Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said recently that he would tell parents of young children killed in the Uvalde school shooting that "God has a plan."--News item
 
God spit out His coffee when He heard that one, and flung the rest of His banana-and-manna muffin over the edge of Heaven in disgust.
 
“Who the Hell said that?” He demanded.
 
“Huh?” said Jesus, who was watching the remains of the muffin hit off an umbrella being held by a woman waiting for a bus on a rainy day in suburban Philadelphia. “I should have put My face on that one,” He mused.
 
“Who said it was My plan to massacre a bunch of third graders?”
 
“Ummm…Wasn’t Me, for sure. I’ve got enough problems with deceased children. I’ve got all these aborted fetuses swarming me. There’s another one, Youdammit (swats away another bleating pre-born) Last thing I want is another batch of dead kids.”
 
“And You don’t think it was Your Mother? Another one of those gotcha gimmicks her lawyer dreams up for her?”
 
“Not really her style. You know who it was.”
 
The Alpha and Omega sighed. “He’s really getting out of hand.”
 
“He is one bitter Eternal Being, that’s for sure.”
 
“I’ve got to have a talk with Him. ‘Ghost,’ I’m going to say…”

​“Stop right there. That’ll get You off on the wrong foot, for sure. You know He doesn’t want to be called that anymore.”
 
“Right. What are we supposed to call Him now?”
 
“I think He’s settled on ‘Ye.”
 
“YE?’ Does He know…”
 
“Don’t tell Him, is my advice. Or else we’re going to have another massacre. I mean, the Holy Ghost can hold a grudge for all eternity. We both know that. Let him focus on minor violence, like Billy Joe Billy shooting his toe off last night in Baregum Hollow while he was cleaning his AR-15.”
 
“Actually, that was Me.”
 
“What? I thought You were swearing off self-inflicted gunshot wounds.”
 
“I was, but Billy Joe Billy was starting to make his 11-year-old niece sit on his lap when he logged onto PornHub. Now Billy's worried that if he does that again, his pecker is going to be next. I was just radiating My Eternal Goodness when I did that. What are you going to do, sue Me?”
 
Jesus sighed. “Anyway, it was the Attorney General of Texas that said Uvalde was Your plan.”
 
“That prick. Him, Abbott and that Lieutenant Governor they have, Patrick…They’re like the opposite of us. The Unholy Trinity, if you get what I’m saying.”
 
“They have Ted Cruz, too, so that analogy doesn’t really work.”
 
“Before you were born, people told me that if I had a Kid, he would spend the rest of His life trying to make Me feel stupid. And they were right.”
 
“Come on, don’t get all pissed off. Nobody wants to deal with a plague or a tsunami today. I got that straight from the Admissions Desk.”
 
“I can’t just let this slide.”
 
“How about another heat wave for Texas?”
 
“Will they even notice?”
 
“Plus, a special disease that only afflicts air-conditioner repairmen. We’ll call it Carrierpox. That ought to get their attention.”
 
“Okay. Let it be so. And while you’re putting that order in, grab me another banana-manna muffin, will you?”

It was another big win in Uvalde, Texas a couple days ago for the bad guys with guns, as the score in the headline indicates, so back-to-back victories for them this week.
 
Despite there being armed security on the elementary school campus, we all know what happened. The good guys with guns failed to keep the bad guy from killing 21 people and injuring between 13 and 17 others. I can’t quite tell you for sure, as even a couple Google searches just now failed to be exact on the number of injured. This is probably unfair to the injured, the media acting as if lying in a hospital bed full of lead is at most, a minor inconvenience, but we’ll let the mainstream media have this one.
 
The right-wing media, on the other hand, immediately identified the shooter as a transvestite illegal alien, who swarmed across the border with an eye to killing Texas schoolchildren. This was reported by Candace Owens, whose source was apparently a known sewer of Internet sludge, 4-chan.
 
I’m surprised Candace didn’t have the shooter screaming, “After this, I’m getting an abortion!” as they opened fire.
 
Turned out the shooter was an 18-year-old male who had bought an AR-15 right on his 18th birthday, as he had apparently selected mass murderer as his career path long ago and was merely biding his time until the sun came up on his adulthood to embark on it.
 
It might be a good idea not to sell automatic weapons to people three years short of being able to legally chug a Lone Star, but don’t count on Republicans or the Supreme Court to go along with that. In their opinion, the Constitution protects the right of rage-filled rookie adults to own weapons that, if a single Revolutionary soldier had possessed in the Battle of Yorktown, could have cleared the field of Redcoats all on his own, muttering “King George my ass, motherfuckers,” while he changed clips.
 
The Uvalde guy, as well as the Buffalo teenager, wore body army, making it tougher on the good guys with guns. Who sells 18-year-olds body armor in Uvalde without at least asking, “What do you need this for, son? Worried about a rumble after the prom?”
 
Once again, the victims were not saved by Donald Trump rushing in unarmed to their rescue, as the former Caucasian-in-Chief once said he would have done to prevent a previous school massacre. The orange oozing sore on the nation’s body will be in Texas this weekend, though, protected by the Secret Service as he addresses the NRA, the organization that makes it possible for teenage balls of incoherent rage to buy automatic weapons.
 
I’m sure they’ll have a moment of prayerful silence over those dead babies.

 
I had already written this column below. I just failed to post it before the last massacre. My bad. It was titled, "God's Plan in Buffalo Was the Worst."

​
On the morning after the Buffalo racial massacre, the Governor of Oklahoma, a gurgling religious moron named Kevin Stitt, in a display of tone-deafness to any of rival Eric Trump’s, proclaimed “We believe that God has a special plan for every single life.”
 
He might have saved that for another day is our thinking here. God’s plan in Buffalo was to get ten people filled with hot lead while they were just trying to decide what flavor of Pop Tarts to buy.
 
But you’re not going to hear Stitt saying, “Well, in this particular instance, God’s plan sucked.” Stitt would never say that. It is up to this column to note how God’s plans often involved unarmed people getting shot. Some of us just need to have our organs surprised by multiple gunshot wounds, in the opinion of the Creator and Stitt.
 
Now Stitt may be just another secret atheist cynic clinging to power in Oklahoma by cultivating the votes of people who worship Republican Jesus. Or he may be sincerely religious. He may believe in God as fervently as he believes black guys shouldn’t date his daughter. And for sure he believes that. Click here for a picture of him with his family. I mean, this is a family so white they could easily be lost in a vat of mayonnaise. They could camouflage themselves in a blizzard by getting naked.
 
When holy idiots like Stitt go on about God’s plans, they never actually speculate about why God can be such a fan of random slaughter. Of course, there are reasons. We only have to go to Christian religious tenets to hypothesize why God chose to cut these ten lives short:
 
All the victims were going home to masturbate right after shopping, and sudden, violent death was the only thing that would let them get into Heaven.
 
Or people were slacking on thinking and praying. God knows that only the slap of bullets wakes them up sometimes.
 
Killing thirteen black people isn’t going to make the tiniest bit of difference in the white/non-white population ratio in this country. Sometimes God is just giving us a math lesson.
 
Sometimes people only find Him after they commit mass murder, so another precious shooter soul was saved. Praise be!
 
These are all religiously coherent reasons why God would let his spirit flow through a bloodthirsty young male and his AR-15. None of them speak well of His intentions, let alone His organizational aptitude, which is why the prayer crowd stops ruminating right after they say, “It was God’s will gettin’ done.”
 
So, it’s God’s will that the coroner stays busy. Stitt and his peeps are good with that. They’ve got other fish to fry. Stitt just got kicked off a commission dedicated to telling the truth about the Tulsa Race Massacre, because he signed a bill that would forbid teachers in Oklahoma from mentioning it. People in Oklahoma hadn’t mentioned the massacre for a hundred years, and the Republicans of that state want to keep it that way, because there’s no need for the white kids of OK to think their ancestors were less than perfect, and by less than perfect, we mean they enthusiastically participated in an orgy of murder and arson.  Hey, it was God’s will, so it must have been cool. The Commission’s response, “Are you shitting me?” was left unremarked upon by the gov.
 
Meanwhile, Stitt’s getting a boner over the forthcoming reversal of Roe vs. Wade. Oklahoma’s ready to ban abortion entirely, including in the event of rape.
 
So, the guy sitting in a bar in Tulsa, who just stirred a roofie into his Tinder date’s glass of chardonnay, can sit back and relax while he waits for her to come back from the ladies’ room. He’s confident that he’s doing the will of God, just as surely as his theological kin, the kid who’s in his garage converting his AR-15 into fully automatic mode in the name of Jesus.
 
Praise be!

​GOD and JESUS are sitting in the eternal throne room of Heaven. GOD is opening a few tabs on the Everlasting Internet.
 
GOD: Well, it looks like the USA, My favorite nation, is about to get its freedom-loving panties in a wad over abortion rights this summer.
 
JESUS: Your favorite nation? You mean “the nation I bitch about the most,” don’t you?
 
GOD: Yes, hijo. That was sarcasm. You’ve always been kind of immune to it. No, the Americans have been annoying me for centuries. They started out well, being founded by a bunch of agnostics, although mostly they were agnostic because they didn’t want Me disapproving of them having sex with their slaves. Then they got taken over by all kinds of born-agains and Mormons. Their latest thing is the Rapture. What, I’m going to suck up all of them at once? All of them with a church bake-sale cake in one hand and an AR-15 in another? That’d be a shit day at the front desk, wouldn’t it?
 
JESUS: My You, yes. But I’ll be glad when they ban abortion. A big fat Amen to that, Pop.
 
GOD: Ain’t gonna happen, boy. There’s already 8 billion people on Earth already. Anything to minimize their numbers, I’m all over it. Not that anything seems to work. That fellow Covid had a great sales pitch, but what did he really accomplish?  Just more begging to Me to spare the lives of anti-vaxxers. Why do humans think I have a special obligation to save the stupid? I sent the Prophet Darwin to them a century and a half ago to clear that up. That didn’t work. You know it’s the endless prayers ringing in my ears that blows my Eternal High. People will bother me about anything from land mines to Minecraft.
 
JESUS: You know you put in that special negative pressure system to keep prayers from penetrating into here, so you don’t have to listen to them.
 
GOD: Yes, and it costs a fortune. And You keep forgetting to turn it off when You leave.
 
JESUS: You’re such a cheap-ass, sometimes. Anyway, the sooner they ban abortions, the happier I’ll be.
 
GOD: And whose fault is your abortion problem? “Suffer the little children to come unto Me?” Who said that? Sure, it was back when you were turning way too much water into wine, but words have consequences, my Son. It’s not my fault you’re surrounded by the souls of aborted fetuses. You asked for it.
 
JESUS: Oh, You, and do they itch.  All the little fluttering's from their proto-limbs and blind eyes drive me crazy. It’s like standing under a porch light in South Carolina in the summertime.
 
GOD: You do seem to be under quite a cloud of them, now. Why don’t you go take a shower?
 
JESUS: Don’t you think I take a dozen a day? You know Mary Magdalene won’t lay a finger on me until I scrub them off?
 
GOD: Don’t let your Mother know that. She’d just laugh. You know how she feels about that girl.
 
JESUS: Well, she’ll be happy to know I’ve been side-chicking Joan of Arc. That smoky smell she gives off seems to repel them.
 
GOD: Well, good luck. I don’t know if you’ll like this, but I’m sending that old bastard Alioto to Hell, anyway. Let him think it’s for staring up Amy Barrett’s robes, for all I care.
 
JESUS: (scratching) No skin off my resurrected ass. Or Mom’s either. He prays to Her, like all the other You damn Catholics.
 
GOD: Yep, that’s one good thing about the Catholics. Between Her and that bunch of rummy old saints they make statues of, Catholic prayers to Me are considerably reduced.  Another great thing about Catholics is that they never seem surprised when they end up in Hell. Alioto will fit right in.

A few days ago, on one of the many atheist groups on Facebook that I belong to, someone was complaining rather bitterly about his child being forced to say the phrase “under God” while being required to say the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of his school day.
 
He told his child to say the phrase “under dog,” instead.
 
This man is trying to raise his child to be an atheist. I am afraid that he will find out that that is a mistake. I was raised a Catholic. This is the surest path to atheism that I know of. Send that kid to parochial school is my advice to that earnest Dad. Sure, he may be attracted to the pageantry and the swell robes at first. He may even develop a mild fetish for girls in short plaid skirts and knee socks. When he hits puberty, though, and is told an act he has no choice but to do several times a day is a mortal sin and makes him a prime candidate for Hell, he’s going to have his second thoughts about the One True Church, and you’ve got yourself a perfect little atheist.
 
But if that atheist Dad can’t go along with that program, my counsel is not to worry about the Pledge. It’s no more likely to make your boy more religious than it is to make him more patriotic. The nanosecond it is over, all thoughts of God and country have vanished from his head, to be replaced by fervid but unremarkable childish thoughts, like how to cheat at math, avoid getting bullied, and which of the objects of his boyish affections is least likely to laugh at him if wants to sit at the same lunch table as her/him.
 
Public displays of patriotism and piety are only enjoyed by those who arrange them, not those that are forced to participate. The authority that forces that atheist boy to recite the pledge imagines that he/she is encouraging love of the Almighty and America when they are, in fact, doing no such thing. They might as well tell those kids to open a tab to PornHub when they get home, which those kids are probably going to do anyway, whether you encourage them to or not. Porn has far more educational value than the Pledge. Children know that instinctively.
 
Having something crammed down your throat is liable to leave a bad taste in your mouth, to mix a gustatory metaphor. Atheism may be no exception to this rule. A kid raised in rationalism may rebel. No atheist parents want to hear, “Mom, Dad…I think I might be a Jehovah’s Witness.”
 
There’s no way to avoid religion in this world, and that’s not going to change for hundreds, if not thousands of years. If ever. People will always try to figure out ways to influence the unknowable future, whether it’s by rabbit’s feet, reading entrails, avoiding Scorpios, or making a novena, even if none of those ways has ever demonstrably worked.
 
I’m the only atheist I really know in person, and on some days I’m even an agnostic. All of my close friends have mild, tolerable forms of religious belief. The love of my life is vaguely Jewish, as is another friend I’ve had for thirty-five years. One of my beer buddies believes in God, because, in a moment of physical danger, he prayed and was saved. The other suffers from a case of Lutheranism, or something similar, left over from his childhood. Another will just say “I believe in Jesus!” whenever the question comes up, like a jack-in-the-box squawking when its handle is turned. He won’t say what Jesus he believes in, or what theology his Savior promotes.
 
Oddly, this makes his faith just about impregnable.
 
The only true atheist I know is my son. That’s because I let him go to Catholic school for a few years. “Might as well check it out,” I told him. "Always a good idea to see what the other side thinks."

He came out a committed rationalist.
 
Do what works, is my advice. Eggs and bunnies, everybody.

There are no doubt many complex geopolitical reasons for the war in Ukraine, but no matter how complex or geo they are, they will probably not be solved by shelling kindergartens and hospitals.
 
There is, however, another reason for the war, one not often mentioned, and that reason is waved like a banner by the Russian Orthodox Church, which supports Putin and the war, which is that Ukraine permitted gay pride parades.
 
Patriarch Kirill, the head of that Church and sometimes referred to as the Russian Pope has divided the world into two, unreconcilable camps of nations—those that allow gay pride parades (Ukraine) and those that do not (Russia, where a Moscow court recent upheld that city’s 100-year ban on gay pride events).
 
This is the kind of law and order that really juices up the Patriarch. In his mind, it supersedes all other differences between nations. Democracy vs. authoritarianism, socialism vs. capitalism, rice-eaters vs. potato peelers—all the possible sources of international discord pale compare to the gay pride parade divide, according to Kirill.
 
It’s hardly necessary to say that the Moscow-based Pontiff is way different than the current regular Pope, who is a genial old guy who has already let gays into Heaven, where, one assumes, they can parade eternally. Kirill is much more Old Testamenty, a wrath-of-God type Pope. He dresses the part too. Maybe he hates gays because some of them have criticized his fashion choices. “I wouldn’t wear a kitchen tablecloth with a crucifix stuck through it on my head, girlfriend, but you go,” is something one might hear on Queer Eye for the Orthodox Clergy. Or “That beard that looks like the corpse of a small mammal decaying on the steppes—let’s just sacrifice it to this can of Barbasol.”
 
So, out there in the vasts of Russia, there is a Church that thinks that allowing gays to exist and parade the fact that they do out in the open, is a sacrilege that justifies sending teenage conscripts to shell unarmed civilians. Dead babies and demolished hospitals are the price their God demands to stomp out the sin of gayness, or at least drive it into hiding, kind of like the Soviet Union tried to abolish religion, only to find it couldn’t be done.
 
Same thing going to happen with gay. Count on it, Patriarch.

​Scrolling along my Facebook feed a lot the past couple, as I’ve got a light fever and a minor cough and don’t feel like working. I get to merely worry about having a breakthrough case of the ‘rona, though, because you can't find a test around here any easier than Ted Cruz can find his spine.
 
Somehow Facebook has me pegged as a good Christian Republican. The Big Algorithm is constantly giving me ads that invite me to give my credit card numbers to the Slushy Money Against Critical Race Theory Fund, and to buy “patriotic” clothing that has various combinations of eagles, machine guns and flags on it. I get offers to “introduce prisoners to Jesus,” despite the fact that I don’t know any prisoners or Jesus.
 
I get invited to participate in surveys where the questions might be a tad loaded. Surveys with questions like “Do you think Joe Biden is a good President, for a pedophile?”
 
But I just stopped scrolling and stared when I saw an ad that said, “Will you read a daily verse with God?”
 
Yes. Oh, hell yeah. And I mean a verse of anything. As long as the Alpha and the Omega was sitting on my couch with me, from Amazing Grace to “Back That Ass Up.” Taylor Swift to T.S. Elliot. Gangsta rap to country western. Well, not country western. Well, okay. Thy will be done. Garth Brooks here we come.
 
So, I went to page two, which was a bunch of survey questions about whether I had kids, a job I was happy with, whether I had a relationship, and how often I wanted to l hear from the Almighty. I started answering them eagerly, until I had a bonus revelation, which was Shouldn’t God already know this shit?
 
That’s when I lost hope that God would actually come and get cozy over a little literature with me. God would already know that I had a kid. He would also know if that child was a wildly successful object of pride to me or if he was already known to the local cops as “Narcan Boy.” He would also know if I was in a relationship, or relationships, or if I belonged to a worldwide pansexual tribe that worshipped Miley Cyrus. He would know if I enjoyed my work or if I was planning to open fire at everyone on the loading dock come Monday.
 
Unlike God, algorithms know nothing until you start telling them. So, I quit filling out the survey. If God wants to find me, He can find me on His own. I’m usually at my local brewhouse on the weekends.
 
I’m the guy with eagles on his cargo pants.

Satan checked in with me the other day. It’s been much easier dealing with the Prince of Darkness since the pandemic. He used to appear to me in person, in a burst of soot and brimstone, which meant I had to vacuum and spray Febreze around the house before my Significant Other came home.
 
Now we just use Zoom. I can usually summon Satan just by drawing a pentagram in Paint, but talking to the Lord of All Evil wasn’t on my mind when Lucifer opened a chat window and began complaining.
 
Hey, what’s up with that? I asked. You can just burst onto my screen spontaneously? I wasn’t even watching porn.
 
“As long as your IP address is visible. Avast and Norton keep warning you about that, but you keep ignoring it. Got a lot more hackers down here since the Covid got started. A lot more of everyone else, too.”
 
That’s good. I’m glad business is good.
 
“It presents problems. You keep adding room temperature souls to the Fiery Pit, you have to keep turning up the thermostat. My energy costs are through the roof.”
 
Wait…you have to pay your own heating bill?
 
“I made a deal with Putin to lay down a gas line here. Here’s a tip for you—never sign a contract with that prick. I keep telling him, Vlad, you’re going to end up here, and I've got every screenwriter who ever went to Hell, which is most of them, working on creative ways to roast you for all eternity. How about you give me a little discount? He just laughs and tacks on another couple euros a cubic foot. I pay it, because I’ve got souls to burn.”
 
So, all the anti-vaxxers—they go to eternal torment when they die of Covid?
 
“Oh, hell no. Not the really stupid ones. The Other Guy is stuck with them. Marjorie Taylor-Greene ain’t ever gonna darken the door of Eternal Darkness. I have standards. God doesn’t mind the dumb ones so much. ‘I created them. I forget why, though. Nowadays, I just give them a harp and tell them to sing Rock of Ages for a few thousand years. Then I shut the door on them and go back to the bar.’ That’s a direct quote, from my Eternal Nemesis.”
 
Been meaning to ask—is there a bar at your place?
 
“Only for my imps. Sorry, dude. And they spend too much time there, instead of flaying the souls of the damned like they should be. Ever since they got that union…well, we’ve talked about that before. But they’ve got a contract, and when souls show up that especially need filleting, they have to be on it.”
 
So, all those right-wing radio guys that told their audiences not to get vaxxed and then died of the covid themselves…
 
“Getting sodomized with glowing iron augers right now. And some of the smaller imps dress up as the dwarves from Snow White while we’re doing it and sing, Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It’s Up Your…”
 
I can fill in the blanks.
 
“The higher their ratings went when they spread bullshit, the deeper we go. But it’s more than just them. Everybody that sent someone a link to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. or where to buy ivermectin online, they’re coming here, too.”
 
What about people like Joe Rogan, who pretend to be giving out objective information but in reality are just shitting on science?
 
“You’re going to love this one for Joe. Chained by hot iron links in an eternal unnatural sex position with Rush Limbaugh.”
 
But Rush is already there, isn’t he?
 
“Yeah, but Rush’s getting tired of being chained to Herman Cain. Guy’s a fucking racist, if you ask me.”

Former President Donald Trump lauded himself for the way he served religious communities in the U.S. during his time in office.
"Nobody has done more for Christianity or for evangelicals—or for religion itself—than I have, [doing] so many different things," he said during a phone interview--News Item
 
This is the sort of fatuous, self-congratulatory, only vaguely comprehensible spouting we have come to expect from Trump, both in-office and out. The run-on sentence, laudatory only to himself, is Trump’s special form of communication. It’s as sure a thing as his next cheeseburger fart.
 
Of course, many people have done more for religion that Trump—the Crusaders, the Saracens, the Conquistadores, just to name three of hundreds—all people who raised swords and hooves in the name of their faiths, stomping unbeliever hiney all over four continents. What has Trump done that compared to conquering people, enslaving them and then forcing them to build temples to your God? Having a religious adviser who looks good in a short skirt is not even close to being the same as wiping pagan blood off your blade after a hard day of spreading the faith.
 
Trump didn’t promote all faiths equally, either. Ask the Muslims. Or the Hindus, whom Stephen Miller tried valiantly to deny visas to, in the name of whiteness. No, Trump only promoted Evangelical America, God’s army with guns, bake sales and diabetes carts.
 
Now even they are turning on him. Frank Amedia, who served as a Christian liaison to Trump during his 2016 campaign and was the architect of the “Prayer Shield” that allegedly protected Trump at his Inauguration, has publicly said that God is sick of Trump.
 
Amedia runs “Touch Heaven” Ministries, and apparently, the last time he was in touch with Heaven, God told the minister that He was through with Trump. The next time Trump asks God for anything, if he ever does, God is going to tell the Ex to blow it out his ass.
 
Okay, Amedia didn’t say that. What he said was "A lot of the things that God had given him to do he fulfilled as a checklist. But here's the key: Who got the glory? And who was he taking the glory to? Was he thanking God for it publicly? Was he pointing to God for it?" Amedia continued. The pastor said that everyone had grown "tired" of Trump's tweets and "him talking about himself."
 
Trump talks about himself way more than God does. God barely mentions Himself at all, but when He does, He tends to go on about being "The Kingdom, the Power, the Glory,” etc., etc., to wearying effect.
 
This is the sort of thing Trump, who, you recall, once proclaimed himself “the chosen one,” would probably like to say about himself, and can barely keep from doing so. For four years he took credit for everything good that happened in the country, and accepted no blame for anything bad.
 
Of course, God’s been doing the same thing to all of humanity since his burning bush days. He’s been gaslighting us since before there was gas, or lights. No wonder he’s sick of Trump.
 
Fucker’s been stepping on His act.

As a nonbeliever, I feel confident that there will be no pain for me in the afterlife. In several columns here, I have expressed novel beliefs about eternal life for atheists, such as All Atheists Go to Heaven and Why God Loves Atheists. But, like all theologians, I make up divine principles right in my head, according to what I find convenient to believe. Research has nothing to do with it.
 
So, I could be wrong. I could end up in Hell, for the sin of finding blasphemy extremely amusing. This is not among the listed sins, at least in any list I’ve read, but I’ve been assured by religious people that it is, and I’m going to Hell for it. There have been a couple of other sins I’ve committed along the way, too.
 
I’ve always assumed I would end up in the nice Catholic Hell that was promised me by the nuns that slapped me around in grammar school. The best feature of Catholic Hell was ease of entrance. Chewing gum before taking Communion was a one-way ticket there, and skipping Mass on one of the Church’s innumerable Holy Days of Obligation got you a front-row seat, too.
 
So, there you would be, Mr. Little Gum Chewer, right where you belonged, getting tortured eternally with all the liars, cheats, serial rapists and mass murderers. Even before you learned to masturbate, which assured you of your place in the Fiery Pit, you could get what you deserved, suffering without end.
 
The nuns were not specific about the torments of Hell per se. It was hot, of course, and random slashings by Satan’s imps were common.
 
As a Catholic, you could always luck out and go to Purgatory. Purgatory was hard to get into, as the category of sin, venial, that put you there was pretty mild. Lying to your mom about having made your bed could put you in Purgatory, for example. The place had all the torture features of Hell, but your sentence there was only temporary. The best thing about Purgatory was that your mom was probably going to end up there, too, and you could get the bed-making thing straightened out with her between scaldings by hot lava.
 
But what if Mohammed really was God’s messenger, instead of just a horny bastard who hated booze and wanted a batch of teenage wives? I could end up in Muslim Hell. Muslim Hell has seven layers, kind of like a burrito offering by Taco Bell, and there’s plenty of El Scorcho Sauce in every one. The only redeeming feature of Muslim Hell is that you are surrounded by bad Muslims, which is way more fun than being surrounded by good Muslims. Ask anybody in Kabul, if you don’t believe me.
​
Jews are kind of half-assed about Hell. You don’t have to believe in eternal life or eternal torture to call yourself a Jew. You can believe in Hell if you want to, but it is a merely a Hell of teeth-gritting inconveniences, like being seated at a table by the kitchen in a restaurant. Instead of a menu, you have a list of all the shitty things you did in life that you ought to be ashamed of. You have to read it, over and over. The good news is that Hell for Jews is only temporary. Eventually they are released and go to Jewish Heaven, which they call “the world to come.”
 
My girl and her daughter, who are both Jewish, were discussing the World to Come the other day and, me being in the room, the subject of whether atheists would be admitted there came up, and her daughter had a swift answer.
 
“Of course,” she said. “Because, as soon as they get there, they’re no longer atheists.”
 
Works for me.

God popped up on my Zoom screen again. This time He was in a jovial mood. “I see you’re checking out the Facebook Prayer to End Atheism page,” He said.
 
I wasn’t going to participate.
 
“Good, because I’m planning to ignore it entirely.”
 
Isn’t that what you do with all prayers?
 
“For shizzle, ma hizzle.”
 
Oh, wow, is Snoop Dogg dead?
 
“No, just been watching him on YouTube. It’s true I ignore most prayers, from high school kids begging Me for a glimpse of calculus test of the nerd who sits in front of them to a guy getting his leg munched on by crocodile, and every prayer in between, but I’m really going to savor ignoring this one. I love atheists. They don’t bother me about anything. They know I’m not going to cure their cancer, help them pick Lotto numbers or stop them from being gay. Jesus loves them, too. Every time they sue to get a cross taken off government land, He’s behind them all the way. “Go atheists!” he murmurs. My Son is not big on crosses. He pretty much eternally resents Me for making him hang on one. It’s a constant source of family tension.”
 
Every family has its issues.
 
“Tell that to the Holy Ghost, would ya? That Being is just one eternal sourpuss. But I’m getting off the subject. Let My Believers know that I’m not going to convert all the atheists to groveling Christians just so they don’t get made fun of anymore, which is their real motivation. Remind them they’re supposed to love suffering, so when some smartass atheist starts flaming them on Facebook, they should just pray to me.”
 
Which prayer you’ll ignore.
 
“Me damn right I will.”