By Ezekiel Buchheit
Arizona Daily Wildcat
September 11, 1997

Jesus Wants You!

Arizona Daily Wildcat Ezekiel Buchheit

The second of September marked a special occasion for me, the deflowering of my innocence in accordance to true religious fanatics ­ excuse me, I am sorry. I forgot that we are in the midst of the hyper-sensitive '90s and the term "religious fanatic" has a slight negative connotation, and we sure would not want to offend anyone with "strong" religious principles. What I meant to say was "the deflowering of my innocence in accordance with true other-worldly enthusiasts."

Perhaps you are not aware of the situation to which I am referring. A group of said "enthusiasts" were gathered together on the Mall teaching their covenant of love at about 1,200 decibels. One of them in particular, a young teen-age girl who made her way to a corner of the Mall bearing a banner that on one side held the message "You are all going to hell," and on the other side, a picture of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns, began, in the innocent voice that comes with the sweetness of youth, to wail out the following spiritually uplifting message:

"Each one of you are born of sin, a blackened soul with a heart birthed from the loins of Satan's beast, destined to an eternity of burning in pools of blood boiled through your own sin. Repent now, or be prepared for the winged serpent to reach up from the charred chasm to reclaim your soul."

What a group of fun-loving people! I cannot speak for anyone else, but I definitely want to be a part of what they've got going. If I were not already a Christian, I would be the first to sign up after this powerful display of persuasion.

The real flaw in their approach was not so much their reasoning, or the fact that the only message that they successfully communicated is that religion is practiced by chronic bed-wetters, but rather the choice of location. Nobody, with the possible exception of those people in Flagstaff, who lives here in Arizona has any fear of hell. This is Satan's boiler room. We supply the heat necessary for the rivers of fire. Hell would be a sweater-necessary vacation. I think that they inadvertently won a bunch of souls over to the other side.

Being the leader of my own small, but growing religious cult, I decided to do myself a favor and track down the leader of this group to get some pointers.

The leader, a 40ish white male, who, for the sake of confidentiality and to make up for the fact that I flat-out forgot to ask, we will refer to as Earl, started our conversation out on a rather odd key. Shocking, I know. Referring to some other group on the Mall playing the song "Jesus Loves," he said "Man, that's just not about Jesus at all." What else could it possibly be about, the depression suffered after burning the French toast?

We talked for about a half an hour over a variety of subjects, one of them being that of education. He accused the schools of a form of brainwashing, taking our freewill by forcing us to "read and regurgitate, read and regurgitate," until such a point as we are only capable in thinking in terms of quotes from the scripts from which we read. He viewed this as schools' greatest sin.

If the subject of sex came up, he quoted the scripture. If we discussed music, he quoted the scripture. Things of the flesh. Quotes from the scripture. Hair care. Quote the scripture. Poodle maintenance. Quotes from the scripture.

This irony of free will got me thinking ­ an endeavor that I usually try to avoid through the worship of my own many-faced God, television ­ on the subject of religion, religious people, hypocrisy in religion, the need for hope and the gullibility of some people. These thoughts, especially the last, is what has led me to form my own religious cult as I stated earlier.

I preach the salvation of shedding skin through the thickening of my wallet, removing pain by relocating all your worldly possessions to my domain for spiritual cleansing and success in the future by complete submission to my wily charms.

In my cult you will have a completely serene experience in which:

you will not feel afraid to question and explore religion through intelligent thought (especially since you will only think what I want you to), a non-gender biased environment consisting entirely of females, and the complete freedom found within my volumes of rules and regulations.

If interested please contact me; I will be on top of Bear Down Gym making aware my philosophies to other planets. And if you are not interested, remember that the millennium is near, and as logic would obviously point out, so then is the end of the world, and if you do not repent and join my cult soon, you will all die and go to hell ­ a frozen hell.

Ezekiel Buchheit is a freshman majoring in English. He especially encourages prospective female members to join his progressive new faith