Now when I say I was “presented” with this truth, I mean it quite literally. It was not the totality of the film, which despite its craptacularness, allowed me to somehow glean a deeper, hidden, message. No. Nothing so romantic. It was laid-out bare in a specific scene.

In it Pryor is approached by a young asian girl who up until recently had been a child prostitute. She shows him a drawing she’s done, which is completely without artistic merit of any kind, and then proceeds to proposition him. Pryor is appalled and tells her so. He then, and this is the important part, explains that rather than shopping her ass around she ought to focus on her Art, saying something to the effect of, “you’ve got real talent!”

It struck me while watching this scene just how valuable the subjectiveness of Art can be to those of us who are without any kind of useful skill, without talent, without passion, without goals, and ultimately without anything tangible to offer society.

With only a few words of encouragement the confused and aimless among us can grab hold of a pencil and set off into the murky, subjective land of Art. No matter how untalented, unskilled, and unimaginative even the most dispassionate belief in our own artistic merits can keep us afloat.

Art school can safely shuttle us through the college years. The half decade or so after can be fueled on the resultant fumes until we begin, finally, mercifully, to disperse and settle into our menial jobs as barristas, book store employees, museum security guards, bartenders, and graphic designers. Positions in which, though completely untalented in any way, we can never the less contribute, however slightly, to our society. 

The world of Art can forever after serve as a buoy for our self-image. When asked, over Irish car bombs at the local dive-bar, “What do you do?” we can spare ourselves the pain of saying, “I sweep the floor at a hair salon” and say instead with a tortured, far-off look, “I’m an artist.”

So you see the great uncommented upon value of Art is as a haven for the vast amount of aimless among us who might otherwise clog the rivers with their corpses. 

A brass plaque should be placed over the entrance of every art school in the country which reads something to the effect of:

Give us your tiresome, your passionless, your huddled and talentless masses and we will usher them safely to the far shore of their crushing mid-life crisis.

I like to imagine another scene, perhaps on the cutting room floor, in which a virginal little asian girl approaches Pryor with a heart-wrenchingly beautiful picture, and he looks at it and says: “Girl, you’ve got real talent, now get out there and sell that ass!” But I guess that’s a different blog post all together.

Even for the disinterested, Godless, and “Wrong-Godded” there have been signposts in the road too well covered by the media to be completely ignored.

There was David Linbaugh’s 2003 book, Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity.

Last year whilst sugarplums were ostensibly dancing in our heads conservative radio hosts gnashed their teeth about the “War on Christmas.”

In 2004 this thread was continued with John Gibson’s book, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.

In the meantime there have been countless Bill O’reilly sound bytes⊕ and and endless stream of repetitive Fox News talking points.

This past March it all reached a crescendo when radio commentator Rick Scarborough convened a two-day conference in Washington to address the “War on Christians.” It opened with “reports from the front-lines” on the “persecution” of Christians in the United States. Among its key speakers were the House majority leader, two U.S. senators, and two former republican presidential candidates. Sounds serious huh? It’s enough to make you think trembling little Christians are being rounded up en-mass, being tattooed, and having jumper-cables clamped to their private parts! Just a terrible, terrible thing this “war.”

I only bring this up because a couple of weeks ago I came across some county-level choropleth maps put out by the Glenmary Research Center which show the distribution of religious congregations across the United States. Looking at the 25 maps I couldn’t help but notice that a full 23 of the 25 represented the distribution of essentially Christ worshiping denominations. It struck me that perhaps a more truly representative map could be created by lumping all 23 of these denomination together.

So i did just that. Here is a map of the beleaguered and persecuted group which I’ll here call “Christies” as they are distributed across the United States.

Just to offer some perspective here are the other two Glenmary Research Center maps which plotting data on groups which actually qualify as discrete Religious bodies.

So what am I getting at? Let me sum it up in one sentence-

Overwhelming majorities do not get persecuted.

It’s as simple as that, really. Isn’t it high-time this line of rhetoric gets shit-canned? Christies who get worked into a lather by all the snarling of their own duplicitous leadership about the criminalization of Christianity need to understand that not being allowed 100% iron-fisted totalitarian control over every single aspect of society is not even close to the same thing as persecution.

If a group of people who have an 85% majority, with an allied two term president⊕ control of the senate, a supreme court stacked in their favor, and powerful lobbyists whose tendrils creep into every nook and cranny of society, have the gall to still feel persecuted… well then frankly about all I can do in response is invoke their God myself and say “Jesus Fucking Christ! You’ve got to be kidding?!”

Anyhow, enough of that.

An interesting tidbit revealed itself, when I combined the Cristies map with the others, which I wanted to draw your attention to. Have a look at the detail below, paying special attention to the area circled-

You see that little, lonesome, white county there? According to the Glenmary maps that happens to be the one and only county in the entirety of the United States, Alaska included, without a measurable number of religious adherents. It just so happens to be called Loving County. Is it possible that in all my grumbling about delusional Christians that I accidentally discovered… (gasp) Heaven?

Maybe it was just a census error, maybe the population was so miniscule that it just didn’t register on the map, or maybe it was the fact that Loving County itself boasts more ghost towns⊕ than living ones⊕. Then again who knows? Maybe the folks in that one Texas town are uniquely humanistic, secular, rational and without superstition… Spectacularly unlikely I know, but hey, “spectacularly unlikely” is practically the definition of Heaven.