I listened intently to the sermons in an attempt to understand the minister’s weekly tale of enlightenment. Sermons, he had designed for all us sinners. Everyone was a sinner. How’s that work? I didn’t get it. The more the Church minister ridiculed sin, blamed the human race for sin, the more he mocked Hell, the more convinced I became I needed a piece of the sin action. The minister made sin sound like fun. I figured it had to be fashionable, as according to the minister, a lot of people were doing it.
I mentioned to the minister once, if Heaven and Hell were true, Hell would be my preferred destination. He enquired as to why. I answered him by saying, a party in Hell would have alcohol, girls, swearing, sex and sin, yeah, lots of sinning. Whereas, a party in Heaven would be what, a cup of tea and a lamington. The minister didn’t see the same picture I was seeing.
As he walked away from me that morning shaking his head, I shouted, ‘Why do you accept a belief system where you have to wait until you die to find out if it’s true or not? It doesn’t make sense, man. It’s crazy thinking.’
Mother was trying to push me out the church doors as I continued with my wrath.
‘Let’s say you die, you end up facing the Pearly Gates, and some fat dude sitting on his butt with his legs crossed says to you, you screwed up man, Buddhism was the one. Now piss off! You’re buggered, get my drift?’
The minister and Mother failed to understand my point. She took me straight home and made me read the Bible again as punishment. Once, I attempted to explain to Mother I didn’t believe religious leaders officiating on behalf of somebody’s God; we’re all that smart.
‘Blasphemy!’ she hollered. You’re a blasphemous little bastard, you are!’
I never believed that leaders of religion, no matter what religion they were, knew their subject matter – in their case, the Bible. That’s why they have to read from it. They don’t know it. Any numbskull can read from a book, and let’s be honest, preaching is not like having a real job, like a technical job or a medical job. For those gigs you need many reference materials.
A person of the cloth uses one reference source only, a book, an old book. It’s been around forever. The words in it haven’t changed. The stories are the same. The characters in the stories haven’t changed their names, and they’re still doing the same stuff. The miracles are the same; no new ones added since the Bible was first written some 2,000 years ago. How hard is it to update the Bible, put out a new version as they do with other reference books? Put stuff in about what Jesus is doing now in Heaven? Is he working, or is still rattling on about his old man? Did God ever marry Mary, the mother of Jesus? Or do they live in sin? It, too, is fashionable these days. The Bible should also have an address in it for Heaven, so we can send birthday cards and gifts to Jesus. On Jesus’s birthday, people give each other gifts. Why? Jesus gets nothing, no presents, no cards. That’s very selfish. Religious people should be showing Jesus the love on his birthday. They should be singing him ‘Happy Birthday’, not giving each other gifts and saying ‘Merry Christmas’. Jesus gets ripped off every year by a fat guy in a red and white suit, and it’s not his birthday. It’s the birthday of Jesus.
If religious leaders knew their subject matter better, they’d be able to pass onto their congregations the important messages the Bible offers.
For example, in 2 Kings 2:23-24 it states: ‘Elisha left and headed towards Bethel. Along the way, some boys started to make fun of him by shouting, “Go away, baldy! Get out of here!” Elisha turned around and stared at the boys. Then he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Straight away two bears ran out of the woods and ripped forty-two of the boys to pieces!’
The message from this piece of scripture is simple enough to understand. Don’t take the piss out of bald men; if you do, the bears will get you. This is the information the community needs to know. It makes sense; it’s a good safety message. As God’s preachers failed to pass on safety messages such as this to their congregations, people are still taking the piss out of bald men, and therefore, bears are still running about killing people.
I was fourteen, a recent school dropout, when I had a change of heart about my church attendance. I began to look forward to my weekly church sessions. By then, I knew enough of the Biblical shenanigans to run rings around the minister. It was fun watching him squirm as he tried to counter the logical arguments of a young teenager.
‘Did you know,’ I said to him once, ‘if you repeated out loud every word Jesus is alleged to have spoken in the New Testament, it would take you two hours. That’s it; that was the life of Jesus; you can tell it in two hours. Yet, you’ve been telling stories here every week, for how long? Your sermons go for an hour. You’ve gotta be making stuff up, man. Jesus didn’t have that much to say. Two hours’ worth. That’s it, a done deal in two hours. What gives with you?’
The minister half-smiled at me and tried to talk to other worshippers.
I continued. ‘Not only that, Jesus spoke in parables. Every parable he spoke in the New Testament, every one of them, was previously mentioned in the Old Testament – that’s plagiarism, is it not?’
The minister was now outside the church trying to get away from me.
I let rip. ‘The money donated by way of the collection plate is an interesting affair, isn’t it? The donations are cash transactions, right? No receipts are issued, unaudited dollars, correct? The one person who knows where the money goes is you, huh?
Who checks you?’
I kept following him. ‘The Biblical authors were great, weren’t they? We must praise them for sharing with us their limitless, vivid imagination in the ancient art