Funism: the New Religion

By Richard T. Halfpenny

The hilarious tale of a gambler who dreams he died
in a mysterious car crash and faces judgment day in a
poker tournament with Vishnu, Moses, Jesus, Buddha
and Mohammed. It is a satirical, provocative, defiant,
eclectic expose of the absurdities that separate common
sense and religion. No sacred cows are spared. It
emphasizes the wars fought in the name of religions
and Gods. Funism, a new religion is juxtaposed with
the five major organized religions. The fiery debate
encompasses: theology, philosophy, ethics, culture,
history, psychology, economics, gambling and politics.
The absurdities of religions may seem innocuous to
realists, but when fanatics act on them, the repercussion
can wreak havoc in society, and among nations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479726646

Richard T. Halfpenny

Richard Halfpenny is a father, university graduate, U.S. Army veteran, former history teacher, stockbroker, real estate broker, avid sportsman, world traveler, Alaskan gold prospector, student of comparative religions, and the founder of Funism. He presently resides in Atlantic City. He can be contacted at [e-mail]

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

IF YOU CAN’T TAKE A JOKE—DON’T READ THIS BOOK.

IN LOVING MEMORY OF THE PERFECT SCOUNDREL.

He was spared a lingering cancerous death when his car slammed into a strip club on an icy February night in Ancora, New Jersey. Miraculously, none of the local voyeurs and church members was injured. The town coalition for clean government and the Third Assembly of the Tabernacle of the Holy Ghost had the gentlemen’s club liquor license revoked on Good Friday. The popular hangout was ruled a threat to neighborhood values.

The firemen arrived on the scene and pried him from the wreck with the Jaws of Life. A cigarette was still smoldering between his bloody lips. It was too late. He hit the bittersweet jackpot—a quick, albeit untimely death.

The rest of humanity was rarely that lucky. Most would meet their maker, taker and judge after a miserable life and the ignominy of dying flat busted and alone.

Livingstone never liked canned obituaries. They were nothing more than post-mortem varnish. They sanitized the Knights of Columbus, Moose, Elks and Lions Club meetings where the dearly departed got sloshed, stoned and gambled for thirty years. The members were usually busy swapping wives, hot numbers from their little black books, and business cards with the death insurance and car salesmen instead of rendering Band-Aid community service projects, which were usually cosmetic promotional stunts.

Joe Doaks read the Bible daily and returned to the Lord after he refused to fight: AIDS, cirrhosis of the liver, a heroin habit and a compulsive gambling addiction. He lost his house, car and hocked his wife’s wedding ring. He didn’t have life insurance and left the material world penniless. His family has been evicted from their studio apartment.

Fat chance you’ll ever read anything close to that in an obituary.

People enjoy reading the obituaries. They want to know what killed the bum. Did he commit suicide, or was he shot in a drug deal? Did his bookie, brother or wife murder him? Some just want to know the deceased’s age and last employer, so they can hustle over and apply for his job. The death of inept stockbrokers was welcome compensation to their clients who lost the family’s nest egg in a can’t miss IPO. Neighbors are thrilled reading the miser who wouldn’t lend a starving writer a penny was mauled to death by his dogs? The crooked Bible salesmen loved them as leads. Your husband loved you so, so dearly, that he ordered this gold plated edition for your wedding anniversary just before he, sniffle, sigh—passed on. The sob-sob spiel rarely failed. The widow coughed up five hundred bucks and was spared the hard close: ‘buy it or you are going to hell’.

The old folks in the neighborhood got a dose of the warm fuzzies reading they outlived the cantankerous SOB that flew the rainbow flag, refused to pick up after his nasty dog, wouldn’t cut the grass or shovel the snow off his sidewalk and hung his brown stained underwear on the front porch. When the ugly were lucky, an empathetic family member sent the paper a picture better than the driver’s license or an old mug shot. Everybody’s favorite is the dearly departed smiling as if they enjoy being dead. It annoyed Livingstone that nothing was ever written in the obituaries what the deceased thought about the condition of the world, the biggest jerks they met, or any indelible last words of advice. He swore that his obituary would be longer than four inches. He’d make damn sure he wouldn’t be forgotten in three days after the funeral. Some night he would write his ‘swan song’, the secret desire of egotistical windbags.

Livingstone was a maverick at heart and angry about the unfairness of life. He spent his adult life drinking, gambling, playing tennis, golf and partying—always marching to the beat of a different drum. He was never a member of a religious or civic organization and none ever asked him to join.

He bet when he died the religion columnist for the town scandal sheet would ignore the ironclad rules of journalism and vilify his literary legacy for defamatory, profane opinions on politicians, prophets, preachers, cultures and religions.

He was forewarned: don’t pontificate, no tedious sermons, don’t lie about how you will be missed by phony friends and relatives, and don’t insult the reader’s intelligence with impossible accomplishments. They know the important historical stuff; keep them in suspense; never assume they can relate to your quixotic battle for truth and justice, and never, ever mock any religion. He would spurn the nitpickers, have fun with the facts and let the readers decide what’s fiction. They can read between the lines.

The longest obituaries are crammed with innuendo written by men who never met Abraham, Moses, Buddha Jesus and Mohammed Their histories have been censored, rewritten and embellished so often that nobody can prove their validity. And, the inquisitive, broad-minded majority will enjoy a contentious, condensed chronicle of world culture, history, psychology and sensible theology.

Community councils always have one indomitable, gadfly whose death brought tears of joy. The person who refused to remain silent, the despised iconoclast who exposed sacred cows, corrupt cops and hypocritical politicians.

Unified nations need a world leader, country or religion to hate and distract the citizens from looking in the mirror. They feel superior when they see others living in self-imposed mediocrity. It’s the Comparative Misery theory.

The examination of collective stupidity is a depressing endeavor best left to the anthropologists and military historians of the opinion that humanity is a greedy, warlike, horde of barbarians, more often than not, led by ambitious sociopaths.

A good story never kills off the protagonist in the first chapter. Nobody wants to read about a dead guy unless he defied the odds and gods and founded a new religion.

Livingstone was that rare innovator. He had nothing to lose unless fairy tales come true and the dreaded judgment day did indeed exist. It’s a dangerous task attempting to prove the emperors of prosperous religions have no clothes.

Questions and doubts concerning gods, heavens, miraculous achievements of saints and prophets existed before we were born and Livingstone would take a fresh look, regardless of the consequences.

CHAPTER 2

Ecclesiastes 4 2:3 And I declared that the dead, who have already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not been, who has not seen the evil done under the sun. Why would God say that?

Livingstone was forced to take his first breath in February 1939. It was before the inventions of: hula-hoops, television, the computer, cell phones, contact lenses, iPods, microwave ovens, jet planes, atomic bombs, ball point pens, panty hose and guys who tattooed swastikas on their foreheads. People smoked cigarettes and grass was for cows; Coke was a drink and mushrooms were for soup, not tea. Colonel Sanders, the Dairy Queen, liposuction, nose and boob jobs were waiting in the wings. Rubbers were for rain and if you knocked up your girlfriend at the drive-in movie, you got married. Bachelors were the leftovers, not TV stars. People never knew what they were missing until the next generation showed them there was always something new under the sun, regardless of what was written in the book of Ecclesiastes.

It was different from other centuries devastated by wars, tornadoes, famines, earthquakes and economic collapse. It was the bloodiest century in history. It was a time of depression, monarchical despotism, ethnic cleansing and the routine battles among the tribes and races. The wars over religious ideology were temporarily overshadowed by two worldwide wars over political ideology.

The rise of Nazism, Fascism, Communism and theocratic dictatorships crushed individual’s aspirations for freedom. The isms were misguided experiments in Utopianism that failed and cost the lives of uncounted millions.

The predictable phases of life: survival, achievement, peer group approval and self-gratification hadn’t changed since mankind lost their tails. The inventions of the telegraph, gunpowder and penicillin enabled armies to kill faster and survive infections longer. The aged, women and children stayed home when the men went off to war to be slain for politics, water, real estate or religion.

Historians recorded battles of noble kings and countries that conquered so and so with the assistance of some infallible God. The virtuous killed the sinners whose false God failed to save their asses.

The fierce God of monotheistic Jews, Christians and Muslims was an invincible, battlefield general, unless they fought each other. God still hasn’t decided whose prayers he likes the best.

It was a rare war that didn’t involve the prophets and clergy cheering on the soldiers until their last gasp. When victory was certain, they eagerly joined the battle fervently hacking and stabbing the wounded pagans. The courageous few who resisted the rallying cry of ‘God and Country’ were labeled traitors and imprisoned, executed or banished.

The ancient war gods: Mars, Ares, Thor and Athena were slowly replaced by Hebrew, Christian and Muslim deities who were adept at establishing themselves with the point of a sword or excruciating methods of persuasion. The newcomers: polytheists, resurrectionists and monotheists purported to be less belligerent and more rewarding than their predecessors, but history paints a far different picture.

Few episodes in history can match the three hundred and fifty year reign of terror initiated by Catholic Church during the Spanish-Portuguese monarchy’s attempt to expel non-Catholics from their countries. It highlighted the absolute necessity for the sublimation of religion to the authority of a secular government.

Livingstone thought the mastermind of planet Earth made an egregious blunder. Survival of the fittest was appropriate for the animal kingdom, but surely Homo sapiens deserved a better fate than slitting throats over cockeyed ideologies that had future generations wondering why their ancestors were so dense.

The rough and tumble winnowing process of evolution made more sense but, without a personal God, there were few eager buyers in the crowd.

The Bible and Koran alleged by the authors, of course, to be the actual words of God, deny any possibility the earth was the result of potluck, natural cosmic construction, populated with primal brutes and abandoned by the architect before completion. Whoever botched the job should have been fired, not worshipped. The notion of divine providence is a cruel joke. Many doubt it, but can’t accept the possibility of ending up in a bag of fertilizer or spending eternity six feet under with the worms crawling in their ear and out their snout.

CHAPTER 3

The hopes and dreams of millions of Westerners for an exciting future went up in smoke when Adolph Hitler, the mesmerizing prophet and savior of Germany with his master race of Christians invaded Poland in September 1939, and enslaved the inferior races of continental Europe for five years. The fact that most of the unfortunates worshipped the same God carried no weight in the tribal pecking order.

The racist Japanese and their divine emperor Hirohito, a direct descendant of the Sun God, (Pharaoh), was not to be outshined by a Teutonic corporal, anointed themselves the masters of Asia. But the free thinkers of the world had a major difference of opinion with these obsessed thugs. The nips and krauts in Tokyo and Berlin were bombed into submission and reduced to a diet of their pet cats, rats, horses and dogs.

The dismal times worsened for half of the world with the rise of Communism and the fall of individualism. Russia and China ruled by two ruthless tyrants, Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, decided a totalitarian state bereft of religious opiates was the panacea for world order. They learned that it was easier to overthrow a government than eradicate religions. The incompatible economic and political philosophies regarding the right of citizens to elect leaders, own property and overthrow tyrants generated an intense rivalry between the East and West. The Cold War never heated up because mutual destruction was guaranteed. Hence, the popular term of the time: M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction).

The United States in the 1950’s drifted into a bunker mentality and the extremes of Joe ‘McCarthyism’. A drunken, egomaniacal, rabid anti-Semite, Irish Catholic, Republican Senator from Wisconsin fomented the frightening example of mass paranoia. It was a political witch-hunt that destroyed the careers and reputations of actors, writers, filmmakers, state department employees, union members and socialists. It wouldn’t be the first or last time Americans surrendered their First Amendment rights for a national security farce.

Extreme patriotism was the Zeitgeist. The dread of being labeled a Commie pinko sympathizer and Black listed (economic disaster) was eerily reminiscent of religious executions in Puritan Salem, (America’sTaliban), the Vatican inspired Spanish Inquisition and the European hysteria over witchcraft that cost 100,000 women their lives.

Nobody was above suspicion from the prying eyes of the extreme conservative, super-patriotic sleuths of the John Birch Society. They suspected the commie devils were hiding under the liberal’s beds. ‘Better dead than red’ they howled: ‘my country, right or wrong’! The parallels with organized religion were hard to miss.

There was no respite from the gloom and doom. The Catholic Church with its Legion of Decency screeners raised censorship of movies, books and television to antiseptic heights. Pajamas, bathrobes and separate beds with a goodnight peck on the cheek sufficed for marital bliss. The words sex and pregnant were taboo, and the stork delivered babies. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen with his iconic beanie, red sash and gold crucifix delivered homespun homilies and became a television celebrity.

Ward and June Clever, the neutered sitcom parents never seen in a bedroom, and their dorky sons, Wally and Beaver, the juvenile delinquents that threw snowballs at stop signs were about as funny as a trip to the dentist. For the hip hirsute it was hair curlers, Beehives and Duck’s ass cuts, while jitterbugging the night away with the pasteurized, cool cat, Lawrence Welk Orchestra. Hot Rods, drag races, peg pants, zoot suits and black leather motorcycle jackets shocked the frugal, depression generation. It was heaven on earth for the religious conformists. Church attendance, door-to-door Fuller brush sales and the atom bomb bunker building businesses were booming.

The Korean War erupted in l950 and was curiously labeled a Police Action by cowardly politicians. It claimed the lives of 54,000 unsung heroes who fought in horrendous conditions. The atheistic commies aided by Chinese infantry suicide charges settled for a stalemate at the 38th parallel dividing the communist north from democratic South Korea.

Livingstone’s distrust of political ‘isms’ and governments tinged with religion was growing fast.

The staid Republican, president Eisenhower and his tippling wife Mamie were a perfect match for the stuffy Babbits and the yes-men in drab, gray flannel suits in the 1950’s. This combination was the suffocating ‘wet blanket’ that dragged on until the Age of Aquarius, when the good times arrived with Catcher in the Rye, the Beatles, Fats Domino, Elvis the Pelvis, pot and the pill.

CHAPTER 4

Battles are sometimes won by generals; wars are nearly always won by sergeants and privates. F.E. Adock

Livingstone served the required two-year duty in Mannheim and Frankfurt with the 7th Army in post war occupied Germany with a new friend he made on the 10-day, puke filled voyage from New York to Bremerhaven on the USNS Upshur. Incredibly, they were the only two soldiers (out of the 2200 aboard) who were assigned to the same mobile army field hospital in Hoechst.

Private Livingstone finagled the two of them out of the brutal twelve-hour shifts of KP in the 110-degree sweltering galley by immediately feigning seasickness with the duty sergeant. They groaned and gagged themselves topside and remained hidden in the bow until all the other men had been assigned the keep ’em busy chickenshit duties of a naval troop transport ship. This act of cunning bravado was the glue for a lifetime friendship.

Joe Atrocious Gronsky a pugnacious 22-year-old conscripted lawyer who hated the army nurtured the younger Livingstone’s incipient skepticism of entrenched authority. He was a ferocious boxer from Syracuse University, who loved dirty jokes, expensive cigars, and Italian women. He had an unusual soft spot for cats. He trusted them more than people, who, he said, ‘would stab ya in the back for a beer. Most days, he could be seen swaggering around the motor pool chomping on a cigar and doing his impression of Edward G. Robinson in the movie, ‘Little Caesar’. It offered some comic relief to the conscripts who were just doing their mandatory time.

Like most horny soldiers, they disproved the rumor that the army put soft-peter in the chow to reduce the high rate of syphilis among the troops. They took full advantage of the abundance of widows and beautiful women who were eager to please for bottle of scotch, a carton of cigarettes, a pair of nylon stockings and a hot body on a frigid European night. They prowled the bars in civilian clothes pretending to be rich, American tourists.

The free flights out of Rhine Maine airbase in the cargo hold of flying boxcars with two parachutes enabled Livingstone to boast that he had partied in every gin mill and whorehouse from Amsterdam to Zurich before his 21st birthday. He saw the Pope, the Pieta and Pompeii, Langelene, the Louvre, Eiffel tower, Big Ben, the Beefeaters and the bullfights in Barcelona. He skied the Alps, swam in the Mediterranean with the Nordic beauties from Norway, Finland and Sweden and fell in love in Innsbruck, Austria. The Red Ox café in Heidelberg was his weekend watering hole.

One highlight of Livingstone’s nineteen-month tour of duty was drinking a few beers on two occasions with Elvis Presley in the ‘Florida Stube’ in Mannheim, when they were hustling the only barmaid. Those were the ‘easy pickin’ nights before the monthly payday when the greenhorn, company whoremongers were broke and stuck in the barracks.

They exchanged the usual (where ya from) and griped about the army chow, midnight bedchecks, relentless guard duty, inspections, PT in the snow, alerts and thirty-day war games in February in parkas and thermal boots in the Fulda Gap. (The Russians were over the next hill revving up their tanks) and how much time they had left to serve. Elvis was the ‘long timer’. Livingstone was a ‘nervous in the service’, ‘short-timer’ with the double-digit-figits—less than ninety days to serve. Elvis was a down-to-earth trooper who did his two-year obligation without any fanfare from the rest of the GI’s. They both drove the army duce and a half. Livingstone drove the company trash truck and Presley drove a laundry truck for the third armored division in Hanau.

Elvis in his trademark, blue suede shoes picked up the tab and the foxy fraulein and sped off in his black, Mercedes 300 SL convertible. Livingstone attributed his loss to the lack of a convertible.

Elvis wasn’t a tightwad. He treated his company of two hundred soldiers to free booze and food every weekend at the local gasthouse for nineteen months.

They were stationed in a country with eighty million people, where most had enthusiastically followed the dictates of a crystal-meth addict, racist, spellbinding psychopath who elevated Nazism to the level of a religion. The industrious Germans loved beer, the autobahn, the Volkswagen and der Fuhrer’s’ big lie—the Aryan race was nature’s designated—supermen. Adolph Hitler wasn’t alone. There were other nations dominated by nationalistic, fascists. Benito Mussolini thought the Italians were superior because the pope lived there. They conquered mighty Ethiopia; the trains ran on time and pizza, bocce ball and Mafia gang wars were the national pastime. Opposition to state rule over the individual, was tantamount to snubbing God. They were clobbered by the allies, surrendered and relied on the flimsy excuse that they were forced to follow Hitler’s orders and didn’t believe in racial superiority.

Humans are natural racists. It’s the savage component of society and an intrinsic element of tribalism and evolution. Racism remains dormant from time to time, but when ethnocentric majorities compete for limited life sustaining resources, the weak minorities will be the losers. Ancient nations and tribes reveled and fought over their differences while advanced nations welcomed and adopted the various talents.

The new, sly tactic replacing brute force is to hype-up the nation’s athletes with performance enhancing drugs to overpower the ‘inferiors’ at the Olympics. Now, athletic invincibility is the distracting masquerade for racism.

While on leave traveling Germany, Livingstone and Gronsky saw the awesome destruction of war and the pitiful condition of the survivors. Yet, they thought the merciless bastards got just what they deserved. Their enthusiastic allegiance to Der Furher and the Fatherland cost more than sixty million lives. Those who opposed the Nazi madness were summarily dispatched to a concentration camp or a cemetery; once again, the armed mob ruled.

The devastating bombardment on the democratic cities: Paris, London, Brussels, Rotterdam, Warsaw and hundreds of European towns, energized Livingstone’s resolve to question the motives of presidents, governments and religions that insist they have a patent on the formula for a utopian world.

Livingstone’s trust in his government was shattered by the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Senator Robert Kennedy. Disillusionment grew as the United States, the self proclaimed one nation under God, initiated the incredibly stupid and immoral Vietnam and Iraq wars; ironically orchestrated by two lying, Christian presidents: Lyndon B, Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

President George W. Bush, the college cheerleader, (you fight, I’ll hold your coat), whose hubristic threats of pre-emptive attacks on any government with the prescience to question the policies of a faith based, military superpower, blind to the lessons of history led the charge. He and a clique of snotty, ‘chickenhawk’, draft dodgers transformed the USA into an international outlaw in Iraq. Election fraud, Nepotism, judicial and financial corruption, defense contract favoritism, (sweet-heart deals to Halliburton), fear mongering, illegal spying on citizens, torture in military prisons,