Dear Brother Sam,
How do you get brainwashed young adults to open their mind (sic) and step outside the bible box? These kids are my nieces and they have been brainwashed their whole lives . . . If I even mention anything about no gawd, they cop an attitude.
Love,
Brother Frank DelNiro
Dear Brother Frank,
You want Brother Sam’s advice for what to do or say to believers? My father used to say of advice, “The wise don’t need it and fools won’t heed it.” But here’s mine, such as it is.
Let the believers in your life, the ones you actually give a shit about, know that you expect more of them than simplistic answers. Give 'em standards to live up to. From time to time remind them that they’re selling themselves short. They are smarter, they are better, than they are giving themselves credit for. Convince them that it’s not about you showing them up, but about how smart you know them to be. Do that without coming across as a condescending jerk.
My father also used to say, when he was feeling especially charitable, “You walk in the light that you have.” Now, Brother Sam’s friends are doubtlessly weary of hearing me liken the moral and intellectual luminosity of Christians to the brightness of lightning bugs. Therefore, I henceforth shall forebear that particular simile. After all, the glow of the average lightning bug is, in relation to a Christian ,as the sun is, to, well, the average lightning bug. The light in which they walk (for they have only one another to guide them) is more like that of a lighting bug larvae. You see, lightning bug larvae emit a feeble little glow to repulse predators. Now there’s a goddamn simile. That motherfucker fits tighter’n size-28 ass on a size-42 frog.
You can shine a hundred-million candle-power beam of full-spectrum logic right in their faces, but only if their faces are where the light can get at 'em. If their heads are way up inside their behinds they can’t see anything anyway. They must first remove the head from the ass, which, in this case, would mean admitting that they do not yet know every fucking there is to know about the universe, even if the admission is to themselves alone.
But, if we can infer anything from eight out of ten Americans being Christians, it’s that most folks are perfectly content with that anatomical configuration.
In most cases, no amount of blasting and excavation will extract the head from the butt. Accept that it’ll work its way out of there in the fullness of time or it won’t. You gotta know when to say “Fuck ‘em.” Life is short.
Love,
Brother Sam
