In Praise of Catholicism

Thinking about Alpha Unit’s latest, I love the Catholic religion, and I even call myself a Catholic on Internet surveys, even though I have not yet converted, and may never. I moved to an Hispanic town, and the happening religion here is Catholicism, so I started going to Mass for the Hell of it.

Now, I happen to think that the Church is full of crap on a million things, especially birth control, gays, abortion and immigration. But there is something special about a Mass, and I’ve been going to them lately.

I hate going to just about any Christian Church, and I haven’t gone to the churches of my Protestant religion for many years. Further, I dislike most Protestants. They’re way too uptight, and it’s all about this sickening White middle class morality that I grew up with and came to despise.

Protestantism, to me, is all about how I’m an evil, scummy, disgusting, immoral sinner!

Why? Because I hate. Because I get high on dope. Because I drink booze. Because I’ve spent most of my life trying, often successfully, to screw any nice looking female that moves. Because I fight back when someone attacks me. Because my enemies aren’t always right and I’m not always wrong. Because I’m happy working less than 40 hours a week. Because I’ll live off free money if I can figure out a way to get some flowing my way. Because I support non-state armed struggle (“terrorism”), as opposed to state violence that everyone loves. Because I used to sell dope. Because I like to shoplift a piece of candy now and again.

It’s just guilt, guilt, guilt, and I’m evil, I’m evil, I’m evil. That’s been the message to me from these Protestant shits my whole life. On the contrary, Hispanic Catholics never tell me that. It’s assumed we’re all a bunch of scumbag sinners. Big deal. That’s what the confession booth is for, folks. We’re always trying to do better, but we keep on sinning anyway. It’s a neverending struggle, but as long as you’re trying, you’re a good Catholic. You get to feel guilty, but everyone else feels guilty too, and no one acts like you’re worse than they are.

A religion just made for me!

The Catholic Mass is great. I prefer the Spanish language Mass because Hispanics are so much cooler than White people, plus the music is way better. The White Catholic Mass is what you would expect, a bunch of really uptight White people! Who needs that? I’ve been living with that BS my whole life.

The whole Mass is a great big ritual with a number of steps. The priest waves, you stand up, cross yourselves, mumble something, and kneel down. Then you stop kneeling and sit. There must be 20 or so steps like this. The priest lights some candles, eats something, and drinks some wine. A religion where the Holy Man drinks booze at the ceremony! Yo! My kinda religion, baby!

At a Catholic Mass you do your own thing. There’s people here and there alone, tripping away. They’re off in their own worlds, praying, or crying, or heads down and silent. None of these folks are participating in the ceremony, but no one cares. They’re thinking of something important, maybe something sad. Maybe someone died. Maybe they can’t pay their mortgage. Who knows? There’s lots of stuff to pray for.

The artwork on the walls, the huge Jesus statue and the cathedral itself is good for a visit right there. There are all sorts of ritualistic shrine-type things along the walls. Holy water, flowers, a statue of Mary. The Hispanics go up to these shrine things and pray to them, kiss them, touch them, do all sorts of strange things. But I like that. That’s how a religion should be. Ancient, ritualistic, with genuflections and shrines.

I don’t know how much most of you realize how hacked up Protestantism has become recently. There’s my old-line Church, which I always hated anyway. This Church is practically devoid of religious substance anymore. It’s like it’s had all the lifeblood sucked out of it, except the Protestant “you’re a sinner” thing. It’s been so denatured that I wonder why anyone even goes to the services anymore. What does it stand for? What do they believe?

Probably in response to this boring decaf Protestant Church, a super-caffeinated fundamentalist Church has broken off in the past 30 years or so. Anywhere you have lots of regular White people, you will find legions of these fundamentalist boneheads.

You’ll never even recognize them. With a lot of them, they drink, they smoke, they cuss, they watch porn on the Net, they screw around, they smoke weed, but they’re all Holy Rollers. What the fuck, man? The ones that are nice and tidy often have a seriously sinful past. The Church is full of  “I used to be bad” types. Reformed sinners are always the worst.

Anyway, the religion itself is completely insane. They’re all anti-abortion, they hate liberalism, and they’re not too wild about gays. These are nice middle class White types, often with money. They seem hip and cool, they have nice houses, nice clothes and are often well-educated. But every damned word in the Bible is true!

Nowadays, if you meet a White person who is at all religious, they are usually one of these whackjob types. As long as you keep away from their idiot religion, you can talk about anything under the Sun and they seem like normal people. But as soon as you venture into the religious area,  it’s clear that they are Pod People.

I know the Catholic Church sucks ideologically, but at least they are tolerant. Plus they don’t try to convert you. I talked to some of them, told them I’m pro-choice, and they just said, “Well, we have pro-choice Catholics, you know. That’s your problem.”

A nun (!) told me, “Well, we don’t agree, but really, that’s between you and God.” I like that! Of course it is! Of course it’s between me and God. Damn, why didn’t I think of that?

The Catholics don’t really have any litmus tests, while the fundies have about a million. Talk to a fundie, even if if you’re a Christian, and pretty soon the fundie makes it clear that you’re actually not really a Christian! Why? Because you just failed one of their million and one litmus tests. The fundies are quite clear that all of the mainline Protestant churches are not Christian.

The Catholic Church is definitely not Christian, though they started the whole thing. A lot of them really hate Catholics, and a number of them are on this, “Catholicism is the source of all the world’s evil” thing, like anti-Semites except substitute the Pope for the Jew. Try to give them some Church history about how the Catholic Church was the first, and their eyes glaze over.

Many, or most, of them, claim to not be practicing Catholicism or Protestantism. Well than what are they practicing? The “original Christian religion,” I guess from 60 AD.

Try to tell them that the oldest Christian church is the Syrian Orthodox, a bunch of evil Catholic scum, and their arguments start twisting like snakes. Try to tell them that the “original Christian Church” was a bunch of Jews and was little more than modified Judaism (with most of them still keeping Kosher I think), and their arguments start doing 180’s. They’re engaged in a Belief system that elides history and common sense.

The fundies love the Old Testament, even though it’s a bunch of Jewish nonsense to me. It’s ok for history, but that’s it.

Jesus showed up to erase the OT and replace it with the New Covenant, the NT. The Law (the OT) was gone. In its place was Mercy (the NT). Israel (the Jews and the OT) was no longer the Church. The Church was the new Israel, and the new Chosen People were the Christians.

Following this Replacement Theology further, Judaism (the OT) has been replaced, and the Jews don’t even get Israel anymore. This is why Replacement Theology is so popular with Arab Christians. From a theological perspective, a good case can be made that Christian Zionism is not only oxymoronic but also heretical.

One cool thing about the Catholics is that they seem to have junked the OT. It’s still part of the religion, but you never hear about. All of the little sermons they hand every Sunday are NT stuff. Even more than that, they always deal specifically specifically with Jesus himself. It’s the four main NT books, and that’s about it.

I’d give the Apostles some theological leeway too. Because those books were just written by guys (apostles) like me. Not Gods, or Gods in Flesh. There’s only one Guy in the NT with God’s phone number, so He’s the only one to pay attention to. The rest are just guys like you and me. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong, but there’s no reason to believe that their every word is Godly.

So Catholicism almost seems to be pure “Jesus-ism,” which is all Christianity ought to be anyway. If you study the very early Christians from the 1st Century, that was the original Christianity. Jesusism. No OT, no apostle BS, no Pope, no Vatican. Just one Guy. Listen to what He says and try to live your life by it.

Thing is, once you strip away everything else and just listen to what Jesus himself actually said and did, Christianity is a pretty cool religion. Jesus was a very tolerant dude. He never said anything about fucking, queers, abortion, drinking or dope, or if he did, it’s not too prominent. He hung out with sinners. He thought greedheads were assholes. He threw money-changers out of the Church.

And he was a nice Jewish boy who adored his Mom and was still living at home at age 33, so even the Jews ought to dig him for that alone if for nothing else.

Do the Yezidis Worship the Devil?







The Yezidis believe that a Creator, or God, created a set of deities that we can call gods, angels or demons, depending on how you want to look at them. So, if we say that the Yezidis worship the devil, we could as well say that they worship angels. It all depends on how you view these deities.

In the history of religion, the gods of one religion are often seen as the devils of another. This is seen even today in the anti-Islamic discourse common amongst US neoconservatives, where the Muslim God is said to be a demonic god, and their prophet is said to be a devilish man.








This comes close to my own view of what God is.

Compare to the Yezidi view that God “pure goodness”. The Yezidi view of God is quite complex. It is clear that he is at the top of the totem pole, yet their view of him is not the same as the gods of Christianity, Islam, Judaism or of the Greeks, although it is similar to Plato’s conception of the absolute.



An inscription of the Christian Trinity, the father, or God, as an old man with a beard; Jesus, a young man, and the Holy Ghost, here depicted as a winged creature similar to Malak Tus, the winged peacock angel. Compare to Yezidi reference for Šeiḫ ‘Adî, Yazid and Malak Tus (Father, Son and Holy Ghost)


The three forms are the peacock angel, Malak Tus; an old man, Šeiḫ ‘Adî (compare to the usual Christian portrayal in paintings of God as an old man with a long white beard); and a young man, Yazid (compare to the usual Christian paintings of Jesus as a healthy European-looking man with a beard and a beatific look – a similar look is seen in Shia portraits of Ali).


This is similar again to Gnosticism, where the pure good God created intermediaries called Aeons so that a world that includes evil (as our world does) could even exist in the first place. On the other hand, Malak Tus is seen my the Yezidis as neither an evil spirit nor a fallen angel, but as a divinity in his own right.


More likely, the peacock god is leftover from the ancient pagan bird-devil gods of the region. The ancient Babylonians, Assyrians both worshiped sacred devil-birds, and carvings of them can be seen on their temples. The Zoroastrians also worshiped a sort of devil-bird called a feroher.





In the Koran, both the Devil and the peacock were thrown out of Heaven down to Earth, with the Devil and the peacock both suffering similar punishments. So here we can see Islam associating the peacock with the Devil also.

In popular mythology, peacocks tend to represent pride. Note that the Koran says that the Devil was punished for excessive pride (compare with a similar Christian condemnation of excessive pride). Peacocks are problematic domestic fowl, and tend to tear up gardens, and so are associated with mischief.


Malak Tus was there from the start and will be there at the end, he has total control over the world, he is omniscient and omnipresent and he never changes. They do not allow anyone to say his name, as this seems to imply that he is degraded. Malak Tus is the King of the Angels, and he is ruling the Earth for a period of 10,000 years.

They also superstitiously avoid saying an word that resembles the word for Satan. When speaking Arabic, they refuse to use the Arabic shatt for river, as it sounds like the word for Satan. They substitute Kurdish ave instead. Compare this to the Kabbalist view of God as “that which can not even be comprehended (i.e., spoken) by man.

In addition to Malak Taus, there are six other angels: Izrafael, Jibrael, Michael, Nortel, Dardael, Shamnael, and Azazael. They were all at a meeting in Heaven when God told them that they would worship no one other than him. This worked for 40,000 years, until God mixed Earth, Air, Fire and Water to create Man, as Adam.



So, yes, the Yezidis do worship the Devil, but in their religion, he is a good guy, not a bad guy. They are not a Satanic cult at all. In Sufism, the act of refusing to worship Adam (man) over God would be said to be a positive act, one of refusing to worship the created over the creator, as in Sufism, one is not to worship anything but God.

The Yezidis say that God created Adam and Eve, but when they were asked to produce their essences, Adam’s produced a boy, but Eve’s was full of insects and other unpleasant things. God decided that he would propagate humanity (the Yezidis) out of Adam alone, leaving Eve out of the picture. Specifically, he married Adam’s offspring to a houri.

We can see the traditional views of the Abrahamic religions of women as being sources of evil, tempters, sources of strife, conflict and other bad things. The Yezidis see themselves as different from all other humans. Whereas non-Yezidis are the products of Adam and Eve, Yezidis are the products of Adam alone.




Yezidism being quite possible the present-day remains of the original religion of the Kurds, we must acknowledge that for the last 2,000 years, the Yezidis have been fighting off other major religions. First Christianity came to the region.


This is in contrast to another group also called “Nasara” in Koran – these being the early Jewish Christian sects such as the Ebionites, Nazarenes and Gnostics, who followed Jesus but denied his divine nature, believe only in the Book of Matthew, and retained many Jewish traditions, including revering the Jewish Torah, refusing to eat pork, keeping the Sabbath and circumcision.

Mohammad apparently based his interpretation of Christianity on these sects. The divinity of Jesus was denied in the Koran under Ebionite influence. The Koran criticizes Christians for believing in three Gods – God, Jesus and Mary – perhaps under the influence of what is called the “Marianistic heresy”. At the same time, the Koran confused human and divine qualities in Jesus due to Nestorian influence.

Finally, the Koran denied the crucifixion due to Gnostic influence, especially the apocryphal Gospel of Peter. The local Muslims, similarly, hold that the Yezidis are apostates, having originally been Muslims who left Islam to form a new religion.

There is considerable evidence that many Yezidis were formerly Christians, as the Christian story holds. Šeiḫ ’Adî, one of the tripartite of angels worshiped by the Yezidis, was a Sufi Muslim mystic from Northern Iraq in the 1100’s. He attracted many followers, including many Christians and some Muslims who left their faith to become Yezidis. Yezidism existed before Šeiḫ ’Adî, but in a different form.

Šeiḫ ’Adî also attracted many Persian Zoroastrians, who were withering under the boot of Muslim dhimmitude and occasional massacre in Iran. Šeiḫ ‘Adî (full name Šeiḫ ‘Adî Ibn Masafir Al-Hakkari) was a Muslim originally from Bait Far, in the Baalbeck region of the Bekaa Valley of what is now Eastern Lebanon.


His followers were said to worship him as a God and believed that in the afterlife, they would be together with him. He died in 1162 in the Hakkari region near Mosul. At the site of his death, the Yezidis erected a shrine and it became one of the holiest sites in the religion. However, Šeiḫ ’Adî is not the founder of Yezidism, as many believe. His life and thought just added to the many strains in this most syncretistic of religions.

The third deity in the pseudo-“Trinity” of the Yezidis is a young man named Yezid. They say they are all descended from this man, whom they often refer to as God, as they sometimes refer to Šeiḫ ’Adî. In Šeiḫ ’Adî’s temple, there are inscriptions to both Šeiḫ ’Adî and Yezid, each on opposing walls of the temple. In a corner of this temple, a fire, or actually a lamp, is kept burning all night, reminiscent of Zoroastrianism.








These were the first Kharijites. Early split-offs from Ali’s army, they took part in the Battle of Nahrawan against Ali’s forces outside Madaen in what is now the Triangle of Death in Iraq. In 661, the Kharijites assassinated Ali, one of the penultimate moments in the Sunni-Shia split.

At some point, bin Unaisa split from the Kharijites, except for one of their early followers who were following a sect Al-Abaḍia, founded by ‘Abd-Allah Ibn Ibad. He said that any Muslim who committed a great sin was an infidel. Considering his fundamentalist past, he developed some very unorthodox views for a Muslim.

He said that God would send a new prophet to Persia (one more Iranian connection with the Yezidis), that God would send down a message to be written by this prophet in a book, and that this prophet would leave Islam and follow the religion of the Sabeans or Mandeans. Nevertheless, he continued to hold some Kharijite beliefs, including that God alone should be worshiped and that all sins were forms of idolatry.

In line with this analysis, the first Yezidis were a Kharijite subsect. The fact that bin Unaisa said that the new prophet would follow Sabeanism implies that he himself either followed this religion at one time or had a high opinion of it.

Muslim historians mention three main Sabean sects. They seemed to have derived in part from the ancient pagan religion of Mesopotamia. They were polytheists who worshiped the stars. After the Islamic conquest, they referred to themselves as Sabeans in order to receive protection as one of the People of the Book (the Quran mentions Jews, Christians and Sabeans and People of the Book).
One of the Sabean sects was called Al-Ḫarbâniyah.

They believed that God dwelt within things that were good and rational. He had one essence but many appearances, in other words. God was pure good, and could not make anything evil. Evil was either accidental or necessary for life, or caused by an evil force. They also believed in the transmigration of souls (reincarnation).

It is interesting that the beliefs of this sect of Sabeans resemble the views of modern Yezidis. So Yezîd bn Unaisa believed in God and the Resurrection Day, he probably respected angels and the stars, yet he was neither polytheistic nor a true follower of Mohammad.

At the same time, he lined himself up with those People of the Book who said that Mohammad was a prophet, yet did not follow him (in this respect, he was similar to Western non-Muslims who acknowledge Mohammad as the prophet of the Arabs).

Although most orthodox histories of the Yezidis leave it out, it seems clear at this point that Yezîd bn Unaisa was the founder of the Yezidi religion in its modern form and that the Yezidis got their name from Yezîd bn Unaisa. This much may have been lost to time, for the Yezidis themselves say that Yezidi comes from the Kurdish word Yezdan or Êzid meaning God.

After naming their movement after Yezîd bn Unaisa, the Yezidis learned of Šeiḫ ‘Adî’s reputation, and become his followers, along with many Muslims, Christians and Iranians.

Like their founder, the Yezidis believe in God and the Resurrection, expect a prophet from Iran, revere angels and stars, regard every sin as idolatry, respect Mohammad as a prophet yet do not follow him and at the same time pay no attention to Ali (recall that the early Kharijites assassinated Ali). Being opposed to both Mohammad and Ali, bn Unaisa is logically despised by both the Sunni and the Shia.

The fact that the Yezidis renounced the prophet of the Arabs (Mohammad) while expecting a new one from Iran logically appealed to a lot of Persians at the time. Hence, many former Zoroastrians, or fire-worshipers, from Iran joined the new religion, surely injecting their strains into this most syncretistic of religions.

There is good evidence that many Yezidis are former Christians. The Yezidis around Mosul go by the surname of Daseni, of Dawasen in the plural. It so happens that there was a Nestorian diocese in Mosul called Daseni, or Dasaniyat. It disappeared around the time of Šeiḫ ’Adî. The implication is that so many of its members became Yezidis that the Diocese folded.

Furthermore, many names of Yezidi villages are actually names in the Syriac (Christian) language, more evidence that many Yezidis are former Christians.


The Yezidis must baptize their children at the earliest possible age, and the priest puts his hand on the child’s head as he performs the rite. Both customs mirror the Christian baptism precisely.
When a Yezidi couple marries, they go to a local Nestorian Church to partake of the Eucharist. The cup of wine they drink is called the cup of Isa (Jesus). The Yezidi have great respect for Christian saints and houses of worship, and kiss the doors and walls of churches when they enter them.


They revere both Jesus and Mohammad as religious teachers, not as prophets. They have also survived via a hefty dose of taqqiya, or dissimulation, in this case pretending outwardly to be some species of Shia Muslims.

This is common for minority faiths around the region, including the Alawi and Druze, who have both proclaimed at the top of their lungs that they are Muslims and have hidden to the aspects of their religion which would cause the Muslims to disown them at best or kill them at worst. The primary Islamic influence on the Yezidis is actually Sufism, not Shiism per se.

There are traces of other religions – Hinduism may possibly be seen in the five Yezidi castes, from top to bottom – Pir, Shaikh, Kawal, Murabby, and Mureed (followers). Mureeds are about on a par with Dalits or Untouchables in Hinduism. Marriage across castes is strictly forbidden, as it has been disapproved in India.

On the other hand, pre-Islamic Iran also had a caste system, and the base of the Yezidi religion seems to be derived from Persian Zoroastrianism. The Yezidi, like the Druze and the Zoroastrians, do not accept converts, and like the Druze, think that they will be reincarnated as their own kind (Druze think they will be reincarnated as Druze; Yezidis think they will be reincarnated as Yezidis).

The Yezidis can be considered fire-worshipers in a sense; they obviously got this from the Zoroastrians. The Yezidis say, “Without fire, there would be no life.” This is true even in our modern era, if we substitute “electrical power” for fire, our lives would surely diminish. Even today, when Kurdish Muslims swear on an oath, they say, “I swear by this fire…”

Many say there is a resemblance between Malak Taus and the Assyrian God Tammuz, though whether the name Malak Taus is actually derived from Tammuz is much more problematic. Tammuz was married to the Assyrian moon goddess, Ishtar. But this connection is not born out by serious inquiry.


Where do the Yezidis come from? The Yezidis themselves say that they came from the area around Basra and the lower Euphrates, then migrated to Syria and then to Sinjar, Mosul and Kurdistan.

They hold the number seven sacred, a concept that traces back to the ancient Mesopotamians. The Yezidis have seven sanjaks, and each one has seven burners of the flame. Their God created seven angels, and the sculpture carved on the temple of Šeiḫ ’Adî has seven branches.

The Sabeans, another ancient religion of Mesopotamia who are now called star-worshipers by their detractors, also worshiped seven angels who guided the courses of seven planets – it is from this formulation that our seven days of the week are derived. In the ancient religion of Assyria, Ishtar descended through seven gates to the land of no return. The ancient Hebrews likewise utilized the number seven in their religion.





Another pre-Islamic Arab pagan belief is the belief in sacred wells and sanctuaries that contain them. The springs contain water that has curative powers. The holy water found at the Zamzam Well in Mecca is an example; even to this day, Muslims bottle the water and carry it off for this purpose. Often sacred clothes are used to make these pilgrimages, because ordinary clothes are thought to contaminate the holy site.


At the temple of Šeiḫ ‘Adî, there is a sacred pool. The Yezidis throw coins, jewelry and other things into this pool as offerings. They think that Šeiḫ ‘Adî takes these things from time to time. And they must remove their clothes, bathe, and wear a special garment when they visit the holy valley where this temple resides.

The ancient Arabs also worshiped trees. There were sacred trees at Nejran, Hadaibiya and Mecca. The pagans hung women’s ornaments, fine clothes, ostrich eggs, weapons, and other items.

Similarly, the Yezidis also worship trees. They have their favorite trees, and sick people go to these trees and hang pieces of cloth on them, hoping to get well, and believe that whoever takes one of these down will get sick with whatever disease the person who hung the cloth had.

An inscription of a sacred tree from Ancient Babylonian civilization. Trees were worshiped not just in ancient Arabia; they were also worshiped in Mesopotamia.The Christian Trinity combined with the pagan Tree of Life, in an interesting ancient Chaldean inscription that combines pagan and Christian influences. The Tree of Life was also utilized in Kabbalism, Jewish mysticism from the Middle Ages. Nowadays the symbol is used by practitioners of both White and Black Magic. Radical Islam is committing genocide once again on the Christians of Iraq, including the Chaldeans.


The ancient Meccans used to worship stones. At one point the population became so large that they had to move out of the valley where the Kaaba resided, so when they formed their new settlements, they took rocks from the holy place and piled them outside their settlements and made a sort of shrine out of these things, parading around the rock pile as they moved around the Kaaba.

In Palestine, there were sacred wells at Beersheba and Kadesh, a sacred tree at Shekem and a sacred rock at Bethel. As in animism, it was believed that divine powers or spirits inhabited these rocks, trees and springs. This tradition survives to this day in the folk religion of the Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese.

When the Yezidis reach the goal of their pilgrimage or hajj, they become very excited and start shouting. After fasting all day, they have a big celebration in the evenings, with singing and dancing and gorging on fine dishes.

This hajj, where they worship a spring under Šeiḫ ‘Adî’s tomb called Zamzam and then climb a mountain and shoot off guns, is obviously taken from the Muslim hajj. Mecca has a Zamzam Spring, and pilgrims climb Mount ‘Arafat on hajj.

The shouting, feasting, singing, dancing and general excitement is typical of a pagan festival. The non-Yezidi neighbors of the Yezidis claim that Yezidis engage in immoral behavior on this hajj. No one knows if this is true or not, but if they do, it may be similar to the festivals of the Kadeshes discussed in the Old Testament, where people engaged in licentious behavior in their temples.
