While we're in the mood for some more Jesus, why not consider the Roman Catholic Church? I've been thinking about just saying I'm Catholic. I'm not going to actually go on with the rest of it, kind of like getting more respect on a Sunday afternoon if you dress up like you went to church, but didn't actually go and sit through it.

The thought bounced around my brain yesterday when I went to my mom's church. It is in a small rural community called Big Lick, and is just about the most picturesque church you've seen. It's laughable how much it looks like an L.L. Bean catalog or Tennessee tourism commercial. I was attending the night service for Christmas Eve, which was two hours long. The service was standing room only, which was nice because that church deserves such positive attention. Everybody and their extended families showed up, equipped with screaming, sugar-filled children. God, those fuckers got annoying.

Moving on, Catholicism. First of all, you have the chicks. You just can't beat 'em, they're amazing. Second of all, if you could get married in a big cool cathedral and surround yourself with big flashy hokum all of the time. You could attend mass, but I don't really know what that would be like since I've never been. Most of the Catholics I know don't go to mass every often, so they couldn't say shit about me not ever going, which I would plan on happening. The architecture is undeniably impressive.

Among the bad aspects, you'd be absorbing responsibility for centuries of shitty ideas, dogma, theology, murder, and other stupidness. I took a class on the history of Western Civilization (required) where two thirds of the class were on how poorly managed Christendom was. There were massacres than we even know about, and the ones we do know about were pretty gruesome. If you want to feel happy about the age we live in, look some of it up on Wikipedia some time.

So help me weigh the possibilities of this. I'm hoping it will open doors instead of bite me in the taint, though the latter is possible for reasons unforeseen.