Your Lord God Tells You to Shut the Fuck Up

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

Matthew 6:5-6

Matthew 6:5-6 has got to be one of my favourite passages from Christ's official biography. I like how most Christians I've ever met ignore and violate these words of their Lawd Gawd liberally as if the man had never said them. They are expert pickers of cherries. Look at Leviticus 11:7-10 which specifically forbade the consumption of pork and shellfish, but the average Malaysian Christian would not hesitate to order cha sio pehng with extra cha sio or suck down as many balitong as they humanly could when they go out for seafood. Leviticus 19:28 very insistently commanded that anyone who keeps the Biblical laws cannot make markings on his or her skin but in Sarawak, the state with the largest population of Christians in the otherwise Islamic Malaysia, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone without some form of tattoo (and ironically, a lot of these tattoos tended to be Christian-themed).

And Leviticus is also where the famous "no-consensual-butt-sex-between-bros" verse came from, and Christians - violating God's laws so frequently within the same book - somehow have the bloody cheek to tell homosexuals where not to shove it. The hypocrisy is so thick you can just slather it on a cake without whisking it.

But let us get back to Matthew 6:5-6, shall we?

Last Friday, which was apparently Good (I thought it was Okay), I witnessed a nephrologist teaching a teenage patient how to pray out loud in a 'repeat-after-me' fashion, and after an five-minute impromptu sermon at that. The fact that Jesus had said that praying in public places is hypocritical behaviour, and had informed his flock that he only answers prayers that are said in private was completely ignored by the preacher physician.

Honestly, I can't for the life of me think of many more places more public than the Female Medical Ward in a government-run hospital.

I guess Christians only follow their favourite superhero's decrees when it suits their purpose, huh? When two loving adults of the same sex wants to have a consensual physical relationship, they readily rally under the Bible to obstruct and to condemn them. But when they want to speak to their God in front of everyone, or chow down on a ham-and-clam sammich, suddenly the relevant Bible verses are 'taken out of context' or 'not applicable to us now'.

I like how the woman closest to the camera is wearing a gold chain around her neck,
when 1 Peter 3:3 and 1 Timothy 2:9 chastises women for wearing jewelry.

Less than a quarter of an hour later, I ran into a dozen other Christians singing their prayers publicly around a patient in the Geriatric Ward, probably because it was only a couple of days to Easter Sunday and the loons are out in force. They could have easily decided to pray for the ill old guy in the comfort of their homes, but they deliberately banded together and drove all the way to the hospital to make a show of it. And not only are they violating Matthew 6:5-6, but I daresay they are breaching the subsequent verse 7 as well which said:

"And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words."

Tell that to those wacky Pentecostals and Charismatics who indulge in speaking in tongues and babbling incoherently like a brook of insanity, Captain Christ. Clearly, they didn't hear you the first time over their incessant crazy talk.

Christian motorists illegally parking their cars outside their church near the hospital and clogging up traffic on Good Friday.

This show-offish behaviour of appealing to their deity in public places spills into cyberspace as well. We all have seen tweets and Facebook statuses of Christians praying for strength to get through a difficult time, for luck to pass an exam or for the recovery their wayward hamsters. What I find amusing is not only that they are displaying what whooping hypocrites they are to the very god they are petitioning to but also the fact that they behave as if Jesus follows them on Twitter, or are friends with them on Facebook. I mean when your god tells you that he can hear you even if you pray to him in a closet (and prefers it), posting your prayers on social media obviously signifies that you are only interested in exhibiting how pious you are.

So this Easter, I bring to you this paraphrased message from the reason of the season, whose resurrection is the subject of your commemoration, the Lamb who was Shepherd, your Lord and Saviour, Jay Cee.

And he said, "Shut the fuck up."



P.S. He also won't like your status on Facebook or re-tweet you on Twitter.

Unlicensed Bible lawyer,

k0k s3n w4i