Lawrence Kestenbaum wrote:

>Agreed.  But I just couldn't bring myself to read the part where they visited Bob Jones University.
>
I did read it. Does this make me a masocist or simply dense?

Having been brought up fed on and immersed in the mythology of the
religious Right there is one thing that truly scares the hell out of me,
and that is a Born Again Christian of the Moral Majority. I am still
waiting for the prophecy of my semi-paternal grandfather, the slightly
daft lay minister, where he told me of the white horsemen of the
Apocalypse who would morph into the Soviet Union and America settling
their differences then teaming up against Red China (those who eat fish
heads and rice and drown their extra babies) and the inevitable advent
of nuclear winter that would obliviate all of us, like waiting for Santa
or Godo, in the twinkling of an eye. Conditioning, this is the religious
propaganda that I as a wee boy was grown up being told... along with the
odd facts of original sin, abstinence and no dancing, and that the Jews
had done something really awful bad though I was not too sure what they
had done so terrible seeing as the logical extension of god sacrificing
his only begotten son, even though we are all little sons, and
daughters, being chewed up daily in all sorts of unpleasant ways,
leastways god would not have been able to pull off the big monte for the
Christians if it were not for the assistance of the Chosen People.
Bullcrap is not what I said because I was a polite deviant. I questioned
the logical basis of a monotheism that sports a trinity and found myself
booted out of the Sunday chicken dinner crowd. At one point I was caught
reading Freud in the back pew of the church and got slapped around by my
grandmother for conducting blasphemy. It was only 30 years later that I
figured out that some Limbaugh like dinkhead was going around spouting
this mythical Revelations crap that I realized that my grandfather had
not received all this message directly to himself alone and none other
in the closet sequestered directly from the one and only voice of god. I
mean, if you hear it directly from god then it must be true. Right?

Seems to me the human condition is one of being lied to over and over.

If I get nervous and show facial ticks while visiting religious sites
please forgive me. Mind you, it does not stop me from trying to hug old
ladies.

][<en (your local theocratic anarchist -- in good faith)

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