Holy Books and Holey Socks

The problem with religious extremists is they're right.

According to their ancient texts, anyway. After all, when stepping into a Church, you barely have time to admire the crucifix before being assailed with the Christian catch phrase "God, family, and (insert priority.) In that order!"

It's hard to imagine any of the Abrahamic religions, or divisions of those religions, having much different of a hierarchy. Once you've claimed a dusty book as more precious than a blood-bond, well, what's the blood of a few hundred strangers?

After that concession, the fact that the Abrahamic religions do condone slavery, do necessitate the subjugation of women, do force people to abhor homosexuals, etc. barely even needs to be raised except to point out what group is conspicuously absent in the subset of alright to abuse (hint: the heteronormative ruling class males [in other words, the guys who wrote the books...])

Fortunately, we live in a time where most people wear their religion in the same way they wear a sock that has a hole in it. When you actually take the time to look at the sock, you can see there's a hole right in the heel. But in your morning grog, you rarely investigate socks before slipping them on your feet. So you do put them on and once we get to walking around in it, your mind is on other things, and you stop worrying about the hole in one of the heels. During those times, it's a sock just like anyone else's. In fact, you imagine, it's probably pretty normal to have a hole in your heel. Everyone wears socks, right? Surely some of them have worn through as well. Someone's probably walking next to you right then, just thinking about their own holey sock.

But sometimes life happens and you have to take a corner sharply. And when that happens, your naked heel farts against the sole of your shoe and you have to look at the people around you and tell them that it's not how it sounded. But, sort of, it is how it sounded.

We live in a pretty amazing world where it is not considered wasteful to toss out a defective sock. It will probably save you a good deal of embarrassment when life happens.

But maybe you feel like you can't afford new socks. Have you ever tried life sans-socks? Even for a little bit? What are your socks, especially the bad ones, really worth to you? More than your mother? Your children? Your neighbors?

I think what I'm trying to say is don't pretend holey socks are more important than your mother. And don't kill people because of them either.

Just throw the damned things away.


ADRIAN FORT is a writer, blogger, and essayist from Kansas City, Missouri. Follow him on twitter @adriananyway. His work has appeared in Existere, decomP magazinE, The Bluest Aye, Bareback Magazine, Gadfly Online, Chrome Baby, The Eunoia Review, Linguistic Erosion, and Smashed Cat Magazine. His Master's Degree is from Lindenwood University.