Not as Cruel as the Baptists
A true story
“Not as cruel as the Baptists!” he bellowed to the whole room. His unwarranted religious pronouncement hung in the now-silent air thickly. All attention now on him, he graciously began his public tirade.
“Holding snakes!?” he accused poisonously.
Someone took his bait – “Snakes?” she asked.
“Oh yes - it’s allllll right there in their BUY-BULL – they pick up snakes and believe they won’t be poisoned”
‘’Like those crazy babbling people?” she asked.
“Ohhhhh no, those are Pentacostals!” he shouted like an indictment, then, extending his arms like stigmata and convulsing with violent babbles, eyes lolling to the ceiling and head back.
The group watched, laughed, shook their heads. This act was just like it, they agreed, just like those Christians. Those Believers.
“Yes, it’s all in their book – you just gotta have faith. It’s all about faith; no matter what it says, you just believe it. Word for word. Hate for hate.”
The group clicked their tongues knowingly and glanced at each other in shared disgust. ‘Those foolish people of faith,’ they intoned as the performance continued.
“But they’re all the same, the blind faithful! Don’t ask questions, just believe as you’re told! Take the church’s hand and just keep walking. Hate the gays? Sure. Pray to some God to get good stuff? Sure. Believe in some old book that’s rife with errors? Sure! Why not?”
The generalizations and laughter continued until everyone had agreed and agreed and agreed and then swept their brows in relief that at least they weren’t suckers for such idiocy: that at least they knew how to be egalitarian, open-minded good people of political correctness, who use their logical faculties correctly, who approach the confusing world with rational, faithless certainty and walk the earth unfettered by sky-beings and sin and wrongdoing, without irksome absolute truths paving their trail or anchoring them to the ground like so many rusty, heavy chains.
Such injustice to a holy God, such a simple maligning of something so good; yet, like wiping a blind hand over the intricate glories of a newly-grown frost they washed over the crystalline things of God.
“Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
As the Savior uttered to his killers, in love and in desirous hope for them to peer more closely at that frost, those glorious thousands of so many icy fingers enrapt and arched into impossibly intricate lacework.