Christian Schlock

Dear E-Diary,

I credit my mother with my being an atheist, which is funny, because she's the only Christian in the house. The reason? She has good taste.

Mom always taught me to be wary of those solicitous Christians everywhere who try to get you to come to their church or buy their cheap tawdry merchandise or join their Ponzi-Scheme-cults. She hated hated hated bad taste, and it's not a coincidence that most of the bad taste we saw came out of "Christian aesthetics," Including what she called "Jesus is my boyfriend music," velvet paintings, light-up artifacts, and Helen Steiner-Rice greeting cards. She knew good poetry, art and music, and we saw very little of it that was Christian that came from after the nineteenth century. Our reference point? "The Praying Hands." Albrecht Duhrer's "The Praying Hands" was everywhere in the 1970's: painted on velvet , hovering like "Thing" over the dining-room table, brass bookends, or 30 feet tall in a park.

Christians: where the hell did you go wrong? What happened to the Michelangelos, the Handels, the Bachs, the Dantes? Is it the idea that anything that comes out of your "creativity" is wonderful because it's for Jesus? Are you all just congratulating yourselves on your piety? Is it because your culture forbids you to criticize anyone's work if it's about your white skinny bearded sandaled one? Because if you allowed criticism again, maybe you'd weed out the horrid crap that your culture is insinuating on the world. Doesn't your God deserve better from you?

Well, maybe it doesn't. Carry on.

Thanks for listening, e-diary.