“Turn that mess off.”

This is the voice of my mother as her face twists in disgust. We are watching a documentary on African religions, and this particular segment is graphically showing a cow’s throat being cut. The blood is smeared onto the foreheads of the believers.

“But, Ma,” I reason, “it’s part of their belief system. The blood has the power of Santeria…”

“I don’t care. Those folks are crazy.”

Raised a Baptist, my mother refuses to accept the possibility that black people in the diaspora don’t all believe in a blond, blue-eyed savior. She concedes that Jesus did not look like Michaelangelo’s uncle, but, Lord, he sure didn’t go around smearing blood on the disciples.

As the family heretic and practicing pagan, I knew by age 7 that I was destined for hell. As a young blasphemer I would ask my grandmother, “If Adam and Eve had Cain and Abel, and Cain killed Abel, that makes only three people left. Right, Grandma?”

“Right, baby.”

“Then why did God mark Cain’s forehead for the people in Nod? Who was the extra people? And how can God get mad at you for sinning if he already know you gonna do bad anyway?”

Questions like these caused Granny to clutch the cross and pray for my lost soul. Surely a child who questioned the word of God was the devil’s familiar. I’ve been marked ever since.

I am an open voyeur of the rites and practices of non-Christian faiths. So, not unlike other San Diego residents, I was intrigued by the Heaven’s Gate suicide/permanent road trip in North County.

My pager kept blowing up as friends called to inform me that two black people had died in the mansion.

“Damn, didn’t they learn anything from Jim Jones and bad Kool-Aid?”

“Girl, them fools got tricked. They thought George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars was heading the Mothership Connection.”

“Didn’t Nichelle Nichols tell her brother that she was only acting like Uhura? She wasn’t really beaming up to Scottie on the Enterprise. Damn…”

Yeah, we clowned the whole incident. Humor hides horror sometimes. The most sobering response came from my boy Anthony, who solemnly said, “What if they were right?”

The guffaws really began as I howled into the phone, “Negro, please! What sane black person is going to live in a mansion with some crazy white people and kill themselves? Hello? A mansion, Anthony! Plus, they were castrating each other. Brother, wake up!”

Later, after much contemplation and a few glasses of red wine, I started to wonder: What was so terrible about people choosing free will to take their own lives for something they strongly believed in? If Christians and Muslims can kill in the name of their god, what is so horrific, so wrong, about people checking out because they are ready to go?

No one knows for sure what happens after we die. The pope, the imam, the shaman, the spiritualists none of them can tell us what happens in the next existence. That is a fact. My Buddhist friend Tingling told me that the only thing that is absolute is faith. I took that to heart. If one’s faith is strong, no one can dissuade a believer. I may not agree with their belief system, but can I respect another individual’s choice? Should we be upset because 39 people fulfilled their personal doctrine? Hell, I personally know 39 people I’d love to see leave earth right now! See ya!

Several Christians I know are arguing against the suicide as a sin based on their dogma. However, these Christians should step back and look at how their once-scorned cult was perceived as “crazy” 2,000 years ago.

Imagine Romans looking at the disciples and saying, “Now let me get this straight, your boy Jesus walked on water and raised the dead, Moses waved a stick and parted the Red Sea, and Mary was a virgin when she got pregnant? OK, bring on the lions; these folks are crazy!”

I do not believe in all the texts of the Bible. There are missing books and way too many European translations and interpretations for me to take at face value. I don’t believe in confessing my “sins” to a priest, nor do I cloak my body in hot-ass veils because of Purdah. I don’t speak in tongues, sing Gregorian chants, raise snakes to my throat or beat myself for penance. But I respect people who choose to do this as long as they respect my right not to live and believe as they do.

My ego is striving to become more humble. I don’t need to save the multitudes or chastise them if they don’t follow my way of connecting to God. I can only save my own soul. With that in mind, I suggest that we all question our beliefs and egos for the need to feel religiously superior toward faiths we can’t comprehend.

Two thousand years from now, we may all wear Nikes, pop pills with vodka and cover our heads in plastic bags as the new faith. Just ask Jesus.

I heard that he could save you.

L.B. McDuffey is a social science senior and a contributing columnist for The Daily Aztec.