Ben's Blog

The spirit of Xmas is not actually a mixture of Bundy & Coke, it’s the spirit of giving. Der!

Jesus once said: “lf you want to be rich, give things away, spiritual wealth will fill the void in you soul that is left behind” – or was that the Dali Lama?

If you have 2 cars, give one car to someone who has no cars, and if you were a true Christian you’d give them the late model Prado with air-con, not the clapped out ’94 Mazda with the wind-up windows and the dodgy steering.

If you have 2 shoes give one to someone with no shoes. (such as myself)

If we remember our bible stories from Sunday school, as l am sure you do, the Good Samaritan gave Jesus one of his sandals, off his very own foot. Admittedly it was the smelly old one, with the bent nail that would give you a prick from time to time, not the recently reconditioned one. You see Mervin, his name was Mervin (a common name in Samarra at the time) was poor, just like all the Samaritans in Nazareth, far from home, unemployed. That’s why he could only afford to repair one shoe a time, what with The Plague and the recession and so on and so forth. Just to set the record straight (“don’t believe what you read in the bible, it aint necessarily so” – Sammy Davis Jnr) l should note that Mervin delivered his gift from the other side of the road, with not inconsiderable force, striking Mr. Christ right on his left ear’ole, rendering him temporarily deaf and unable to hear the epithets that came with it. According to a fragment of parchment from The Dead Sea Scrolls, recently unearthed in a previously submerged  cave on the banks of said lake, it went something like this, and l quote: “You and your crazy cult can get the fuck out of Nazareth, and take your hippie mates and smelly lepers with you. Your mum was right, you’re not the God-damn Messiah and you never will be” The diatribe goes on but the rest of the hieroglyphs are indecipherable, having been washed away in the great flood, just the occasional word can be made out… ‘stoner’, ‘dole bludger’ ‘tin pot wearer’, ‘vagina’…. the usual stuff.

…and that is how young Jesus of Nazareth came to the mistaken belief that ‘The Good Samaritan’ was offering a very special gift in the spirit of Xmas, a belief that has endured throughout the ages…..and that is why our Jesus was seen for many years wandering around with one shoe on and one shoe off, making an idiot of himself. A practice that was followed slavishly by his devoted devotees all throughout the Promised Land. (Palestine) A fact you will not find in the modern St James version of the holly book, as it was apparently redacted by Pope Thadeus the Bald, in The Year of our Lord 1369, as it made Jesus look silly, and maybe even a bit gone in the head.. a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock, if you get my drift? An object of ridicule, a laughing stock, and not the spiritual leader of the western world that he was destined to become ..not a good look, tarnished the brand etc. etc.

God only knows what other juicy tit bits were lost forever in the great flood.

That is why we no longer follow the practice of writing down our important documents and snippets of gossip on scraps of paper, but submit them to micro-fish and bury them in Antarctica.

….now where was l?

So that is why we are taught in bible school the instructive parable of ‘The Good Samaritan’. Mind you, all the tales in the Bible are ‘instructive’. A bit moralistic and holier-than-thou, don’t you think, considering…

Now this is where the story gets ugly. Yes, we are talking about Anti-Semitism! You see, our Good Samaritan, Mervin (he wanted to be called something grand like Herodotus or Paris or Satan, but his mother said:

“You will have a good Samaritan name like Mervin, and be a Good Samaritan, and be proud of it!”)

Well our  Mervin was a Semite, wasn’t he? Just like all the other Samaritans, and everybody else within cooee for that matter, from Bethlehem to Babylon and back. As for Jesus, well you can see the moment you set eyes on the bloke, he’s European: the white skin, the golden locks, the superior attitude, sticks out like a dog’s balls! But let’s be honest, that’s why we love him so, isn’t it?

There is even some conjecture that Jesus was actually of Nordic origin, makes a lot of sense really, his Dad being Father Xmas and all.

So when Jesus singles out Mervin as ‘The Good Samaritan’ just because he gave Jesus one stinky old sandal, we naturally assume that all the other Samaritans must be bad, don’t we? For thousands of years, all around the world people find themselves saying to themselves: (you wouldn’t say it out loud, that would be Racist) “Oh yeah, those Samaritans sound like a rum lot, l wouldn’t  like to come across one of them in a dark alley, except for that Mervin fellow of course, he doesn’t sound too bad.”

So what right has some white-man with curly golden locks, who wears a dress and only one shoe, who hangs out with a bunch of ne’er-do-wells, what right has he got to go around denouncing the entire Samaritan race as ‘not good’ by inference? And don’t forget these people are all Semites, a particularly sensitive lot by and large, by all reports, who most likely took umbrage at the slander, especially has it has been translated into every language on the planet except Gunditj Mara. Repeated over and over again, time and time again, ad infinitum down through the eons, with not so much as a “sorry, l didn’t mean it like that” or “It was taken out of context.”

l shudder to think how many Samaritans have suffered silently over the years: shunned, oppressed, persecuted just from that one thoughtless remark.

(Sticks and stones may break my bones… but it’s words that really hurt – as they say) …and don’t think you can dismiss it as ‘a slip of the tongue’ or ‘one bad apple.’ No, the unalloyed enmity between Jews and Samaritans is folk lore: the snubs, the sotto voce snide remarks, the suppressed laughter when they walk in the room, the ‘Irish jokes’. Any reasonable person in their right mind would have to come to no other conclusion: Systemic racism!

The poor old Samaritans have been hardly-done-by. They deserve a sincere apology. But alas and alack, it is too late, far, far too late. They were wiped off the face of the earth, eradicated, exterminated. Just like anyone who stands in the way of….wait for it…. (deeep voice here)…. ‘The Jesus Cult.’

Ben Boyang  2020