Song of the Day: Burn in Hell (Twisted Sister)

One of my favorite torture devices for the fundie mind.

When you're done with Basic Training, your next stop is AIT--Advanced Individual Training--where you learn the skills of your specialty. In my case, it was a Signal Corps (communications) job, 31N or Patch Panel Operator.

I was one of only two 31N students in the barracks building; most of the guys in my 8-man dorm were 31M radio operators, but we only ever had 7 guys.

One of them was sane for the first two weeks...but then the Dear John letter arrived that turned him into Private Preacher. His girlfriend left him for someone else. Pvt. Preacher melted down and found religion and in the grand tradition of religion-finders he wanted the rest of us--the entire Army base--to find it, too.

I wasn't digging, which made me into Pvt. Preacher's project. He couldn't understand how I could fail to be enthralled by the great sales pitches, impressed by the promise of Life Eternal, and all that. I patiently explained each time that I didn't believe in that stuff, and had the dog tags to prove it (granted, the Army in its wisdom only authorized me to be NO REL PREF, instead of ATHEIST, which is kind of close but not really accurate...like many other government situations).

So Pvt. Preacher rebuked me each time, only to come back for another go.

Then I discovered Preacher's kryptonite.

I'd picked up a tape of Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry album (1984), the one with "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock," which were still getting pretty heavy airplay in early 1987.

Not a bad album--but that one golden track, the one that made the Preacher scurry around, was "Burn in Hell."

He tried several times to get me into deep philosophical discussions over this one song. DEEP?! Twisted Sister, deep?! Bahahahahahahaaaaaaaa! Thoughtful, maybe, but not deep.

"Aren't you afraid you're gonna go to hell, listening to that?"

He couldn't understand the song's message even after I pulled out the lyrics and read them to him. Sad:

You can't believe all the things I've done wrong in my life
Without even trying I've lived on the edge of a knife
Well, I've played with fire, but I don't want to get myself burned
To thine own self be true, so I think that it's time for a turn

Before I burn in hell
Oh, burn in hell

Take a good look in your heart, tell me what do you see?
It's black and it's dark, now is that how you want it to be?
It's up to you, what you do will decide your own fate
Make your choice now for tomorrow may be far too late

That looks like a cautionary tale to me, not a "Hey, come join me, let's eat some Christian baby BBQ and piss in the holy water fountain!"

After a few weeks, Pvt. Preacher gave up on his mission to convert me, rebuked me a final time, and moved on to annoy other people. I still get a chuckle out of the song.

Kind of a pity, though, that Marilyn Manson wasn't scaring fundies yet.

Remembering 9-11: invasion of the goposaurs!

I make no secret of my atheism; nor do I go out of my way to make it the main topic in this Blog. I'm a regular in the newsgroup alt.atheism (aka "a.a."), where I take rather bloodthirsty pleasure in simply insulting the invading hordes of religious imbeciles bent on conversion or irritation.

When I first joined a.a., I waded in and started swinging, and my favorite target for invective was the invincibly dishonest "Pastor Frank." He's the one who gave me the name I post by: Dr. Smartass.

Then there was georgann, an entirely different species of religious whack-job. She's some sort of graphic artist, and she's put together some funky diagram that she says proves that Jesus is coming back really really soon, and he'll put his throne atop the Great Pyramid at Giza. The capstone was left off for that purpose by the Egyptians! Even THEY knew thousands of years before he was born that he'd die and come back!

Couple of crazies, good for punching bags, but otherwise uninteresting.


Until September 11, 2001.


Both of them took the events of that day as their cue to set all us atheists straight and bring us in. georgann's effort was especially tacky (link goes to the Google Groups archive of the entire thread). She got double-barreled fury from most of the regulars, including me.

I kept the posts from that thread so I could look at them every now and then. I'm always surprised that my swipe at her and her fellow asshole was so good. I don't think I could manage it these days:

Georgann and Pastor Frank should both be taken by the scruff of their necks
and dragged all the way to New York City. They should be made to move rubble,
look into the faces of the dead, slip on their blood, feel their remains with
their own bare hands. As I understand it, there are not many whole
bodies...but a lot of body parts. Not surprising, when a fragile human
traveling at more than 200 miles per hour in a little aluminum tube slams into
a large concrete-and-steel structure. They should see the hundreds of
volunteers working themselves past exhaustion, facing the very real
possibility of being crushed by still-falling debris, working till their hands
bleed, falling over from heat exhaustion, breathing smoke and concrete dust
and asbestos particles.

Look into their eyes and talk about your fucking gods.

Tell them your god did it to signal the coming of the end of the world.

Tell them it happened because they weren't christian enough.

Tell them it was because they didn't believe.

And then they should be taken north, to where families and friends of missing
people are gathered. There, they can look every one of those people in the eye
and talk their shit to them.

Assuming they survive this experience, they'll be taken from there to the
Pentagon to repeat the process--move rubble, look the hundreds of dead in the
eyes, slip on their blood, preach to their survivors.

From there, it's off to Pennsylvania. Same thing there.

For you two miserable children of perdition--for both of you and all the other
theists reading this who prefer to talk your shit instead of expressing some
fucking human decency, some pain at the loss, some sympathy for the dead and
those who are working to find survivors...if you can do those things and still
preach your shit...you don't deserve to live.

I would add some people to this; not just those two idiots, but also to the scumbags from President Fratboy on down who shat all over the legacy of September 11th, using it to garner political power, using it to frighten people into voting for them, using it to take us to a meaningless war in Iraq. Six months after going all John Wayne and announcing that we wanted Osama bin Ladin dead or alive, President Fratboy told a reporter that he didn't know where bin Ladin was--and he didn't care.

Nice.

No, going to Iraq was more important. George Bush and the GOP shat 9-11 into meaninglessness. And we still don't have bin Ladin. We have 5,000-plus dead soldiers, thousands more injured, hundreds of thousands or more dead Iraqis.

And this is also for the scumbags who are still shitting all over 9-11, the ones who screech that we must NEVER FORGET!!, like Glenn Beck, who in 2005 was fed up with the families of 9-11 victims, wanted them to shut up. Now he's embracing it again and using the imagery of that dark day to further his own agenda, to stir up those insane teabaggers and birthers and deathers who adore him. His new evil is called the 9-12 project (www.the912project.com/--not going to link directly to it). It's just another things for teabaggers to do, screeching their standard idiocies, demanding secession from the evil United States (funny how they take federal aid money, isn't it?), trying to incite revolution.

None of them learned a damn thing from September 11th--but then, they weren't even there.

Here's someone who remembers 9-12 and after--our government telling the people of Manhattan not to worry about breathing the air (without mentioning that asbestos and dioxin were well above 'safe' levels), the flag-waving idiots (with flags made in Taiwan and China) and their nationalistic fervor (including country singers who proudly admit they don't know the difference between Iraq and Iran), and this country losing its freaking mind. If the Glenn Becks, teabaggers, birthers and other insane right-wingers have their way, this country will never regain its sanity.

A few months ago, one of the crazies was screeshing about "re-education camps" for her and her fellow crazies. I'm starting to think that it wouldn't be a bad thing.

Arguing for the Church: Your Atheist Boyfriend!

Well, I wasn't actually an atheist yet. I was some sort of lapsing Pagan or somesuch, after being some other sort of believer in the aftermath of the Big Breakup of April 1995.

Let's call this girlfriend "Number Two"; it's appropriate in quite a few ways, now that I think about it--she was the second woman I'd ever been involved with, and she's the crappiest human being I've ever met. Maybe she had good reasons, maybe not--that's a different post. Also, this was the single worst relationship I've ever been in.

Oh, hell, I might as well give a little background. I met Two while I was still living in Scumbag's living room, about 3 months after I tried to keep "Whitney" from killing herself over him. Two and Scumbag are cousins of some sort, and he was trying to hook up with her. She called on August 8th, 1996 (certain dates stick with ya, huh?) and ended up talking to me, instead.

I shoulda hung up the damn phone. Nope. I ended up going out with her, and by month's end we were an "item." I helped her move out of her tiny one-bedroom apartment and into a relatively palatial 14-by-80 trailer on Tallahassee's outskirts. This is a big deal for anyone--having their own place--but in her case it's even more than that. Two is legally blind, something like 10% of the normal range of vision, and forget about 20/20. She's also bipolar--and at the time, the docs were tinkering with meds, trying to find the right pill and the right dosage.

She was also on Norplant.

Holy crap, what a combination. I really shoulda hung up that damn phone. But the horror stories can wait: this is about me arguing for her church.

She had this notion that the church she was going to was supposed to give her communion, and that they were interfering with her closeness to the Divine by denying her the cookies and juice. She complained to me at one point that they weren't playing along, being fair, giving her HER WAY, and like that. She was even taking Bible study classes!

So here's me, trying to get it through that skull of hers that the church doesn't play from her book. They have their own, and they've got hoops for her to jump through, and she was only on the third or fourth Bible class out of several. She hadn't done all of her own part yet.

"But they don't have the RIGHT to deny me! There's only one perfect man, and that's Jesus Christ!" blah, blah, blah. I know I didn't wear her down, so I'm pretty sure Two thought she'd won. But the church continued in its disobedience of Her will and she dumped them a few weeks later.

I'd say they won. I think they owe me.

They're Baptist, so I have to be too!

When the Old Man married my mother, I was maybe 5 years old. He adopted me, so technically (legally) he's my father, I guess. That's another post.

With him I inherited a large contingent of assorted conservative Southern Baptists in the form of a pair of step-grandparents (whom I dubbed "New Granny" and "New Grampa"), an uncle, his wife, and their litter of kids, all with "T" names (Terry, Tammy, Tracy, Tristi & Troy), all living on the same road.

I enjoyed going over there; Troy and I were about the same age, and we hit it off like little kids do.

But one thing I didn't like was Church Day. This was a day when the entire brood formed up and marched to the station wagon for several hours of preacher-talk. There was no discussion of me not going--such a thing was unthinkable, resistance was futile, I would be assimilated.

So I sat on the pew or knelt or stood, wondering how these people could take such things seriously. I was given a $5.00 bill for the collection plate. This was one of those little hellfire joints where the list of people going to hell went like this (from worst to least):

Non-Christains.
Non-Protties.
Non-Baptists.
Non-Southern Baptists.
Non-SBC-Southern Baptists.
SBC's who went to the wrong SBC church (this one was the right one, see).
People sitting on the wrong side of the building.
People sitting on the wrong pew.
People not of the family.
People not in the car.

You know the type--everyone but our little group, but I was going to hell anyway because my parents were Episcopalians. They really didn't like it when I went into the Boy Scouts in 1980 or so.

I went to their Sunday School and sat there wondering where this "Israel" was, and why it was so important, and not believing a word of it: it was obviously made-up stuff.

If a 6-year old can figure that out...

Gramps died of a heart attack in the mid-'70s. Mrs. Gramps died of Alzheimer's in 1999. Uncle and Aunt divorced in the late '80s (I thought that was a sin?). The Five Tees are well on their way to repopulating the county themselves and ignore me when I go to family reunions. I wonder how many of them still go to that church....

Frog-Marched to Church!

In the waning days of Basic Training, in mid-December [actually, it was November 11--J.] of 1986, there came a Sunday evening when some religious-type sergeant on CQ duty ("Charge of Quarters"--he's basically handling the administrative stuff, managing the troops on guard duty, etc.) decided that since he was stuck on CQ, EVERYone had to come with him.

He wanted to go to the Christmas chorus concert being held up the hill in a local church. The entire Company (Bravo 6-2) had to suit up, form up, and march 2,000 feet so this goofball could enjoy himself. There weren't many objections aside from mine and one other guy: both of us were nonbelievers. And since all the higher-ups who didn't have duty were gone for the night, there was no one to stop it.

So we marched. At some point I started up that mental tape deck and cued up Def Leppard's "Pyromania" album. "Rock! Rock! Till You Drop" got us across the parking lot. It might have been "Too Late For Love" by the time we got to the church doors.

As we filed into the little building, we filed into the pews. My platoon ended up about three-fourths of the way back, on the left side. If I looked straight up and little to the rear, I could see the people in the balcony seats.

The minister came in to mumble some prayers. Everyone else stood up.

I stayed seated. Yeah, maybe it was "rude" (I don't think so), but it'd be hypocritical of me to stand up and go through the motions just to make everyone else happy if I don't feel the same way. I'd be lying, and lying is wrong, isn't it?

So I sat.

I sat and looked around me. There were some offended faces glaring at me from the pews behind, and looking down upon me from the balcony. I glared back and stayed put.

The choir filed in and started their gig. They made so much noise I lost my place in Def Lep's "Rock of Ages" and had to start over. For two hours they danced and sang, the audience clapped and stood and prayed and amened and glared at the asshole who wasn't playing along.

The asshole ran out of Def Leppard songs and started on John William's "Star Wars" soundtrack, from the 20th Century Fox Fanfare to the droids' walk in the desert to Luke's finding his dead aunt and uncle to being captured by the Death Star to freeing the Princess to blowing that thing and going home to everyone but Chewbacca getting a medal to the final notes of the ending titles.

If I'd had a laptop and wireless Internet, I'd have been reading Pharyngula, if it had existed in 1986.

Finally all the sectarian turmoil wound down and we lined up, formed up, and marched back to the barracks. By this time it was between 10 pm and 11 pm, and the evening was shot. A waste.