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Back during the election My Boo got in trouble for saying about small town Pennsylvanians, that they "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."


Ted Nugent, although I'm not sure he's religious. But he sure likes guns!

I personally agreed but cringed as Hillary, whom I would have voted for but don’t love, was able to capitalize on this mistake. Her hubby was my first presidential boo though, I was NOT hating on Monica…power is sexy, what can I say. And those sparkly eyes and grin. Don’t mess with Bill! But anyway My Boo was speaking the truth but not just about small town Pennsylvania.

Look at those big, strong yet graceful hands!

People DO cling to God and religion. Black people in the hood cling to guns and pit bulls too. It is human nature to want to believe in something. We need a safety net that lets us off the hook and gives us something to look forward to. Heaven, reincarnation into a higher caste, “the man that has been prepared for you”, whatever floats your boat.

What made me think of this? Yesterday I saw this dude who looked just like Ned the Wino. He was sitting on a park bench, chillin like only someone who doesn’t have a job to go back to can chill at that time of day. Perhaps he had just gotten off his shift or something and was waiting for somebody else to get off work so they could go do something together. But he kind of looked underemployed to me.

For those of you too young to remember, Ned the Wino was a character on the legendary sitcom, Good Times (spun off from Maude which was spun off from All In The Family). The oldest son in the family was JJ played by the hard-on-the-eyes comedian Jimmy Walker, and he was an artist. One day he painted a portrait of a black Jesus and hung it in the living room after which the family enjoyed a string of good luck. Now, the whole premise behind the show was this family’s bad luck, hence the ironic title Good Times. So clearly, good things actually happening deserved like, a whole plotline because it was so unusual. I swear those folks had the worst luck trying to get out the projects. Everytime they were on the verge somebody died (James, season four, car accident in Mississippi), broke their leg (Keith, bye bye NFL) or got betrayed by their lover (Wilona, too many examples to count).

Well, eventually somebody noticed that Jesus looked just like the bum on the corner – a dude called Ned the Wino. Until that they thought it was Jesus blessing the family with good fortune. Turned out it was just a picture of a regular old drunk in a robe. And sort of the moment they stopped believing the good things stopped happening and they went back to their hard luck life. So maybe it was the belief itself that brought the good fortune, or luck, or Jesus. And of course the fact they switched from the white Jesus to the black one. Right? I don't know, it was a cute episode.

Ok…what was my point? Oh yeah, well this dude looked precisely like Ned the Wino to the point where I almost went up to him like … “Ned, what’s up homey? You still a drunk? Still posing for Jesus portraits? Can I take a picture of you and put it on my wall?”


Ned the Wino talks to the matriarch, Florida, in another episode

Also my other point is…um…maybe this is the whole point? I dunno. Anyway I am continually amazed by human beings’ deep need to believe in something outside of the force of human action to arrange events in their favor, and to explain events that are not in their favor. We are collectively obsessed with this higher being concept and have waged wars, committed genocide, drawn party lines, excommunicated and executed and burned people at the stake over it. But what’s that really all about? Creating order out of chaos and giving us a way to sleep at night with some sort of reassurance that it’ll be better tomorrow and at the very least, it’ll get better when we die, which is inevitable. So like, a 100% satisfaction guaranteed sort of thing. Who doesn’t like a full warranty?


Joan of Arc, now a Saint. How ironic.

But…what if things don’t go your way because it’s YOUR FAULT or even somebody else’s but you just gotta live with it, no relief in sight, no answer to your prayers? And what if lucky things happen to you randomly? Like buying a winning lottery ticket or narrowly avoiding getting hit by a bus? What if it turns out you're very very lucky or very unlucky? Do we think that people who don’t win the lottery or do get hit by that bus don’t have a picture of Ned the Wino on the wall? Of course they do! They say their prayers too. I was in church several years ago and the pastor goes, “There were no saints (Pentecostals) in that World Trade Center! Because we are SAVED!” Well how dumb is that? I never went back to that church again, which is awkward because my grandfather founded it but whatever. One of my girlfriends who still believes in God for some reason – I guess this same human nature reason or maybe because she's Catholic - is getting a divorce and has come to believe that God just has favorites and she’s not one of them. These people must all be homeys with Ned the Wino. Frankly no one in the world could ever say the divorce is her fault in any way, including her soon-to-be-ex husband. But yet she’s divorcing after a 9 year relationship, she wants kids, and has an alarmingly short shelf life remaining on that trade. Bitter is not the word.

So the question is, what happens when you find out the picture on your wall is just a drunk on the corner, incorporated accidently into your religious iconography by a teenager’s unconscious mind? Will your good fortune disappear? What happens if whatever you pray for never happens and like all middle aged and old people you turn your focus towards praying for Heaven and then you die and nothing happens? Kind of anticlimactic, eh? Would you be liberated and empowered here on Earth by the notion that nobody is in charge but the collective of humanity? Would it motivate you to do good work and inspire good work in others or do you need the promise of Heaven to do that? Would it scare you half to death? Would you be relieved of the crippling effect of hopeless hope and be able to get down to business and make something good happen? Or would you experience the existential nausea that Jean-Paul Sartre so eloquently described in La Nausee and become paralyzed?

What if there is no God?