Mixing With People of Dubious Piety

FIVE DAYS A WEEK, give or take, I go to the senior center for lunch. The kitchen crew is extraordinary, the food, delicious.You can't beat the price. A coupla bucks stuffed into the donation box, you're in line. I have a good singing voice, I enjoy singing, and I like to take part in worthwhile community activities, and therefore I sing in the gospel group. Been doing it about two years. Although I do not like gospeel music, and am tired of singing gosple songs, I enjoy the activity more each Monday morning, and I try to never miss. The songs have a comfortable familiarity now; when I began I could hardly tell one gospel song from another. My favorite, since childhood, is "How Great Thou Art." When its my turn, I select it. I have a reputation for selecting it, the "How Great Thou Art" guy. What i do not like is singing about, or talking about, washing away my sins in the cleansing blood of Christ. I'm not religious,other than being a pantheist, and most ancient religions,and the Christian religion in particular,seems primitive, barbaric, cruel, and bloody to me. I do not cherish and relish the thought of a better person than I being tortured to death to atone to a vengeful God for my sins. That nearly two billion people seemingly do, and zealously so,has always amazed me. Coward though I often am, let me pay for my own mistakes, by either correcting them, or experiencing their consequences. Another difference between me and the other old people, other than my tendency to be young for my age, and very pshyically fit and well educated, is my hatred of Donald Trump. Most of my fellow small town seniors love Jesus, (many are Pentacostals), and support Donald Trump. Make America great again with Jesus and Donald Trump. No matter where you live, how old you are, or your religious beliefs, if you support Donald Trump you are, in my strong opinion, a traitor, morally and intellectually bankrupt. I don't give free passes to those who attend the same senior center that I do. Jesus was a socialist, not a billionaire. Donald Trump,rather obviously, is the antithesis of every utterance, every act, every teaching of Joshua ben Joseph. People who support Trump,as well as most conservative evangelical Christians, are not well educated formally, and it shows. They condemn something they call "socialism" without having the faintest idea what socialism actually is. They think America is a "christian country", which,as John Adams and the other founders cleary said, it most certainly is not. They fail to see the dramatic contradiction between capitalism and Christianity as taught by Jesus Christ. And they, almost to a person, beleive that if your religion is not the same as theirs, you will spend an eternity in hell. Anyone who beleives that is, in my view, vicious and hateful to the point of being mentally ill. I pride myself on my open mindedness, and I consider it among the most important attributes a person can possess. Some of my best friends are Trump people; we get along well as long as we do not discuss Trump. Anyone who cannot understand, or refuses to understand that christians do not have a monopoly on admiration of Jesus, but only on worshiping him, need not bother engaging in a philosophical discussion with me. That's why when I go to the senior center, I have lunch, do a little singing, and call it a day.