Not praying, just preying...and desperate

Can I give fair warning that a prominent voodoo merchant plans ritual child abuse in public on Peel Beach on April 12th, in front of an audience who are unlikely to escape with their wallets.
Don’t believe me? Go to http://www.iomtoday.co.im/west-news/News-from-the-west.4865538.jp and see for yourselves.
See what I mean? Who but a state-sanctioned spookchaser could half-drown an innocent baby in public, and even get the police diverting traffic instead of arresting him? If David Blaine tried this he’d get jailed or sectioned – possibly both.
But if you think about it, this is godbotherers admitting defeat.
Look at the date – Easter Sunday. One of the two most important dates in the Christian calendar, and barring weddings or funerals the only two when the wider public step into a church to keep elderly relatives sweet. So, instead of a setpiece sermon in the cathedral, with guaranteed radio coverage, the most overpaid, overprivileged cleric on this island is …..standing with his trouser legs rolled up in six inches of seawater, sprinkling tapwater on a rugrat.
It’s over. They can’t baffle us with bullshit, can’t convince anyone outside their tiny, ageing flock they have any moral authority… they’re all washed up. Nothing left but cheap showbiz tricks.
You could see that too last weekend, when our own Southern rednecks, Living Hope Community Church, put on an anniversary show in front of paying punters down at the Villa Marina.
Not just Rev Jonathan ‘I had breakfast with George Bush’ Stansfield at his most mouthfoamingly manic, not just ‘local celebrity guests’, not just live adult baptisms, but a rock band ……. FROM LEEDS!
It was supposed to be a massive attempt to drag in new punters, but even with the local business equivalent of the KKK pooling their funds for advertising (which in turn guaranteed several Manx Radio plugs and a spacefiller in the Courier) it was a disaster.
I know that for a fact, because an office colleague had to attend to placate some mad relative. Even though the colleague is a regular churchgoer, she described the entire proceedings as a freakshow where even the freaks weren't getting off on the parlour tricks.
For example, the rock band weren’t a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute band, and didn’t play Sweet Home Alabama, nobody drowned in the bathtub, hardly anybody spoke in tongues or thrashed around on the floor… in fact the faithful were so underwhelmed they went home without lynching anybody.
Actually, Stansfield might as well have wrapped up his sermon in the immortal words of the knackered ‘droid in Blade Runner.
‘Wake up. Time to die!’