Bless me father for I have sinned. It has been, shit, well over a decade since my last confession. In that time I have sworn profusely, violated myself sexually, gleefully engaged in acts of wanton sacrilege and rebelled against pretty much everything imaginable and to be completely honest I have no plans to give up any of this shit in the near future. I have also lost my mind and my faith and managed to gain the latter back to some degree from some pretty fucking strange places. Lets just say I found more then one prophet, though there both Jewish heretics with bitch'n beards....
Maybe I should just start again at the beginning.
I was born and raised in a relatively conventional, reasonably conservative, mostly Irish Catholic family and in the beginning everything went pretty smoothly. God made sense and so did his rules, more or less. I excepted the Bibles absurdities with the unblinking devotion of a dewy eyed babe in arms. Catholic school wasn't always fun but at least on some level it made sense. Do on to others and all that noise. But somewhere around eleven or twelve things became more complicated. The rules still made sense but it became abundantly clear that those enforcing them held themselves to a different standard if they held themselves to ant standard at all. My teachers and priests used the Bible like a bludgeon towards anyone who didn't fit in to there little cookie cutter, parochial utopia, myself included. I dress in all black and suddenly I'm an infidel. I speak my mind or god forbid ask a question and I'm a heretic. I question my sexuality in a moment of teenage doubt and I'm fucking firewood. Meanwhile these figures I once trusted practiced hypocrisy like a competitive sport. Bearing false witness against there neighbors with reckless abandon and gleefully cheering on senseless war and capitol punishment while loudly proclaiming themselves pro life and pissing on anyone who so much as brings up the complications of rape and rusty hangers. Suddenly Jesus' table didn't seem to have a place for me or any of the other misfit toys. I found myself rudderless, lost in a deep dark sea of doubt and resentment. I had no more patience for god or his Bible thumping lunatics. So I lapsed and hit the proverbial pavement in search of something else to believe in. Some place where freaks like me belong.
After some soul searching and trial and error, I discovered the majestic fury of punk rock music but it was more then just music to me. It was salvation. From the moment I heard Iggy Pop snarl " I am the worlds forgotten boy" I was hooked for life. Finally, I had found a place where I didn't have to hide who I was, a place for the freaks, the geeks, the queers and the sluts. Not only did we belong but we were celebrated, not in spite of our transgressions but because of them. But there was still something missing. I found my church but I still needed a creed, a jihad, a crusade, something to fight for, something to believe in.
My search for something righteous to smash my fists against began with punk rock heroes like Joe Strummer and Jello Biafra, who turned me on to the wonderful world of left wing radicalism. After flirting for a while with anarchism, I stumbled upon the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Something about there philosophy clicked with me. A system in which people came before profit and mercy came before greed, where the needs of the many outweigh the desires of the few. Marxism fit like a fucking glove. It made perfect sense to me. It also felt strangely familiar. That was because the teachings of Marx were nearly identical to the teachings of Christ that I grew up believing. Jesus too stood firmly against greed, gluttony, exploitation, empire and even the tyranny of organized religion. That's why the Romans and the temples decided he had to die. Like Che Guevara, Jesus shook the cage of injustice to loudly and the bastards took him out.
It hit me, Jesus was a socialist and Marxism was scientific Christianity. Not only that but Christ was something of a punk as well. He didn't give a flying fuck about the status quot. He was nothing like the sanctimonious tight wads who bandy his name about today. He didn't hang with the high and mighty. He rolled with the freaks, the geeks, the queers and the sluts. His boys were peasants and his girl was an ex prostitute and they didn't play nice with the fucking powers to be. He turned over there tables and fearlessly defied there authority. Jesus Christ was the worlds forgotten boy, the one searching to destroy or as he once put it "I came not to bring peace but with a sword". Christ didn't come to punish freaks like me. Like Marx, he came to lead us to victory against the pious dicks who spat on us. There wasn't a place at the table because my place was in the fucking mosh pit.
So here I am father, a punk, a Marxist and oddly enough in my own weird way a Christian again. I honestly don't know if I believe in god but I do believe in the righteous path, a long, winding path that leads from Christ to Marx to Iggy and hopefully to me. My sins may be many and counting but I have the better part of a lifetime to make up for them by fighting the good fight. Let that fight be my penance and let it begin on this blog.
In the name of Jesus Christ, Iggy Pop and Karl Marx, Amen.
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