Generally overzealous church people ruin stuff.

One of the things I remember well in Kodiak was the Annual Buskin River Raft Race that took place in the spring. It served as a pretty good vent for cabin fever and was a pretty good fund raiser for one of the local clubs. I may be wrong but I think it was sponsered by the Lions Club.

It was a race down a piece of the Buskin River and had six mandatory beer stops. By the time someone had completed the race they generally had a pretty good glow on. Actually the beers were only 7 ounces each if I recall.

It was a great release after being cooped up all winter or busting your ass in the Bering Sea fishing for crabs. We would laugh about it for weeks afterwards.

Now Alaska has always drawn its population heavily from the four M s. Mercenaries, Missionaries, Malcontents and Misfits. The mercenaries are there to make a buck, the malcontents and misfits are there to get away from the Lower 48 to a place where they are accepted and/or left alone.

The missionaries, on the other hand, are there specifically to ruin things and turn the place into an extension of the Lower 48 and are just one colossal pain in the ass as far as I am concerned. They do it under the guise of doing God's work. Truth is they have a track record of ruining just about everythng they touch.

 The church people came along and thought they knew what was good for us and they raised hell over the raft race and it went away.

It seemed that everything that was fun or outrageous went away during the years I spent in Kodiak and it got to slowly be a less colorful and fun place to live. When you went to figure out why it was almost always the doings of the church people.

I would imagine that a number of church people are reformed drunks simply because there is nothing worse than a reformed drunk. They have seen the light and they want to take the light and blind everyone else with it.

As time went on my desire to punch a certain hypocritical preacher in the face grew and grew. Preacher or no preacher, that guy deserved a good hickory shampoo. 

Self-rightous people like that are miserable to be around because they always want to eliminate what they don't like. The attitude I have toward most things I don't like is to simply stay away from them. Who am I to tell someone that they can and can't do if it doesn't hurt me or rob from me?

Of course, it it hurts me or robs me, then that's a different story.

The way I see things is that crimes have to have a victim. The church people were not victims no matter how you slice things. I'd have liked them if they had simply kept their noses out of where they didn't belong.

Incidentally it isn't just Christians that are a royal pain in the ass, either. Every time I see militant Muslims babbling about trying to get Sharia law passed I get just as angry. To me it is all the same. It is people trying to ram their religious beliefs down everyone else's throat.

Actually I sometimes think that if someone volunteers to be governed by Sharia law that's fine by me. They can mutilate each other's genitals, stone each other, hack each other up all they want as far as I am concerned. I'll just sit by, eat a ham sandwich, drink a beer and watch. I got ten bucks on the bearded guy with the big scimitar.

Of course, if the bearded guy with the big scimitar even looks at me cross-eyed, it's Indiana Jones time and out comes the .455 Webley. 

Now that I think about this a little, maybe you ought to put the militant Christians into a big pen with the militant Muslims and let them settle their differences.

The rest of us could watch the carnage. It could be quite a pay-TV event. Afterwards we'd take the winners and put them on a boat headed to a tropical paradise on earth. Then along the way to the tropics we park the boat next to USS Oriskany.

The ship could then serve as an artificial reef and get listed on a Scuba website of the ten best dives in North America.

It would save us ALL a lot of trouble.

Incidentally, some of the nicest people I have ever met are deeply religious. They simply know when to butt out of things. What's more they don't necessarily fall into the 'church people' category.







To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY