Gospel According to Janeane Garafalo

"Organized religions and their dogmas only serve to indoctrinate the participants into sheeplike common behaviors. This type of blind assimilation promotes the popularity of top-forty radio stations and movie sequels. Train your light spirit to shun God. Skepticism towards groups, holy or otherwise, is enriching and makes you a far more entertaining drinking companion." - Janeane Garofalo

Oh, my, what a remarkable statement for a celebrity to make, and no wonder far right wing dinosaurs like Bill O'Reilly regularly rant against her.  One only wonders if she had read Maslow, who wrote a remarkable book (he wrote several) titled Religions, Values and Peak-experiences (1964).  In some circles, Maslow was an enlightenment guru and "father of humanistic psychology" whose writings about peak experiences led to the est-type human relations seminars of the '70s.  In the 1964 work, Maslow compared church-goers to automatons, mindlessly mouthing rote gibberish week after week after week, no longer even faint carbon copies of the original congregants and incredibly ignorant about the contents of their own Holy Books.  Maslow was a genius.  So what if most of us had our peak experiences in smoke filled rooms?  A peak experience is the only way I could describe the birth of my first son, which I witnessed.  (He pee'd all over the doctor who said at least the plumbing works. Yeah, I know, they say that to every Dad.  So what?)

"Train your light spirit to shun God"!  Wow, that is almost as good as Luis Buñuel's statement, "Thank God I'm an atheist."  Well, yeah, Janeane may be some pagan or other heretical person, not so much anti-religion as anti-organized religion.  Me, too.  I think people like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council makes all Christians look bad.  I think that when the Catholic church pushes legislation designed to interfere with a woman's reproductive rights, e.g. making them see sonograms, or forcing a waiting period so they can be "counseled" by evangelicals, makes the RCC guilty of 1st Amendment violations that ought to revoke their tax exempt status.  (In the case of the RCC, it should be banned entirely in the U.S. until it convinces the Department of Justice that it has not hidden or assisted priests to avoid prosecutions for child molestation -- obstruction of justice by U. S. Code Annotated.  Randall "Sickhead" Terry should be locked up in a mental institution while we are at it.  All such laws violate the First Amendment.

But Janeane makes her point: Quit looking to religious dogma to supply your man-made laws.