Gods and Other Faeries

Two things happened when I was fourteen years old. I finished reading the Bible cover to cover for the fourth time, and I walked away from church with no interest in returning. As a story teller, I've never been able to make the bible stories blend with the religious meanings attached to them.
     Anyone who can read the shenanigans of Old Testament characters and ascribe a deeper, higher story to them simply confuses me. Anyone who can take the hundreds of conflicting parables and make a cohesive god out of them is too complicated for me to understand. I have the same problem with religion that I have with superstition - there are too many rules.

     For this Halloween blog entry, I'm going to do something I've not done before, and probably won't do again. Amid the yammering of politicians and preachers and media celebrities, a conservative candidate and a taliban spokesman saying the exact same thing (I find it impossible to separate my faith from my politics) and not see the correlation, I'm posting a song I wrote called Talkin' Middle East Blues.
     Happy Halloween.
     Mike

In the beginning, God made day and night
Then Abraham got tired of the Canaanites
So he decided to go off and start his very own clan

Well, he finagled some sheep and a couple of cows
(you can read the bible if you want to know how)
But then he saw the flaw in his little plan

See, he and Sarah did it night and day
They did it in the desert and they did it in the hay
They did it and they did it until they almost wore it out

But Sarah said, "Sorry"
And Abe said "Thanks,
I can't be sure who's shooting blanks
So I'm gonna have to leave it up to you to work this out"

So Sarah gave Abraham a jug of wine
Then she gave him Hagar, the concubine
and nine months later, there was little Ishmael

So it was Sarah who was barren as a dry creek bed
But she couldn't get those pictures out of her head
and it would be an understatement to say she did not take it well

She was in her 70s and she thought she'd had it
But she and Abraham kept going at it
And along came Isaac, her own little bundle of joy

So she said, "Abe, I'm gonna need more room for the baby
A place for the bassinet so do you think maybe
You could get rid of Hagar and that dirty little ugly bastard boy?"

Well, Hagar begged and Abraham whined
But Sarah stood firm and she toed the line
And before you know it, Hagar was on her own

Well, Abraham didn't have to do it,
but he thought it over and he figured, "Screw it,
It's the easiest way I know to keep a happy home"

So with the clothes on her back and a baby at her breast
No food to eat, no place to rest
Hagar began to starve in abject deprivation

But God looked down, and God took pity
And Ishmael lived, and he built a city
And soon he was the leader of a brand new Arab nation

Now we all know that sooner or later
The Middle East will be a nuclear crater
And we're all gonna die trying to fulfill some biblical matter

That was written on papyrus with camel dung
By some dim bulb on the bottom rung
Of the entire human evolutionary ladder

About a naked couple that was left to grapple
with Life and Death and Snakes and Apples
And a God that would let some guy kill 10,000 people with the jawbone of an ass

So, don't you think it's time that we got rid
Of hating somebody 'cause your daddy did
and finally put our history in the past

But, there's only one real question I have for you......
Don't we need better reasons for the things we do?