“Fighting about religion is like arguing over who has the best imaginary friend.”
Yep, that Yassir Arafat. AxeMan has, reluctantly, returned his (very best) imaginary friend to Philip Guston, the rightful owner. AxeMan discovered Arafat’s little morsel in an online comment to Bill Keller’s must read op-ed piece on June 17 about Roman Catholicism; The Rottweiler’s Rottweiler. If only AxeMan could stop fighting. But for quite some time he has been calling himself  the A-word. He’s pretty sure The Creator put him up to it, but he had to ask. “Am I really an atheist?”  “Do you want to be?” said The Creator. “I have read a lot of books where the G-word is prominent, and quite often it has acted in bad faith or in the name of it. But why do you want to know?” “Because I want people to like me,” AxeMan said.  “So stop asking questions.” AxeMan is thinking about all those ultra orthodox people in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he spends a fair amount of his time…
… enough to have to growl at those little boys in black suits who touch him on his arm and ask, “Are you Jewish?” Sometimes he responds, “Are you? I hear your families are so big you have to get welfare. That doesn’t sound Jewish.”  Have a nice day, they say. So he asks The Creator, “Am I Jewish?” The Creator says, “You have more Jewish sap in your grain than Elisabeth Warren has Cherokee, or whatever she’s calling herself.”  “But no Christian?” AxeMan says. “Absolutely not!”  “Good,” AxeMan says, “because there’s a bunch of weirdos up in Hudson. They hang out in front of Planned Parenthood every Wednesday across the road from a creepy church. I wouldn’t want to be associated with any of them.”  The Creator pauses. “But we do have a little Mormon problem. I think they may have baptized my mother after she died. They go after dead Jews, and they may try to get you. But trust me, you are an Atheist. Live with it.”