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Nikita on Bass
I have an on again off again relationship with a young lady. She is a fundamentalist Christian. She’s pretty, and has the personality of a little girl. Basically the relationship works this way: we date for a while. She warms up to me. And then when some real progress is about to happen, she pulls back. At that point I decide to move on—until the bad memories die down, and I decide to give her another chance.
Now, by “progress” I am not implying that we are about to have sex. She doesn’t want to have sex before marriage. I have no problem with that.. What I mean is far more basic: stuff like holding hands, kissing, and so on: the normal dating procedures, in other words.
As I said, she is very attractive. She is in her 50s, and I have seen 20something kids come on to her. She’s so naïve that she’s completely unaware of what is going on.
It’s to the point that I can see certain personality types in her. Right now, she is in the Chelsea Churchgoer phase: nothing matters except that I go to church. Some of her phases approach acting like a normal person. But Chelsea Churchgoer is the norm.
She wanted me to go to a new church. The last two churches she dragged me to were McChurches: converted warehouses, with a dumbed down viewpoint designed to appeal to as wide a demographic as possible. Such things can be funny, if you’re in the right mood.
She switches churches more often than some people change their socks. She had taken me to a Pentecostal church once: it reminded me of a Nazi party rally run by Daleks. Picture Rudolf Hess’ extreme praises for Hitler, substitute the name jesus for Hitler, and think of it being delivered in a stiff, robotic voice, and you’ll have some idea of the proceedings. This new church was Pentecostal, and weird in a more friendly way.
I walked into the church. Trouble already: some parishioners were on their hands and knees, praying out loud: a certain sign of weirdness. The pastor looked like some sort of bizarre cross between John Hamilton (the actor who played Perry White on the old Superman TV show) and Nikita Khrushchev. Around his neck was an electric guitar. Picture Nikita Khrushchev with an electric guitar, and you have an idea of how bizarre the scene was. In the background was another character: a crew cutted man with a suit 20 years out of date and an acoustic guitar. If you’ve seen the film “Top Secret,” you probably remember the scene where these East German singers were in the background. This guy had that same look, only without the sunglasses.
I looked around. There were less than 20 people total in the church. I suspect that everyone there shook my hand, giving me the bland “Glad you’re here” greeting. It was all done automatically: not out of sincerity, but out of some sort of sense of obligation: more like a military salute than a greeting.
The parishioners reminded me a lot of the footage I’d seen of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints church members: long, pinned back hair on the women, long dresses, out of date suits on the men. If I wanted to prove to people that christians had no individuality, I’d found the right place.
The pastor mentioned me by name. I suspect I was the first new person there in months.
They started with music. And they followed that up with…music, after that… music. It was twangy, corny country gospel music.
The pastor began with a joke, or at least I assume it was a joke: polite titters came from the audience. “Sermons are like biscuits. Both need shortening.”
And then he got to the meat of the sermon. You don’t just need to believe, you need to receive. The holy ghost was invoked. He’d say “Isn’t that true?” at random moments. The pastor repeated that same theme over and over and over again, yelling louder and louder each time. And as he yelled, something strange happened: his face got redder and redder. He whipped himself up into a frenzy, until his face was so red that it approached being brown. The parishioners were getting into it, waving their arms and so on.
At the end of each sentence, he would say “uh!” and breathe in heavily. He’d have had a good career as an obscene phone caller (picture the speaking style of Reverend Lovejoy in "The Simpsons," amplified tenfold, and you'll have some idea).
But, you know, it’s kind of funny: there was nothing of substance offered. Even if I was a Christian, I wouldn’t have gotten anything out of it. If all he wanted to put across was the subject matter of the above two sentences, he could have sent it in a two line e mail, and saved everyone a lot of time and trouble.
I will say this much for the pastor: he put a lot of weight on speaking in tongues. He mentioned it so often that I was waiting for him to start spouting out nonsense syllables. He didn’t do that. I suspected that he was building on the subject, and that some time in the future, he would start shouting out random sounds. But as I would later find, he was cleverer than that.
Thinking of his reddening face, I can only wonder at the future. What if Nikita has a stroke during the middle of a sermon? I can picture our hero falling down during the middle of a sermon, having a seizure. And his congregation would accept it as a gift of the holy spirit. The guy could be dying in front of them, and they would be shouting “Praise the lord!” and encourage his twitching.
Tell me again how extreme religious beliefs are harmless.
You know, the ancient Romans and Greeks really knew how to put on a show in their temples: they would have complicated mechanical devices, way ahead of their time. Doors would open mysteriously. Statues would cry on cue. Amazing automatons, what we would call robots, would be utilized to help temple goers to believe, and (of course) to donate money.
Nowadays we have pastors who talk baby talk. We’re being cheated.
90 minutes later, the sermon ended. At least it was brief. More pod people coming by to thank me for showing up: wonderfully bloodless. “OK, say hi to the new guy, check. Shake his hand, check. No eye contact, check. No real communication, check.”
I stepped out into the daylight, away from the darkness. My friend was ever so happy. It didn’t matter that I had seen nothing of substance. Apparently I was supposed to absorb any meaning through osmosis. On the positive side, at least no one I respected saw me there.
UPDATE:
I went a second time. Some things became clearer to me. There is a part in every service where the congregation can talk about how good jesus has been to them and so on. This black woman stood up. She started talking and talking and talking. I could tell that the pastor wanted her to shut up. He kept saying things like “Amen, sister” every minute or so, in the hopes that she would get the message and shut up.
She started the standard baby talk which impresses the fundies so much. Speaking incoherently is apparently a gift from god. And here is the thing: the pastor was actually covering his ass in his sermons. Other pastors, in order to impress their flock, put on the speaking in tongues act. This guy was brilliant: he simply brought up the subject before his congregation as a cue. The first time I attended, no one took the cue. This time, that black woman swallowed the hook and started babbling in baby talk.
This way, if someone came forward and rightly said that the babbling was phony, he could simply say that he allows all believers to talk. There’s no way to go after him; it’s the errant congregation members that are at fault.
I must say that I admired the pastor at this point, in the same way that I admire other fraudsters like Charles Ponzi, Frank Abagnale Jr., or John R. Brinkley. It takes a lot of forethought to cover your ass that well.
But back to the black woman. It was immediately apparent that she was a very disturbed individual. I can see why the pastor wanted her to shut up (even though she was giving him what he wanted: baby talk). The congregation no doubt sees a lot of aberrant behavior as being OK, as long as the person doing it says “jesus” every few minutes. But I am certain that there is a limit as to the degree of mental illness they will put up with. There would be some point when the truth would become obvious. It’s far better for the pastor to rein in a member of his flock than risk alienating all of them.
And that’s the problem with a scam like this: you want to encourage your flock to speak; you want them to do the baby talk, roll around on the floor and so on. But you don’t want them going too far. For instance, that nice woman whose schizophrenia caused her to spout off christian-correct babble one week might start talking about invisible aliens beaming x rays into her brain, making her do evil things.
Yes, that pastor has a good scam going. At the same time, it could go sour at any time. If I was him, I’d find an easier con game.
He might actually believe all or some of what he is spouting, which is more the pity. I know that other fundy preachers don’t believe a word of what they’re saying. At the end of one sermon by Peter Popoff (a ‘faith healer’ put temporarily out of business by James Randi), his wife was heard to say to him “We’re going to hell for this one!” Sometimes I wish there really was a hell.
I was tempted to stand up and say something like “Ja, wir haben keinen bananen, wir haben keinen bananen heute.” (Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today). No doubt they would have accepted it as genuine.
I find the whole phenomenon amusing. If someone babbles nonsense sounds, that’s OK—they are speaking god’s language, or some long lost language. Never mind that there is no way to separate phony glossolalia from the real stuff, if any real stuff exists. Which is the more reasonable explanation: that god is manifesting himself yet again in a way that can be easily faked, or that people are faking it all because they want to fit in, impress others, and so on?
As a side note, skeptic James Randi played a recording of someone speaking in tongues to a pastor. The pastor happily translated what the nonsense sounds meant. Randi then went back a couple of weeks later and asked the pastor to translate what he said was another tape. The pastor gave a completely different interpretation. It was the same tape. The sad thing about all of this is that no matter what Randi debunks, people continue believing, because it fills an inner need.
On another occasion, I had injured my hand coming in the church. My female friend asked for someone to pray over the wound. Nothing happened. The wound went on as wounds do.
During that service, a woman offered a testimonial. Proof at last that jesus is real! Her story: she and her husband were driving in a pickup truck. They had to slam on the brakes suddenly. The truck stopped just short of hitting another car.
There it is, nonbelievers: jesus MUST have intervened to make the truck stop. Stepping on the brakes obviously had nothing to do with it. The regular maintenance she did on her truck (including having her brakes checked) had nothing to do with it.
Am I being too harsh? Which is the more reasonable conclusion: that she didn’t get in a wreck because she stepped on her brakes and her brakes worked, or that jesus stepped in and saved the day, working his elfin magic by making sure that her brakes worked? If the second option is true, do all of our mechanical devices work solely because god wills them to? If that’s the case, then every time a device fails (such as a light bulb burns out) then it happened because god wills it. One would think that god has better things to do.
Faith is a pathetic thing, to be supported by all sorts of mental tricks. Atheism is a lot easier: you don't have to make any excuses (christians cover the extreme logical and factual inconsistencies in their beliefs with something called apologetics; there is no such thing as Atheist apologetics). Or as one of the most famous Atheists, Mark Twain, said: "Tell the truth. It's easier to remember."
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