Don the Gloves of Logic and See If You Can Pick Up Christianity – Part 3
Do I Love You Enough?
“When I was young, I think I might have told you this before, Pat, when I was young, I really tried really hard to be a good part of a good church. I explained this to a woman at at a church service that I performed at, I guess you might call it: she wanted to talk to me afterwards. She asked me, you know, what’s the deal, what are you doing. And this is what I told her. That when I was young, I went to church and I tried real hard, I wanted to do what they were telling me to do. I was a good student; in school I did everything they told me to do and I got the A, and I went to church and I wanted to do the same thing. I wanted to get the A. And it was impossible. I was a bright kid, but it took me two or three years to figure this out, that it was impossible.
“And what really showed me, you know you go to church as a kid whose parents don’t go to church and you feel like an outsider; I went to a lot of different churches as a kid for a lot of different reasons. And you imagine everyone sitting around you, that they’re the insiders and you’re the outsider. And what really got to me, what made me realize this–I guess I was five years into my Christian quest, right? At age 14. (laughter) And what was funny, what I realized, that the other people sitting around me, they were there last week, they were there the week before that. They were members of the church. They were not five years into their Christian quest; they were thirty-five years into their Christian quest. Thirty-five years or more. They had had the time to have done all the things that the preachers told them to do, they had had time to do all their homework. And here they were sitting with me, listening to the same thing I was listening to, to this guy at the front of the room telling them that they weren’t getting an A. That they weren’t good enough. That they had to try harder. In general. That they had to do more, that they had to give more, that they had to think more–nope, not that last one so much. But more was needed before they could consider themselves good, not even A, material. And that blew my mind. And I left the church, in a sense. I mean I still went to church, but not much.
“I had gotten to know some of these people, and I knew how they lived their lives, and I had such an unbelievable respect for them that it hurt me, to sortof watch their faces as they were told — again — that they were vile sinners. In need of Christ’s grace so much that they were worthless without it. It made no sense.
“But the point I wanted to make here was that even back then, and this is kind of cute, I used to take this catalog, I used to make a list, you know, ‘What are my sins?’ And I’d get the book out, and I used to get upset, you know, that there wasn’t a longer list of rules. Because my sins were always not very interesting or any.
“So my list was usually ‘lying’ or ‘none.’ But I tried to make my list longer: I looked for things, like not cleaning my room enough, things like that. But there was nothing about that, so I couldn’t get away with it.
“It’s actually really fun to eliminate lying from your life, Pat, you know this, once you figure out how to do it. It takes bravery. All you have to do is confess to people what you really don’t want to say. I tried to teach little kids this idea, of a ‘really good truth.’ One would say ‘I broke, I stole your jewelry,’ and I’d be like, ‘Way to not lie.’ Which, she, she loved that, I don’t know. She might have. She’s a complicated girl. Anyway, listeners, if you do that enough times, let’s say if you do four big not-lies, it’s easy not to lie going forward from there.
“But I would look at this list and be like, ‘Yeah, I’m not having sex with anyone, so that cuts out a lot of this.’ What else was in there…I wasn’t going to kill anybody, I wasn’t going to steal anything, and then there was covet: my friend Wendy had a lot of board games, but I thought it was good that she had the board games. And a ping pong table. She had one of those, but I wanted her to have it.
“Pat, what I’m saying here, and I hope I didn’t get to personal, is that I don’t think most people sin very much. I’m really serious about people being good people. It’s not like I don’t care if they ‘sin.’ I care. I care a lot. I’m not one of those people who just doesn’t care if people do bad things or not.**
“I care though, I care a lot. But I just think in general that people don’t sin very much.”
———–
Now if a guy cuts me off in traffic on purpose, he’s trying to hurt me. I don’t know what else would be a sin! But if you walk up to me on the street, a stranger, and I look you in the eyes and spit on the ground, do you think God cares? I don’t. Is my spit going to hurt you? Are you going to catch a cold? Is there a chance some of it might get on your shoe? Now it’s a little bit different if I take my 2 and a half tons of steel moving at sixty-five miles and hour and try to rub it up real close to yours, isn’t it.
I seriously hope this shows you what a different view of the world the physical view is, compared to the view that we may or may not have in our heads, which comes from our intentions. Your intentions are all yours. They physical world is the place we share; that’s where people get hurt or don’t. Car crashes hurt. Spit doesn’t.***
Unless you have AIDs.
Or hepatitis.
I used to volunteer at a prison a lot, and one time I came in and all the guards had hazmat suits on. “Come on in!” they said.
“Come on in?!” I said. “Why are you wearing a hazmat suit?”
They said, “Don’t worry about it. Come on in.”
“No, I think I need to know the answer to that one before I come on in,” I said.
“No,” they said. “So-and-so lady inmate got mad, and she was spitting at us, and we don’t know who has what, so we had to put the hazmat suits on.”
And I was like, “Where is so-and-so lady inmate now?”
“No, she’s in solitary confinement, so come on in.”
(just a note, don’t mind: 1:52:15,1:53, 1:53:20 – change the words)
1:53:50 – 1:54:10 lazy
1:59:45 – end that article – (2:00:00 – 2:00:01 Olivia Newton John)
**This class of people does not exist. See Where are the dumb.
***Jesus spit.
Graduate of 12 years of solid American public schooling typing this right now.
PS: I dictate this sh__. No edits.