BY MICHAEL SOZE
Ralf König
Oh, God! Is there a whiter, older man than HIM? What beard is longer than HIM? God or not God is chewed through like old chewing gum, which tastes as bland as the hosts that the pastor used to put on the tongues of us children.
But God does not have a sell-by date, it is tenaciously passed on from one generation to the next. Humans builds telescopes with which he looks up to the edge of the universe and has to realize that he is sitting on a grain of dust that trundles through physics for a cosmic moment. And nevertheless still insists on a saviour who sanded through the desert, died and flew to heaven 2000 years ago.
Enlightenment or not, we want to be redeemed from evil, especially from death! Death is God’s great trump card! If a catastrophe happens somewhere with many dead, the cathedrals are full. Because this cannot be true, the death!
The opposite of death is desire, Hemingway once wrote, I think. Sex is pretty much the most enjoyable thing that can happen to you in life. Sure, I’ve read Lucky Luke, enjoyed friendships, indulged in carnival, swam in the blue ocean and ate duck with red cabbage, but nothing was more blissful for the moment than lying passionately in love under the ass of this or that! Sex is life, lust is the engine of evolution, so the show goes on. Dying on the other hand is less popular.
Of course, someone came up with the idea to polish up the image of death, to take away its horror and on the contrary to demonize sex. Paul, the most lust-hostile of the apostles, had, if at all, his orgasms when he thought about death. And all those who were more afraid of fucking than of dying, emulated him.
Recently a good friend of mine was ceremonially baptized. He had left the Catholic Church years ago, out of indignation at what was being preached from the clerical corner on the subject of sexuality and especially homosexuality, but somehow faith gives him something and he feels more comfortable than sheep among sheep.
When he opened this to me at lunch and invited me to the baptism ceremony, he was a bit meek, because of course he knows what I think of the bimbam, namely that it is bimbam. But I am tired of the subject, I had little desire to raise my voice and speak out against it. If he feels more prepared for the holy sacrament in life, ok, but on the other hand I kindly refrained from sitting in the pew and watching the procedure.
I just can’t take it seriously, mea culpa!
Or my father! All his life, like the entire Catholic family, he had nothing to do with church. Not out of a conscious decision to atheism, but out of pure disinterest. My father took more pleasure in lust. The cupboards in his parents‘ bedroom were stuffed with hardcore productions such as films, photo magazines, novels etc. in silent tolerance of my mother, which gave me a very entertaining puberty.
Much later, when the man was about seventy, he expressed anxious doubts to me about whether it was okay to use pornography or whether it was a sin after all. I could not believe my ears. My father was afraid of the Last Judgment? About porn? At the baptism of my niece’s baby, he even painstakingly got down on his knees in the chapel before some wooden saint! It’s only ten years until I turn seventy (o my God!).
Let me know when I become a believer and wash my head! Just not in the Jordan.
Gay and religious is a balancing act anyway, so the homosexual has to spread his thighs quite a bit. What is written in the Bible and in the Catholic catechism, that is to say, what is said about ‚man with man‘ and ‚depravity‘ and so on, is gladly coughned up. When I drew the Paul comic ‚Antityp‘ for my Bible trilogy, I met a gay and faithful friend for dinner to have a few technical questions answered.
As a child in religious education I was harassed by the confused letters of Paul, but even then I did not understand what the man was trying to get at. And since I am not interested in deliberately insulting religious feelings, but want to know exactly why I am mocking something, I had to find out. So there he sat in front of me, gay, sexually active, intelligent, and believed in Jesus. At some point I had to dig deeper:
Do you really, really, really believe that 2000 years ago one stood up again after three days of corpse and flew to heaven?
He slipped around a bit on the chair and the confession of faith did not come so firmly. But yes, he believed. He also believed that the wafer transforms into the body of the Lord when the bell rings. You have to leave it like that, smile at each other amusedly and toast with a glass of wine. That at least in the restaurant fortunately remains wine and is not suddenly blood.
Like many atheists, I stand in disbelief before the faith. But I am convinced that the greedy, greedy, stupid humanity would need a big portion of spirituality!
Here we are, on this wonderful blue planet somewhere in the middle of the mysterious depth of the cosmos and have the brain to be aware of ourselves, to understand connections, to marvel at existence, and what do we do? And what do we do? Man is fertile, multiplies and makes the world subservient to him, which is exactly the tip God gave us. Thank you, God! And of course they will be right, the religious apocalyptics, the end is near! I don’t have to justify my pessimism, turn on the radio.
At least I can’t reproach myself with the multiplication as a gay man without desire for children, otherwise I try to be ok, eat little meat and not to bother anybody. But it’s a pure pity what we do and what we carry away, destroy, extinguish everything.
And then every morning when I go to the studio I see the friendly smiling Jehovah’s Witnesses and I am tempted to go and ask them if they can’t use their time more sensibly for social purposes than holding up stupid Jesus booklets for hours. But I realize that I am no better! The planet is overheating and I draw gay comics.
And that would be my conclusion too:
Believe it or not, we as a whole are nothing more than virus-like teeming stick figures with teeth, who stuff things in at the top and let things out at the bottom. We are lucky, we are unlucky, we enjoy pleasures and suffer fates. There is no God and we are all going to die. I don’t know what this is all about, what the point is.
So, dear congregation, turn the pages and read the BONER, here you will find support and confidence! A BONER rises up to heaven fullfilled, and the one with the redemption is still to come. So help us God.
