RELIGIOUS IGNORANCE

Parroquia de San Felipe y Santiago de Bejucal (my hometown)

“So, if you were not properly baptized Catholic, then you must be a Jew”

That’s what the little girl said, she lived on the same street we did on the next block. We were all playing in the street when for some reason the conversation came up. I must have been around ten years old then and I remember it as if it was yesterday.

Curiously, the same girl was being teased about being left handed. Then she showed us her left hand that had been obviously struck with some stick and she told us that the nuns at the school where she went told her that using her left hand was giving in to the Devil because left handed people were possessed by Satan, so the nun would hit the palm of her hand repeatedly with a ruler.

I had an aunt who was a very religious Catholic, amazingly enough, on my father’s side we had two Jewish grand-uncles and they gave her the key to the house the family left behind in Spain hopefully to return someday after they fled the Inquisition. She hung the key on top of the front door. This aunt would say to one of her 7 kids whenever one would fall and scrape a knee “Now, what did you do wrong to have God get angry at you and punish you with a boo-boo?”

Our next door neighbor in Cuba refused to eat meat on Fridays because she said the Church prohibited it…it was, as she explained: “like eating Christ’s flesh”. I can’t take that imagery of cannibalism out of my mind.

Just down our street, on the road that led out to the cemetery, right on the railroad tracks you would find almost on a daily basis a bag with one or more dead chickens; these were deposited there as some sort of Santeria ritual. I felt so sorry for the chickens that had to pay with their lives to bring validation to some obscure cult instead of doing what any self respecting chicken would do: to give up their lives so we could have arroz con pollo Sunday.

But even as a youngster, raised in a very superstitious culture, I was not buying into it, I could not wrap my mind around all these outlandish superstitions. I was fortunate that neither my father nor my mother were very religious…my dad did dabble a little into Spiritualism but he was as agnostic and as opposed to organized religion as anybody I have ever met. My mom hated to be dragged to church and often would find excuses not to go to weddings and the like. She did use in her everyday speech phrases that she probably picked up from the people around her like: “ojalá” (from the Arabic let Allah allow it) and “que Dios te bendiga” but I don’t think there was one religious fiber in that woman’s body.

Lavish NY funeral for salsa queen Celia Cruz

My mom passed away this past January 31^st and even in her last days, when she was coherent we had a conversation about the possibilities of there being a “hereafter” and that sort of thing and she never recanted her stance on her opposition to organized religion.

She also wanted to be cremated like my dad was and she even mentioned the reaction of her friend when my dad passed away and she asked when the funeral was going to be. My mom said to her that there was going to be none as he was going to be cremated and the woman responded “so, you’re not going to give him a Christian burial?”

Whenever I hear crackpots like Pat Robertson…and there are hundreds if not thousands of things he has said over the years that are so outlandish and ridiculous; when I hear a Glen Beck or a Tony Perkins, or some other asshole preacher pushing some superstition or embellishing, even exaggerating some Scriptural fairy tale…I absolutely go into apoplexy.