I’ve Gotta Have Faith-a, Faith-a, FAITH. AH!

Halloween is coming up and, down in the Bible Belt, that can mean only one thing: the Devil is coming to eat the souls of your children!

Stop laughing! I’m quite serious.

It’s a well known fact that faith, in general, makes people stupid. In the South, however, religion takes people of already questionable intellect and not only makes them dumber, but injects into them a level of righteous indignation that only grows more furious the closer they come to realizing just how stupid they really are.

There’s nothing quite like watching the Holy Rage wash over a redneck when it dawns on him that he’s willingly participating in a societally-accepted form of being an adult who believes in Santa Claus.

That’s all southern fundamentalists are, really: grown-ups who believe in a magical man who will reward them for being good and punish them for being bad. Everything else, all of the rules and stories, fables and pageantry of the church are just window dressing for the big, fat man in the big, red suit. Or linen loincloth, as it were.

My first real encounter with a southern fundie was with my fifth-grade teacher. She spat out hellfire between English and Math, and brimstone after History, just before Recess. The bitch actually told me that I was going to burn in Hell because I liked Science. Why? Because Science seeks to replace God by explaining him away, of course! Duh!

According to the Bible, the fig tree was the Abercrombie and Fitch of the pre-historic world.

I’ll never forget the night when my mother found me awake in the wee hours of the morning, lying on the floor of the living room, sternly flipping the pages of our family Bible.

“What are you doing?” she asked me, in that certain tone of Mom Voice that teeters on a delicate pivot between Angry Scorn and Fascinated Curiosity.

Not bothering to look up, I just dismissively responded with, “Um…looking through the Bible.”

“Why?”

“Because my teacher told the class I was going to Hell if I still believe in Evolution when I get to school in the morning.”

My mother, a religious woman herself, was taken aback and, much to her credit, I was quickly transferred out of that school. Then again, if she’d never sent me to a Christian school to begin with, maybe my impressionable mind would not have been assaulted by the idiocy of zealots at such an influential age. As it stands, I look back upon the early days of my fifth-grade year as an important time in my life. It’s when I learned how stupid some people can be, although the species continues to find ways to impress me more with each passing day.

Come on, Adam…Think Different!

Like I said, though: Halloween is coming up, and the all the fundies have their undies in knots over it. Thanks to people like the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Jack Chick, the majority of Americans today are too afraid to let their kids go trick-or-treating. Well, there are a couple of reasons, actually.

First, there’s the whole religion angle. Guys like Chick, who produces a seemingly endless amount of evangelical propaganda tracts, distort the facts of history to support their argument that it’s the Devil’s Birthday, or some other form of equally ridiculous claptrap.

They say that Witches and Devil Worshippers adore the holiday as a time to both recruit new members into their dark fold and to offer human sacrifices of innocents (read: kiddies) unto their dark lord. Yes, the Son of Perdition himself lies in wait on the night of Oct. 31, for the saccharine-and-cyanide-laced tasty morsels gifted to him by having the supporting cast of Rosemary’s Baby slip the tykes poisoned candy bars.

As for recruitment, can’t the Prince of Lies be content with enthralling the malleable minds of Dungeons and Dragons players? While I’m sure Beelzebub has his standards (read: no LARPers), surely anyone who’s gone through puberty and is still playing D&D would jump at the chance to sell their immortal souls to Satan, if it meant having five minutes unrestricted access to female genitalia and a +10 bonus to their manhood.

Of all the witches working, she’s the worst.

The second reason that Mommies and Daddies are terrified of trick-or-treating has, in some ways, much to do with the first reason – only it affects the secular crowd, as well. Due to years and years of urban myth, the average parent is convinced that there are crazies out there who do terrible things to Halloween candy every year.

Entire communities embrace this notion. Police encourage parents to be cautious, while hospitals offer free x-ray scans of Little Johnny’s Halloween haul. Why? Because faith makes people stupid.

People who believe in the talking heads on the tv screen, or who have faith in a collective groupthink (if everyone else thinks this, it must be right!), are just as jellyheaded and imbecilic as the idjits who praise God by dancing around with rattlesnakes between hits off a strychnine bottle, who later wonder why their preachers keep dying.

You touch it this time, Jane.
No way! It’s your turn, Dick!

The problem with all of the paranoia is that it’s all based on the stupidity of urban myths. Don’t believe me? Check out Snopes for the details, but the basic idea here is that there is not now, nor has there ever been, any outbreak of horrible murders due to razor blades in Snickers bars or cyanide in Fun Dip. It’s just not true.

So why do people insist on insisting that things are verifiable fact when they are anything but? I’ll give you three guesses, but by now you should only need one: Faith makes people stupid! Have I driven that concept home, yet?

Don’t have faith in anything or anyone other than yourself. Oh sure, you can believe in a God, whether he be Jehovah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster – but don’t just take everything that The Church Of [Insert Deity Here] tells you on faith.

The same goes for everyone else, too. (I’m looking at you, Atheists!) It’s fine to not believe in something. I get that. However, if you just blindly follow what “they” say, then you’re just accepting as fact what some “expert” has told you, while you remain blissfully ignorant of the actual data from whence his conclusions were drawn. In other words, you’re placing your faith in someone else, and that’s just plain fucking stupid.

So, kids: pick up a book. Read it. Learn a little something, then go learn a little something more. If you want to be a Christian, be a Christian! If you want to be a God-hating heathen, then be a God-hating heathen! Just understand why you are the way you are, and why you believe the things you do. Is it because you’ve done your own research and made up your own mind, or because you just let someone else go on and do it for you?

Be cool! Stay in school! (Or drop out and go to the damn library, for all I care.) Smart people do smart things. Stupid people do stupid things. And let us not forget the wise teachings of that most learned of ancient scholars:

Stupid is as stupid does.

Want some books? 'Course ya do!

NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

I'll take care of it.

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I'll try to not be boring.

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You've been warned.