Losing my faith...

I lost my faith in love during the Bicentennial, when my first marriage evaporated in a mushroom cloud of adultery and betrayal.

I lost my faith in justice sometime during the 28 years I’ve waited for the police to make an arrest in the serial murders of my father and three other people.

I lost my faith in truth and integrity when the news media became nothing more than the arm of the Ministry of Propaganda, as dictated by the government du jour.

I lost my faith in America when it re-elected a grinning, dog-eating Kenyan Muslim socialist pimp, who continues to rape and rob the nation like it’s a 14-year-old runaway he picked up in the bus station.

I lost my faith in doctors when the surgeon who is supposed to be supplying the best form of treatment for my cancer instead tried to involve me in an insurance fraud, and now refuses treatment of any sort. (Not that I mind so much, on the basis that just as you don’t yell at the people who prepare your food in a restaurant, you don’t get crossways with someone who has access to your innards with a sharp instrument.)

I lost my faith in people in general when I realized Dr. Goebbels was right: almost anyone will believe The Big Lie if you repeat it loudly and often enough.

I lost my faith in myself when I realized that being a good writer, a competent musician, a well-spoken raconteur, and a generally decent, patient person was not enough to validate my ticket in the parking lot of life. Like Brando in “On the Waterfront”, I coulda been a contender, but I somehow defaulted and threw the fight.

I never had any faith in politicians or preachers, whom Ayn Rand rightly dubbed “thugs and witch doctors.” The thugs exercise power over others in the physical realm, from the making of laws to their enforcement at the point of a gun; the witch doctors exercise their power in the theater of the mind, preying upon the hopes and fears of the powerless, and urging them to submit to the will of the thugs. As church and state exist today, they are co-dependent entities, neither of which has any relevance to the spiritual relationship between the individual and the Deity.

I don’t know if I ever entirely lost my faith in God, but I had a fifteen year flirtation with agnosticism, which I now regard as an arrogant intellectual pretension. Once I realized that the world is what we make it, and a Higher Power gave us the freedom to do so, I got over it. Faith is, by definition, an indefinable belief in the unprovable.


I still have love in my life, though it is somewhat conditional. I try to comply with those conditions, because that love is precious beyond belief. When everything else falls into irrelevance, the fact that one other person on this planet believes in me and accepts me is enough to literally bring me back from the dead. Just ask Ms. Possum, whose real name was on my lips when a doctor revived me from a near-death trauma.

I still have my faith in God, which is linked to the premise of Blaise Paschal’s wager: if I am disappointed yet again when I solve the mystery of death, I have lost nothing by believing. If I’m wrong in my doubts, then a better form of existence basking in an unconditional love is waiting, and I pray daily that I’m somehow deserving of it. The tenets of the spirituality and religion I subscribe to tell me that faith, coupled with a willingness to do right things in spite of my human failings, is enough to bring me into this better realm that transcends the difficult, often miserable and sometimes marvelous thing that we now call “life.”

I’ve lost my faith in most things we consider important in this life, so I’m betting the farm on the spark that still flickers and bends in the direction of Whatever Comes Next.

As for the bastards, degenerates, wastes of protoplasm and epitomes of evil that share this mortal coil with me, I’ll fight them ‘til I die. That’s just how my DNA cooked out in the cosmic microwave.