Take this piss
Humanity’s various belief systems often beggar belief. From ghosts to Gods to goblins: we swallow all and we hallow all.
So, it wasn’t worth more than a slightly raised eyebrow when the Indian police announced that they had discovered a stash of hundreds of human skulls and thigh bones and arrested a gang for allegedly smuggling them to the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan for use in Buddhist monasteries.
The investigating police officer Ravinder Nalwa mentioned that,
During interrogation they confessed that the hollow human thigh bones were in great demand in monasteries and were used as blow-horns, and the skulls as vessels to drink from at religious ceremonies.
Waste nor, want not. Or, A stiff saved in time, etcetera, etcetera.
Then, there is all kinds of weird stuff, commonly & lazily referred to as ‘tribal.’ Like burying babies alive because they look a bit peaky – or are part of a set.
(More crazy still, of course, the mindset of the so-called civilised world who think all this tribal shit – like baby killing, widows being forced to climb upon their dead husband’s funeral pyres or clitoridectomy – is charmingly quaint and should be respected and preserved at all cost.)
Still, if you want really weird, there is always ‘formal’ religion. There’s Judaism, which is based on the concept that some extremely sadistic God saw fit to nominate the Jewish tribes His ‘chosen.’ Or, as the poet said,
First thing they do
is cut up your dick.
Then they tell you,
Don’t eat this and that.
They take you to a desert
you had no wish to visit in the first place.
The promised land, they say -
of bombs and snipers.
And everybody hates you
(and you can’t stop bickering
about the cost of living
and the price of milk and honey)
The chosen - right.
One thing you know,
Next time you’ll see a burning bush
you’ll piss it out.
One demented off-shoot of Judaism is Christianity. Those fish people are truly funny buggers. When they don’t burn you as a witch, crusade the Hell out of you or enslave you, they will try to sell you stuff. They are a true Salvation Sales Army. And they’re not remotely bothered by small matters as ethics – or even taste. There truly is something for everyone, from Jesus air-fresheners to Last Supper mints.
The second, even more feeble child of Judaism is, of course, the happy house of Islam. And they all lived together in a little crooked house, as the nursery rhyme goes. Yes, indeedy do. The followers of Mohammad are really into some strange and unhealthily perverse shit.
Like telling their women that’s it their fault when a Muslim man rapes them – and, of course, then punishing, sometimes even killing the women for having been forced to have extramarital sex.
And they’re very funny about books. They really don’t like them. Hell, they don’t even like cartoons.
Although, and fair is fair, the Muslim world seems to be changing its collective small mind on that one. News reached us that that unlikeliest of cabals, Rushdie and his Danish cartoonists, can sleep easily once again.
Some representatives of the highest religious authorities in Egypt have categorically stated that it is perfectly alright – no, a blessing even – to take the piss out of Mohammed.
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