Yes, you can quote me - Wendel Sloan

For the eighth anniversary of this column (this time around), I am looking back at my greatest hits. And, by hits, I mean mobster — not Billboard top-40.

Hits covered in the three-part series will be: 1. Caustic 2. Humorous and 3. Reflective.

Here are some of the caustic things I have written:

• “What does ‘God Bless America’ actually mean? How I would admire the intellectual courage of one politician admitting they are just using a reflexive, coded valediction to appeal to their religious base.”

• “The pipes of peace don’t stand a chance against the déjà vu drumbeat of greed and power.”

• “Dominant groups are not being persecuted simply because others don’t want to be subjected to their views on public property.”

• “I’m skeptical those offering to pray for me are following through because I never seem to become more like them.”

• “We might have fewer enemies if we bombed fewer civilians in countries we don’t understand.”

• “Journalists’ unflinching digging for and publicizing of facts is the best defense against politicians — our employees — assaulting our freedoms by weaponizing the disingenuous wolf’s cry of ‘fake news.’”

• “God, we do not know if you exist or in what form, but we doubt you would approve of the ways you’ve been described. We know you are not vindictive enough to slaughter innocent women and children for the sins of men violating legalistic edicts attributed to you in ancient documents cobbled together over centuries from geographically dispersed authors with competing agendas.”

• “Legislating against provocative forms of protest are treasonous to contemplative citizens striving for a patriotism that glorifies peace instead of war — inclusion instead of exclusion for the tired, poor and huddled masses.”

• “There should be a special hell for pandering politicians pretending to share voters’ faiths.”

• “Word counts don’t allow me the luxury of dissecting the nuances of every word, so I expect readers to use common sense.”

• “How come people who say the country was founded on Christian principles can’t name one?”

• “When did we have to start pretending to be illiterate to keep the peace with citizens who think facts have an unpatriotic bias?”

• “Trying to convert me usually ends in a crisis of faith for the converter.”

• “We feel empathy for our own, but not for innocents maimed and killed by our bombs.”

• “People inside and outside church are equally good — and good works have equal value no matter the motivating force.”

• “Two out of three good-old-boys who think liberals are pansies would probably get their tails whipped by those pansies.”

• “If humans — with our puny bodies, clannish prejudices and brutish behavior — are the crowns of creation, someone has some explaining to do.”

• “When speculative creatures tell me how I ‘am,’ I am conflicted between yawning and rolling my eyes.”

• “God, if you do exist, we know you are too intelligent to want to be worshiped — or to put the fear of God into us for not bowing to others’ dogma.”

• “We ask only that you deliver us from rednecks, racists and zealots who believe the ever-expanding fires of creation will be extinguished if the infidels don’t get worked up enough to set the world on fire over the unknowable.”

• “Amen or Awomen.”

Part 2 — humorous things Wendel Sloan has written — is coming next Sunday. Contact: [email protected]