You're on the grift, same as me.
THE GRIFTERS
There was a movie that came out in 1990 called The Grifters. It was based on the excellent noir novel from Jim Thompson. I recommend this genre of fiction and movies because it provides a moral education. Noir deals with the underside of life and humanity. This particular movie has influenced me for years with its language. It gave me one of my favorite words--the "grift."
The grift is in opposition to a day job or a trade. There is a certain type of person who can't do honest work. Here is a classic bit of dialogue from the movie:
Lilly: I guess you won't be getting a straight job, either.
Roy: Not this week.
Lilly: Not ever.
Grifters can't abide hard work. This is why they have to get over on other people. Today, the grift is no longer confined to the underbelly of con artists and organized crime but has metastasized into all areas and institutions of life--politics, academia, athletics, corporations, entertainment, and religion. We can lament this state of affairs, but we should not be surprised by this state of affairs. As I am fond of saying, people trade in a free market but only if they can't steal. This is a direct challenge to the libertarian notion that virtue flourishes in anarchy. It doesn't.
There are two paths you can go down. If you love money and material things while hating work, you get on the grift. If you are indifferent to money and material things and love work, you play it straight. The Gentle Reader can already recall people from the workplace and life that were either on the grift or playing it straight.
For the grifter, life amounts to pulling off tricks for money. They are like that chicken that could play tic-tac-toe. The chicken doesn't know how to play tic-tac-toe. It just knows that pecking at that board will dispense some corn. Grifters are just like that chicken.
When grifters take over, the world becomes a game of tricks. This is the appliance that doesn't work. This is the airplane that falls apart as quality control vanishes. This is the politician who says one thing to get elected and does the other thing to get paid. There is no higher level of thought behind all of this. This is a culture and a society that cares for nothing more than material and worldly pleasures. This is what happens when you lose religion. The culture becomes debased.
The Roman Catholic Church is not immune to this. Currently, the Church is under the control of sodomites who love money, sex, and drugs and hate working. Being a good priest is hard work, but being a bad priest is a sweet ride. It is made even sweeter when you can con the laypeople into performing a good chunk of the liturgy in the Novus Ordo. I suspect that the appeal of the Novus Ordo comes from a desire of the priest to sit down for most of it..
For these fiends, religion is nothing more than a trick played on the faithful to get money to pay for cocaine and male prostitution. They don't actually believe in any of it. They lack supernatural faith. This didn't begin with Vatican II but has been there for all time. Religion is a great con. It doesn't matter if the "priest" is pagan, Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant. There have always been those who didn't believe in the religion but saw in it an easy escape from honest labor. This is why Saint Paul made tents and supported himself to negate this notion that he was just one of these religious con artists.
It is fairly easy to tell the good guys from the fiends. Good guys have a good work ethic. The same applies to priests. A lazy priest is a grifter. It begins with not praying the Divine Office and extends to not offering confession times beyond 30 minutes on a Saturday afternoon. They spend their time watching television shows instead of studying and praying. Then, they lament the laziness of all the pewsitters and their lack of giving. Remember, Gentle Reader, that these pewsitters are the ones with real jobs who do real work. They are not on the grift.
It is fairly easy to cure grifting. Let the grifters starve. When there is no corn, the chicken stops playing tic-tac-toe. Likewise, when the money dries up, the grifter moves on. This is why pewsitters need to stop giving beyond the bare minimum needed. Once the Roman Catholic Church is impoverished, these parasites will leave like fleas from a dead dog.
All of this is straight from Saint Paul. The love of money is the root of all evil. If they don't work, they don't eat. Poverty and hard work cleans out a lot of filth in the lives of priests and religious. It will also clean out the filth from the rest of society. Work hard and live a simple life. Everything else is the grift.
***
Recycled from the Smoke of Satan blog
