Shhhh...God Can Hear You

I understand that the question: "What church do you go to?" is often used as a sort of conversational icebreaker between practitioners of the same religion. It's a valid question among fellow travelers.

Sometimes I am mistaken for one of those travelers.

Recently, a Christian friend asked me where I went to church.

"I go to the radio station", I said, "I have a Sunday show. Then I watch football."

"Duh", they replied,"I know that...there's plenty of time between your show and kick-off to go to church."

"Well, actually I'm not a Christian."

"Oh." They seemed puzzled. "I always thought you were."

"Really? Why?"

"Because you are very open and honest."

Me? This struck me as especially hilarious. I started laughing.

"What's so funny? You are."

"No, I'm not", I protested, "in fact, I just finished lying to my grandmother. I'm scum."

There was a long pause, finally broken by my friend's whispered questioning:

"You lied to your grandmother...? Uh...do you mind if I ask what you lied about?"

"I lied about religion."

More silence, followed by another hushed question.

"Um, I am not sure that I understand. What exactly did you tell her?"

"I told her that I believed in God," I whispered back,"It made her feel better."

"But you don't believe?"

"No. Why are we whispering? God knows what is in our hearts and thoughts; why are we talking so softly? He can hear. "

My buddy considered this for a second.

"I thought you just said you don't believe in God...how can you know how God thinks and hears?"

"I don't know. But there are books and stuff that claim to. I have read some of them."

"Yeah, I know, me too, but not as much as I should...I wish I were a better Christian. I'm Bad. I'm not Good, at least..."

Now it was my turn to be confused. I asked for some clarification- why were they not a 'Good Christian?'

"Because, honestly, I don't go to church much anymore, especially during football season...the kids have moved out...the divorce...you know how it is. I should go more often, is all..."

Damnation! I have a lot of Christian friends and most of them say the same thing, that they are not "Good Christians", usually because they don't go to church very often...or have ribald thoughts...or drink/smoke/toke (in moderation) etc. It's never for anything that hurts another person- in my understanding a Bad Christian would be one that deliberately causes harm- and none of my friends are like that.
I'd like to ask them questions to help me understand this logic gap, but they have already told me that they are Bad Christians...if I took my car to a garage and the mechanic said: "I am a Bad Mechanic", I'd be disinclined to ask for mechanical advice or service from that shop.
But this was the only garage open, so I asked him a question that I haven't uttered in years:

"Let me ask you something: what if you instinctively lived your life in accordance with the words of Christ- perhaps a few bad deeds (such as 'white lies' told to comfort a dying relative)- but considerably more good ones- you never hurt anyone, you help people when you can; you act on empathy and compassion, you are charitable and honest, kind to children, pets and the elderly etc...in short, you live a very moral, exemplary life- except you were not a Christian. Would you still get into Heaven, assuming it exists?"

"Hmm," he pondered," that's a tough one. Me, I'd be inclined to say yes, that it was deeds, not words that counted- and I think that helping people is a form of worship that has it's own rewards...but I'm a Bad Christian. I think most Christians would say that you were going to purgatory -or to Hell. But not me. But my opinion doesn't matter, I'm a Bad..."

"No, you aren't. You are a Good Christian. If your God exists, He surely loves you", I said.
I meant that.


It's been a year or more, but the last time I asked someone that same 'what if?' question, I was told by a self-proclaimed Good Christian that nothing you did on earth would matter unless you first accepted Jesus, that you could save a billion lives and you would still burn in Hell for eternity because you hurt the feelings of a being that's powerful enough to create the Cosmos. On the other hand, you could kill a dozen people, find redemption on Death Row and get into Heaven on the fast track via lethal injection.

I hope I never understand how someone could believe that.

That sort of dogma makes it difficult for me have any faith in God or Man, so it was refreshing to hear a more tolerant, open perspective...my friend had nudged me ever-so slightly towards a favorable impression of his faith, which, I would think, is what a Good Christian would do.
I think his God would approve and would love him for it. I explained this to my buddy, who seemed a little confused, but mostly unruffled. At least he listened.

"But you don't believe in...ah nevermind, dude. You might be crazy but you're right. Even if you do lie to your grandmother."

I think my Bad Christian pals are better souls than they credit themselves for.

One Down

"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' "
-Jerry Falwell on 9/11

With Falwell gone, who will protect us from Tinky Winky's
Big Gay Illuminati and their insidious Man-Purse Agenda?

I can honestly say that I am glad the man is dead. He has been waging a campaign against human rights since 1973, when the Supreme Court of the United States had the temerity to give women sovereign rights over their own bodies in Roe v. Wade, outraging a young Falwell with their decision.

Calling feminism a "satanic" movement, in 1979 he founded the ultra-right wing fundamentalist lobbying cartel, the so-called 'Moral Majority', whose main goal was the destruction of the walls between Church and State, the ultimate target being an American Christian Church/State- the sort of New Rome that attracts apocalyptic nut jobs who think it's OK to attack abortion clinics and shoot doctors while simultaneously ranting about the Islamo-Terrorists
that we need to be protected from- at the price of our civil liberties.
Unless you were gay or female. Then you weren't supposed to have any civil liberties in the first place.
His vision was one of a Christian America that would assert itself in a global struggle with the 'rising tide of evil' in the growing Muslim world.

The sort of Nationalistic Christian America that would return to the days of the Holy Crusades, using it's military might to spread it's ideology outside it's own borders, while using the so-called 'word of God' to oppress and suppress any at home who might disagree, including politicians and the press.


"I shudder to think where the country would be right now if the religious right had not evolved," he said when he stepped down as Moral Majority president in 1987.

Twenty years later, most of it under the sway of the Religious Right, and the country is in the worst shape since the Depression. Falwell's ideology was a great fit with the Reagan-Era neo-cons who help anoint Bush 43 as our Emperor.
We got our Crusade.
It's called Iraq and it's going rather poorly, which any thoughtful person could have predicted.

The Generals and advisers who called the Iraq occupation a bad idea were fired, demoted or otherwise had their lives and careers torn apart- see war critic Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame for an example. Or they sold out, drank the Kool-Aid, repeated the party lies, were pilloried as scapegoats and retired in disgrace: see Colin Powell.

I shudder to think where the country would be right now if the religious right had not evolved," he said when he stepped down as Moral Majority president in 1987.

I love the irony of Falwell invoking evolution so much that I'm re-pasting the quote.

The Religious Right can't evolve. It's fundamentally against evolution.

Much like a Great White shark, it doesn't have to evolve, merely adapt- it's already the perfect mindless and unreasoning devourer, with a nearly unstoppable and all-consuming appetite for more power and wealth, damn the costs in lives. Violence is inevitable in the face of such aspirations.
The same religious madness that drove generations of armor-clad European fodder to the meat grinder of Jerusalem during the Crusades is still in force today.

It's what makes people hate others simply because of the way the others love.

It's what makes people burn books that they've never read.

It's what makes people fly planes into buildings full of people they've never met.

It's insanity and it's advocated by both the Taliban and American Evangelists. Both groups spell god differently, but both strive for a militantly strict patriarchy of putatively heterosexual men; holding women as little more than breeding stock for more Jihadists/Crusaders.

Those are some of the 'old-fashioned values' our Evangelical Christians seek to return to. Imagine Cotton Mather leading a legion of Clayton Waagners with the world's most devastating weapons at their disposal. Their enemy: Anyone who stands in the way.

That's what Jerry wanted. He may still get it, but I imagine it's going to be hard for for him to enjoy it from his reserved suite in the darkest pit of Tartarus.

Your Big Gay Baby

Have you ever fired a shotgun at a hobo? The traditional method involves removing the lead 'shot' from the ammunition and replacing it with chunks of rock salt.
This is slightly less fatal than buckshot but guaranteed to hurt like hell in any wounds it causes- but most hobos will jump from a moving boxcar at the sight of a shotgun, rock salt or not- a hobo trapped in the narrow confines of a railway freight car is an easy target.

But there are easier targets.

Fundamentalist Christian Homophobes, for example. Attacking them and their ludicrous 'beliefs' is easier than drowning slugs in a barrel of pickle brine.

These Christians, who hate Science when it teaches evolution or uses stem-cells to fight diseases, have opened up Pandora's Closet with this almost unthinkable uproar about Gay Babies- in theory, these Christians hope, science will allow them to determine their unborn child's sexual orientation , giving them the chance to 'cure' unborn queer babies of their homosexuality, which no serious modern scientist would call a disease anyway...

A Fundie Christian wrote this:

If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.

My idea would be to guillotine the writer's penis in order to help him avoid the "inevitable effects of sin" - but why stop there? Let's remove his fingers before he pens more poison words - heck, lose the whole hand.
Dude.
Save yourself from the Sin of Onan.

This dogmatic freak is using religious insanity as an excuse for practical applications of eugenics theory.
Even the Nazis were not this crass- the Germans conducted their atrocities in the name of science and Nation and left God out of their vocabulary of horror- but this man implies that God would be OK with Man tinkering with the unborn if it kept them from being gay...hmm, what's next? Does Thalidomide prevent self-abuse? Does being born with a flipper instead of an arm keep you pure?

They could test for other 'degenerate' traits...what if you were a Christian Couple and the doctors told you that due to some miscegenation during the Third Crusade, there was a slight chance you might have a Muslim baby- or a Jewish baby...what if your child was destined to be an alcoholic or a vegetarian? A serial killer or the next Gandhi?

What if you made a drastic, irreversible decision about your baby based on a faulty screening test- what if your mistake turned your straight fetus into a gay one- or into a liberal- or made them creative- or atheist-or intellectually curious- or any other item off of the seemingly endless list of things that Fundie Christians cannot tolerate... I reject this idea of aesthetic fetal modification for ethical and practical reasons- if, for example, Oscar Wilde had been "de-faggotted" before birth, would he still have been an excellent author? What else gets destroyed, changed or lost when you start modifying the minds of the unborn? I trust science a lot more then Faith, but I'm not gonna let anyone- Labcoat or Frock- tell me I shouldn't love my child simply because they are gay.

I would have a gay child.
I would love them.
So what?

They'd be loved because they would be my child.

Even atheists love their children, although, in my case, not enough to force mutation on them in the womb.
I might reconsider if they were to be seriously deformed, but probably not.
What if some 'curative' treatment was applied to an unborn Stephen Hawking- perhaps he'd walk, but what would have become of his mind? Would he have been the same?
Aren't people like Mr. Hawking part of God's Plan? Some of us are strong, some are smart...together we are supposed to work it out and take care of each other.

Isn't that the idea? Not according to Fundie Freeks.

If Stephen Hawking was my kid, I'd be proud. Very, very proud.


Fundie Freak makes a great point here:

The discovery of a biological basis for homosexuality would be of great pastoral significance, allowing for a greater understanding of why certain persons struggle with these particular sexual temptations.

What he really means is that this will allow guilt-wracked Fundie parents to stop agonizing over why their kids turned out gay- it's not because of the painfully sado-masochistic homo-erotic imagery of the Crucifixion, it's not because their role-model Pastor likes giving head to the gay hotel hookers who supply his amphetamine habit; it's not because they were never shown the love and attention that they needed at home and wound up getting buggered by the priests- now they can blame it on the DNA. Simple and cleansing.

Fundie insists God created DNA and His "pernicious" handiwork can be seen in the DNA helix, Original Sin being just another genetic marker, but the Bible tends to contradict this Fundie statement:

Given the consequences of the Fall and the effects of human sin, we should not be surprised that such a causation or link is found. After all, the human genetic structure, along with every other aspect of creation, shows the pernicious effects of the Fall and of God's judgment.

Ummm...riiiiighhhtt...

Personally, I think God a is pretty poor consultant when it comes to matters of conception, breeding , DNA and whatnot- at least one precedent comes to mind:

Once upon a time , this Old Guy named Zelophehad died , and he owned lots of land but he didn't have any sons, just daughters- and Jehovah was pretty sexist towards unmarried women and property (women were property, they did not typically own or inherit it), so there was some dispute as how to keep the father's wealth in the hands of his unmarried daughters - and, of course, in the tribe.

Moses was pretty much the spiritual go-to guy back then , so he was dispatched to go ask God about how to settle this dilemma.

This is what God told Moses:

"This is the word that Jehovah has commanded for the daughters of Zelophehad, saying, ‘To whom it is good in their eyes they may become wives. Only it is to the family of the tribe of their fathers that they should become wives."

What God was saying is : "Marry your father's brother's sons- marry your cousins and keep the money in the family."

This concept explains a lot about American Evangelicalism but it shows an alarming ignorance of genetics, especially from the Being who allegedly Created DNA.

Marry your cousin?

God should know better.

It amazes me that anyone could attribute 'Intelligent Design' to a God that is so intellectually dense that He doesn't even understand the basic chromosomal principles at work in His own creations.

Didn't God invent Mendel and those famous beans? Can't He read?

However, the agnostic idea that there may very well be a God, and that God is as thick as the proverbial brick, seems to gather steam every time I hear about these close-minded and dangerous lunatics; in fact , the idea of God being really powerful but a bit clumsy, a trifle stupid and dangerously incompetent seems quite logical.

After all, it's His image.

Bastards! (At least it's not disco)

This is a scan of an album cover from my record collection. The album is King Crimson's USA , a live album that sounded a lot better when I first heard it on 8-track cassette- King Crimson is a great band but this just isn't a very good recording, even by 1975's standards. It sounds like it was recorded in a giant aquarium with the microphones placed underwater, singer/bassist John Wetton has a wonderful voice -but not on this album. He sounds like me at a 1985 keg party on this record-but it was 1975 , so it could have been worse.

It could have been disco.

1975 sure did have different standards- note that this is a DJ copy- it's hard to see on the pic but the two "suggested cuts for air play" chosen by Atlantic Records : 21st Century Schizoid Man and Easy Money , clock in at 7:32 and 6:32 respectively.




Man, I'm a DJ in real life and I get a chuckle out of that- a record label suggesting that we play a seven-minute song!- and what's funnier is that the second song contains the word "bastard" and has a three-minute avant-garde experimental instrumental improv jam toward the end.

Cool. Hard to listen to for some folks but at least it's not disco...

One of my shows is early Sunday mornings and I'm not sure if I'm even allowed to broadcast the word "bastard" in the morning .
Ever since Janet Jackson "shocked the world" by flashing a tittie on TV, it's been downhill at the FCC- that 'incident' , in my opinion, should have warranted maybe thirty seconds of airtime, maybe part of a 'bloopers' segment on the Leno show or something- certainly not a weeks-long media circus and a complete overhaul of inherently useless FCC regulations.

We, as an audience, have some fucked-up priorities.

It was just a flippin' tit and I never would have even known it happened if the media hadn't acted like a bunch of 7th graders about it. Football fans don't watch the half-time Superbowl show and they don't give a damn about the commercials. It wasn't until the next day that I even knew about the wardrobe malfunction - my response: " So what? And who is Justin Timberlake?"

In 1975 the Record Companies encouraged DJ's to play a song with "bastard" in it, in 2007 the FCC is vague but threatening when it comes to profanity- what's OK at night in some areas is not OK during the days in others...it's very arbitrary and ill-defined and by the time you find out what's unacceptable it's too late.

The obvious things like 'fuck' are no-no's but others are trickier- for instance , I am allowed to bitch about FCC regs in the evening hours but if I call my boss a bitch on the air, the FCC can slam my ass...I mean my butt. Unless it's after six ( five on the west coast) , in which case it's ass...I think.
It's nebulous, intimidating and confusing and you don't get a second chance.

You are presumed guilty and it's up to you to prove you aren't. This sort of brouhaha is great publicity for millionaire DJs like Howard Stern but it's a real pain-in-the-ass for us real-life radio DJ's.

(Can I say pain-in-the -ass?
I don't know- what time is it? If South Park is on , you can say 'pain-in-the -ass'...)


When in doubt, it's safest to play something else.

The word 'bastard' might inflict irreversible injury upon the innocent ears and souls of the Kleenex generation- so I won't play 'Easy Money', despite Atlantic Record's recommendation- from listening to the production on this album, I suspect that King Crimson and Atlantic were at contractual odds- artists have been known to sabotage their own works just to lash out at their corporate masters- ask Lou Reed or Captain Beefheart.

So much for playing 'Easy Money'.

Besides, it's six-and-a half minutes long...

I will play something with more appropriate content and length, such as 'Land' by Patti Smith.

Fuck Doll Ruins Holiday

"Mommy, my doll told me to fuck off!"

The hysteria is exceeded only by the idiocy...

Click the link below this story for the video. It's workplace safe- they actually bleeped the alleged naughty word out.

Can you f*cking believe this sh*t?



There's also a link to a story about a dog whose fur pays homage to the Crucifixion...the owner, who is obviously a lunatic (check out what the dog is forced to wear if you need proof) , is treated as credible by the 'newsteam investigators' , who are neither credible nor sane.

The doggie story may be slightly more deranged than than the doll story... but it's close.

Check Out My Humility

I deserve medals for all the wonderful things I do.
Large gold medallions with bold and inspirational messages such as "I'm #1!" and "I Rock!" inscribed upon them, or perhaps just bearing my name spelled out in precious gemstones.
Diamonds would be ostentatious, emeralds are better.

I should also be presented with a likewise bejewelled golden crown in honor of My humility. I don't like to brag about My unsurpassed humility, so I'd like a flashy and expensive bauble to do it for me.
I'm very proud of how humble I am, but I don't feel comfortable boasting about it. It's undignified, even if it is justifiable.

But all that's not enough-not nearly. My Birthday should be a national holiday. Anyone who doesn't want to celebrate My birth will be given the option of celebrating My twin brother's birthday instead.
I don't like to work on My birthday, so why should I expect anyone else to?
By law, this would be a paid holiday.
Mark your calenders.
Let's get some laws passed, people.

Also, immediately upon the event of My passing, a life-size statue of Myself should be placed at the entrance to all buildings public and private; done so in order that the sad and lonely persons who never once had opportunity to bask in the awesome radiance of Me, can (at the very least) console themselves by crying upon the unwavering stone shoulder of My graven image.

They can rub my granite belly and wonder why life is so unfair.