2005-03-21-10:46 a.m.
Please Note!!!

I am having too many problems with Diaryland. I am moving my blog now. If you are following me, please update you bookmarks:

Hellbound Alleee's New Blog

Wednesday, March 23

Dear Internet Diary

What if you're wrong? What if everything in the bible is true? Aren't you afraid of going to hell?

I see women post on boards and blogs defending their particular faith and I just sit back in amazement. Organized religion is so incredibly discriminatory against women, yet women still attend. Does anyone find this strange?

2005-03-17-10:55 a.m.
Thursday, March 17

Dear Internet Diary,
God lives there, up in the sky. We know He is there; we can feel him. He is the source of all life. He is perfect, but we cannot look at him, because if one looks at Him, one surely dies.

The Sun lives up in the sky. We know the sun is there; we can feel it. It is the source of all life. It is a perfect round heavenly body, but we cannot look at it--though we want to--for if one looks at it, one will surely burn out one's retinas.

Have you ever talked to a comic book nut about Superheroes? They may be a bit snobbish and scoff at Superman, but most of them acknowledge that Superman was really The Beginning, the go-to-guy, the source of all superheroes. Well, the sun may be the source of all gods. There are other lesser gods out there represented by the moon and the stars, the earth, animals and other natural things. But in the beginning of civilization, it was the sun that started it all.

In the Old Testament, Yahweh spends a lot of time walking around with man, but in Exodis for some reason it is pointed out that God cannot be looked at. Since he was spending so much time with Moses, he gave him a break and he let him try to look at him. Moses came out of the experience "radiant." Exposed to the sun's radiation, he was glowing. Probably more than the healthy glow of a tan, less than the Hulk effect.

IN the book of Enoch, Enoch describes it this way:

I saw the view of the face of the Lord, like iron made burning hot in a fire and brought out, and it emits sparks and is incandescent. Thus even I saw the face of the Lord. I guess Moses can't claim to be the only one anymore.

While to look into the face of the sun of God, (I mean the real sun, not the fake one), sounds tempting, don't do it without the pinhole contraptions of science. If only Moses had one of those. And use lots of sunscreen

Thanks for listening, diary.

2005-03-15-10:50 a.m.
Tuesday, March 15

Dear Internet Diary,

I was reading a post on a board that had many stories of rude behavior. One woman describes an experience where a quote french family cuts in line at customs. She stated that quote, "I never had a problem with French people before, but now I'm schooled."

Obviously the woman is delusional, and was delighted to find what she sees as an excuse to be a racist. It's not important what ethnicity she really hates now, diary. Only that she is using anecdotal evidence for her claim that the french are rude. Maybe it's the fallcy of small numbers.

The post was on a website that has literally thousands of stories of outrageously bad behavior. If one wanted to use this woman's "logic," one can only come to the conclusion, from reading this website, that Amercans are the most rude, obnoxious, the stupidest people on the planet.

Of course I'm only trying to prove a point. While I don't know if Americans are indeed the least schooled in etiquette, I do know one thing: in matters of moral intentions, there is no such thing as "the french." There might be a way to statistically measure etiquette skills with a double-blind study with control groups, and I'd be willing to bet that American numbers wouldn't fare too well, against the french. But folks like our racist subject aren't concerned with that. They use statements like "the french hate all Americans." Right there, you can see that "the french" is an all-encompassing unity, while "americans' get to be indivduals." You can visualize one poor American being yelled at in French by a waiter at a cafe. "You American swine!" Not a pretty picture.

But in matters like these, there is no "the french" or "America." Republics do not act, speak, or feel. People do. And no individual (unless that is his job) in any situation is under obligation to represent any other person who shares similar traits-as in what religion he is, his ethnicity, his government, or his sex. Doing so is only condoning and indulging the irrational prejudices of others. Am I obligated to represent America to Canadians? No. Am I obligated to "represent" atheism to non-atheists? No. That would simply be presumptuous and rude, no matter how polite I am. That's because I respect you as an individual.

Thanks for listening, diary.

2005-03-14-10:52 a.m.
Monday, March 14

Dear Internet Diary,

When I was a teenager, I got lured onstage by a hokey, corney performing "hypnotist." I sat in a schoolchair next to a bunch of other teenagers who probably were as curious as I was.

The hypnotist spoke very quickly, as quickly: "Iwantyoutoconcentrateonthismirrorand
don'tlookatanythingelsenowconcentrateon
myvoiceokI'mcountingtotenassoonasyouhear
tenyouwillbefastasleepokonetwothreefour
fivesixseveneightnineten..."

And I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. I mean, come on. There was an audience full of hopeful people. This guy seemed pretty nice, and I didn't have anything particularly against him. So I just thought I'd be nice.

He told us to stretch our arms out, fingers apart, for several seconds. My arm felt very cold and numb after awhile. Then he ran a lighter underneath. Of course I felt nothing. You try it some time. As long as your arm feels sort of numb, and you don't sit there with the lighter in one position. Have you ever passed your finger over a candle flame? The skin turns black but you don't really feel it. Same thing.

The show progresses and I find myself grinning widely like Liberace. He asked us to be Liberace, and I acted like Liberace. It's not like I hadn't been in school plays for years and I loved being the center of attention or anything. But even with no experience, actors can tell you that the number one thing they need in order to be relaxed and successful onstage is focus. If you're distracted, you lose it and no one believes you. Lots of actors like to, in a way, "hypnotize" themselves before a stage performance.

I don't know how the guy is doing these days, but if he wants to be successful and he's working with teenagers, he's better lose the Liberace schtick. Kids these days have no frigging idea who Liberace is.

Now take this technique and bring it to a church. Just like "exorcist" Bob Larson does, according to hypnotherapist Daryl Wilkinson, as reported in the australian Herald-Sun. Bob and his assistants pick the people who are the most eager, those who need to be the center of attention. No one who is rolling their eyes will be picked, unless they are rolling their eyes and shouting expletives and spitting, just like in the movie. Then Bob talks really fast, just like my hypnotherapist. But he also has a much more willing audience, and a much longer time-slot to work in. If the show's good, he'll work on someone, usually a woman, for an hour. They might not be asked to grin like Liberace, but it sure helps if they act like some generic goat-footed "demon." Just like in the movie. You don't often see a possessed person act in any way different from the character Reagan from The Exorcist.

How come it's so convincing? Well, if you are in an audience of believers, sort of low-brow, extremely emotional, almost hysterical believers, you're not going to want to say nothing happened. It's more fun and pleasing to others if you just play along.

Thanks for listening, dear diary.

2005-03-13-12:35 p.m.
Sunday, March 13

dear Internet Diary,

The facts are in, and common sense prevails: spanking your kid, even just a little bit, is very harmful to them. What a surprise.

Pro-spanking advocates scare the bejeezus out of me. I'm afraid they might try to spank me. That's probably because of my own deep-seated (ha ha, I said "seated") resentments from being spanked 30 years ago.

Besides the behavioral studies that show spanking makes kids into neurotic and violent adults, the medical facts should be alarming to the spank-happies. It's sexually stimulating.

COme on, you dimwits. Why do people like spankings as part of sex-besides a long-overdue "screw you" to daddy? Why is spanking no longer considered kinky or s&m? Because it's considered vanilla. Everyone does it. It's not because everyone is evil and against your blood-fetish religion. It's because it's a biological fact. The erogenous zones are a little more involved than your sunday school words of pee-pee and hoo hoo. Men have prostates. Women's clitorises are rooted in the body and are actually about 8 or nine inches long. Why else would anal sex stimulate some women? Fact is, your loving discipline is responsible for the juxtaposition of sexual stimulation and pain. Not a surprise, considering the inherent sadomasochistic nature of christianity itself.

I tend to think that parents mostly don't want to sexually stimulate their kids ritualisticly. But these ant-spanking facts make spankers mad. It's because they want to be able to spank. It's not about systematic disclipline. It's not about making their kids into good people. It's about being able to express their anger. It feels good to hit. It feels better to hit than to remain in control and deal with a child's misbehavior with reason. Maybe it's because their parents taught them that.

Just so nobody misunderstands, sexual spanking, the kind everyone does, is of course fine with me. It's a rather grownup way of dealing with the ways so many of our parents tried to screw us up as bad as they were.

Thanks for listening, diary.

2005-03-11-1:31 p.m.
Friday March 11

Dear Internet Diary

I cannot count how many times I have been challenged by theists, upon finding out that I was an atheist, with this million-dollar, silver bullet question:

"So where do we go when we die? Y'ever thought about that? Huh? Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you atheist you."

I don't know what this says about a lot of theists except that they are very predictable. The other big predictable factor is that they don't like what I have to say afterwards, which is "We do not go anywhere. We die."

I'm not sure what happens in their minds, but I suspect that there is a switch that flips off, like a circuit breaker. One problem is that my answer is just too short. It doesn't have enough syllables. Many of us have this problem: we think that what we see as deep questions should have a three-or-four paragraph answer. Well I'm here to tell you that it's not true.

The other problem, perhaps, is that it isn't what they expected me to say. Their limited imaginations created a scenario wherein I stopped what I was dong right then, said, "Wow! I never thought about that before! Where will I go when I die?!?"

Then I will fall to my knees and accept Christ right then and there, with much weeping and sobbing and confessing, and they earn another gold brick for the wall of their heavenly mansion's rec-room.

I don't know why the concept of dying and ceasing to exist is so troubling for so many. It's like a category error, DOES NOT COMPUTE. I can't answer definitively, but I can tell you what it looks like from where I'm sitting. It looks like someone thinks that, even though there are 6 billion people on earth (and an awful lot more animals and things), that their own shining son-of-a-self is so astronomically important that it absolutely must remain eternally. Maybe it's not about their expertise in scrapbooking, changing tires or 1000 ways to cook with Cream of Mushroom Soup. No, they think that their true selves, extraordinary and deep and probably even more talented, are living somewhere deep inside their bodies--or floating about 3 feet behind them. That's the part that will live forever.

Ok. Not that the Universe cares. We might as well not even exist, The Universe doesn't even care about Mozart's Requiem, or the discovery of Gravity, or the invention of the Printing Press. It sure as hell doesn't care how many Day-Care kids you brought to see The Passion of the Christ.

Thanks for listening, diary.

FOR ALL DIARYLAND READERS

The ends of these entries are kind of strange. That's because I am doing all of these entries as audio blogs! Yes, all of these entries are recorded. They take a bit to download, unfortunately. The good news is you can also hear them on my Live-365 station, if you listen long enough.

Anyway, listen to my blogs at Hellbound Alleee's Archive Page. I'm putting a permanent link on the right-hand side, for convenience sake.

2005-03-10-9:44 a.m.
Thursday, March 10

Dear Internet Diary,

I used to work for a big professional children's theatre, where adult actors would put on plays for kids--good stuff like Shakespeare and Johnny Tremain and Bunnicula. Every summer we would go into the drama school season where the kids would put on shows. One year the older kids put on MacBeth. Together with their director, the kids decided that they would stand up and proudly say the title of the play, Macbeth. They did so exuberantly, in unison, much to great gasping and Q&A in the crowd. I was so proud.

Yes, in theatre, because many theatre people (usually actors--the tech people don't tend to be too weird about this) have a taboo against uttering the word "MacBeth" in auditoriums, and instead say "The Scottish Play." To many I suppose this is a fun and old tradition, but just as many if not more believe that to utter the word MacBeth is to doom the show and its players. Some, like one I had a small argument with that weekend, cite references of theatres that collapsed and killed people on stage or in the audience--I don't remember--because someone uttered the word.

Post-hoc, anyone?

How does the MacBeth curse work, oh theatre afficianadoes? Please just ask yourselves. Is there a demon, a god, perhaps a force in the universe, or maybe even the ghost of MacBeth himself, floating from theatre to theatre, hanging out, listening for someone to say the word MacBeth? Does God hate the sound of the word "MacBeth?" Is it Mrs. MacBeth, come to take revenge? If so, wouldn't simply performing the Scottish PLay be sufficient to arouse the ire of the sleeping evil spirit? Do evil spirits care if the play is done at all, or can anyone just walk into a theatre and say the word? An interesting thought, if one has financial problems and good insurance on one's theatre.

By the way, the play went very well, the actors are doing fine, and the theatre might turn a profit this year. Maybe they should change the taboo and just believe saying it is good luck? Just a thought.

Thanks for listening, diary.

To hear more, please visit www.....

2005-03-09-11:22 a.m.
Wednesday, March 9

Dear Internet Diary,

It seems, based on some polls, interviews and just garbage I read on message boards, that young people are taking a very blase attitude about personal freedom. They don't care about it, and they don't even want it. They don't think we should want it either.

Consider what one particular tool said on a random message board. He claimed (and not without almost unanimous support) that the goal of societies is to make everyone happy, and that if you are not happy, freedom is worth nothing.

That's scary. I guess those kids haven't read 1984, Brave New World, or seen THX-1138. In those worlds, the government or "society," kept watch on all the citizens very carefully, making sure they were "happy." If they weren't happy, by Ford they would make them happy, by very interesting means. In Brave New World and THX it was government-provided mood-altering drugs. That or, like in 1984, just say you're happy--to the medicine cabinet, the electronic Jesus confessional, or any droid-cop passing by. If not, prepare for reprogramming. Those fictional people simply existed, living as pale shadows--actually, not living at all. "A happy worker is a successful worker! Buy more, and be happy," amen.

Obviously these whippersnappers don't have much of a concept of what freedom is, to the extent they don't even want it anymore. Talk about complacent! They couldn't possibly understand what happiness is much, either, considering the relativeness and complexity of that term. Happy does not and can not mean the same for all people, and don't think the government will be able to provide it for each individual--look what great individualized service it's giving to public schoolchildren?

How would this new Happiness government resolve civil court cases? Bond measures? State Initiatives? How about resolving sentencing issues around personal happiness? It would make some people very happy to have others put to death, and some people, particularly the one being killed, pretty unhappy.

Perhaps the addage "you can't please all of the people all of the time" is one learned with age. That could also go with the appreciation of personal liberty. As far as making me happy, well, it would make me very sad if I weren't able to criticize products, movies, art, policies, governments, and presidents. After all, this could make people very unhappy. You, of course, would not be able to criticize me, as it would make me unhappy. Sounds like a problem.

Freedom is not clean, or easy, or always happy. Freedom is messy, dangerous and scary. Without it, we don't live-we merely exist.

Thanks for listening, diary.

To hear more, please visit me at ...

2005-03-08-11:58 a.m.
Tuesday, March 8br>
My dear internet diary,

ABC, that "family values" channel may soon broadcast an episode of Wifeswap featuring Amber Finley and The Infidelguy swapped by a big fat Pentacostal preacher family. ABC Medianet speaks glowingly of the god-fearing Stonerock family, and contrasts them with a valueless Finley family. They know their drooling audience, don't they? It's as if there will be no atheists watching at all. Anyway, I'm glad Amber made it through her experience.

The thing is, many of us have gone through a similar experience, although without cameras and money. We were babysitters.

If ABC wants us to think that the atheists are the freaks, us atheist babysitters know the real truth about who the freaks are. When I was a teenager, I got babysitting jobs through the church. I never saw such strange and dysfunctional families in my life. ONe hard-drinking Pentacostal family had a sexualized 4 year-old who constantly demanded I remove my shirt. Others decorated with the bloodiest, ugliest Jesus artifacts you've ever seen. Then there were the little boys, 5 and 6, who had guns and loved to shoot songbirds. Their sister remained indoors, unable to play with so-called "boys toys," and was conspicuously always dressed in dresses. Very. Feminine dresses. There were the Moral Majority pamphlets lying about. The cut-out magazine pictures of dream cars, clothes and vacations smothering the fridge, the strange bedwetting policies: "If you wet it, you sleep in it." Then there were Steve n Debbie, cornering me each time asking me if my dad really wants to work hard every day when he could be selling Amway products instead. Every weekend I stayed in these homes well into the wee hours mentally photographing the Carnival of Souls in which I found myself.

I did have one fantasticly normal family to babysit for. They were Ba'h'ai. In that home, I could let my guard down and not worry that I might be kidnapped or exorcised. About this I am not joking.

Let ABC pander to and rub their audience raw with the sweet assurance that they are normal and everything is ok. Humour them. because I know what David Lynchian lives they really lead.

Thanks for listening, diary.

To hear more, please visit me at hellboundalleee.com. That's A-double....

2005-03-07-10:25 a.m.
Monday, March 7

Dear Internet Diary,

Many school districts--not where I am, in Canada, but over there in America--are requiring science classes to teach the Unintelligent Design Theology in science classes. I'm not sure which classes, though. Biology? Geology? Physics? Astronomy? What about Ancient History? That might be a problem...anyway...

The Christians that want the "Talking-Snake Theory" taught so that children will immediately stop shooting each other in school may be in for some trouble. They are opening the door to scientific discussion of religion. Can creationism stand up to this inquiry, even among teenagers? Not bloody likely.

Sure, most kids don't know shit from Shineola. But there will always be, much to the Cretinists' dismay, those pain-in the ass kids with questions. Always with the questions. "How did all the animals fit in the ark?" "How did Noah get Polar bears, or Penguins, or Iguanas, all the way to the middle east?" " "How could got make the waters if there wasn't oxygen yet, since He hadn't made plants?" I guess that last one was a little complex, but whose to say that people like me, ticked off about this mess, won't maybe, prompt kids we know into asking such questions?

My point is, religion will be discussed and criticized in public school now, because the religious wanted it to be. Never mind the other religions that will naturally have to be discussed and scrutinized--after all, no one religion can be favored.

Student: This "designer" we're talking about: my religion has two designers: a dragon and a woman. And the universe was eternal. Doesn't my scientific theory make more sense?

What a great biology class that will be, where the children discuss the relative merits of the Christian creation story vs the traditional Chinese, or the Aztec ones? There's so much to learn and discuss there that maybe, hmm...perhaps they should make a whole class out of it and call it Comparative Religion? I doubt colleges would count that as a science credit, though.

Someone is going to compare Christainity unfavorably to science in class. Someone might even compare Christainity unfavorably with another religion, like Buddhism or Islam. Someone is going to complain to their christian parent, who will complain that religion should not be discussed in schools. Ha. Don't even think that the fight will end once ID gets placed along side of science. It's just beginning.

Thanks for listening, diary.
To hear more, please visit me at hellboundalleee.com . That's A-Double-L-Triple-E.

2005-03-05-9:43 a.m.
Saturday, March 5

Dear Diary,

I am privileged with the knowledge that everything that happens in the universe, from my mundane, day-to-day life, to the beginnings of life itself, to the end of the lives of countless heavenly bodies in space, is all due to natural processes. Everything that happens is natural, and everything that exists is natural.

For this, I am accused of being a sad, dark, depressed person having no imagination or possessing no joy in my life. I am a militant atheist who would like no less than the world following by every thought and deed upon the threat of sadistic torture.

Okay, I exaggerated that last part.

This seems to be the typical reaction from believers and even some atheists. I make no extraordinary claim--no claim at all, in fact, and for this I am a crackpot, and the ones who claim magic with no evidence are the normal ones. A materialist position is seen to be harsh; it steps over the line. There "has" to be "something more," but attempting to define that something more is to destroy all the beauty and mystery in the world.

This is such a vast topic that I cannot cover it in one entry. I just recall Richard Dawkins stating this same problem. He was asked "how can you get up in the morning?" I know I'm misquoting, but he said he couldn't wait to get up every morning. He felt we are all so privileged to be here, and that we have so little time to enjoy it. But we do have enough time to learn as much as we possibly can about who we are and how we came to be here. He spoke lovingly about poetry and music. Without them, it wouldn't seem worth getting up at all. I second that notion. I know that music is made of sound waves and patterns of sounds and silences and textures, combined based on particularly modified scales of particular cultures. Yet from these patterns and waves, I have received what many would consider a religious experience. I experience the sublime, an inner spiritual lift, "the warm fuzzies," pleasant memories, and chemical reactions in my brain.

When someone wonders "how this can be?" I can only wonder if the anti-materialist, the ignorance-advocate is speaking from fear. I can only say that you've got it all wrong. Go find out why "all there is," the natural, material processes of the world, are wonderous, magical, miraculous, scary and awe-inspiring enough. How could anyone want more than that?

Thanks for listening, dear diary.

To hear more, please visit HellboundAlleee.com. That's A-Double-L-Triple-E.

2005-03-04-11:00 a.m.
Friday, March 4th

Dear Diary,

I was raised a Christian, and tried very hard to be a good one, when I was young. Not without some effort, though, because many elements of my religion horrified and disgusted me. I gag at the thought of it now.

My problem? The blood. I don't remember being blood-phobic. It's not that. It's just that when certain subjects were broached, or certain images were shown, I became very uncomfortable, and almost frightened. I always had a vivid imagination, and was afraid of a lot of silly things as a kid. My imagination was in full color and stereophonic sound, but the best, or worst part, depending upon one's perspective, was the olfactory hallucinations. I could smell it. Christianity to me smelled like congealed, dried blood, and Christianity dared me to eat it. There in front of my face hung a larger-than-life-sized naked man, brown with the caked-on blood of his glorious sacrifice, and I could smell him. All around me, ecstatic people seemed to beg to be covered with this blood, in his holy gore, both inside and out. In fact, it was the only way to be "washed" of our sins. Wahsed in it? Sorry, no. I belonged to the 7th decade of the 20th century, and in my decade, people used Water, Lifebuoy, and Jean-Nate . Not 2000 year-old blood. And they didn't want to use towels, they wanted to wipe off with the suposedly crusty, bloody shroud of turin. If that weren't bad enough, they were always trying to feed him to me. I believed everything they told me, and if they told me that the grape kool-aide was Jesus' blood, it was Jesus' blood. Sure, it was symbolic. Yeah, that's a word that a 7 year-old understands. Drink this blood. It's symbolic." It might have looked like purple drink. but it sure smelled like old, dried-up death.

I'm sorry for bringing this up, dear diary. It's just that I saw an episode of CSI last night, and they were picking up pieces of arms and legs, all hacked up by an axe. The first thing I thought of was "Jesus." For some reason, it didn't make me feel all warm and loving,...and it sure as hell didn't make me feel hungry.

Thanks for listening, dear diary.
To hear more, please visit me at ellboundAlleee.com That's A-Double-L-Triple-E.

2005-03-03-9:17 a.m.
Thursday, March 3

Dear Diary,

I can't believe this still bothers me, but even after 20 years it pops up and rattles around in my head.

I was a senior in a public high school, and in Contemporary World Problems class my teacher, we'll call him Mr. Christian, had a clever idea. What's a worse Contemporary World Problem than Original Sin? He gleefully announced that we would be getting into groups and debating the concept of innate evil vs innate good.

Great. 17 year-olds debating an issue that divides the Christian churches. Not that they don't want to be divided. They seem to be content to keep on dividing until they vanish all together, FIne by me.

I was not a very, shall we say, sophisticated 17 year-old. But I was no dummy. I saw through this false dichotomy right away. It took half the class defending me to get him to change tactics. Not that it is ultimately satisfying to me now, but he changed it to inherent evil vs inherent nothing.

I was proud of myself for awhile, but what gets me now is that I had absolutely no experience or education in formal debate--or informal debate for that matter. Hell--I didn't really even know that there were other religions that had other positions on the very concept "ood and evil." I was still suffering under the influence of Christianity, so much so that I thought it was perfectly ok that "the other side" was using the Christian bible as its one and only reference. Our side was clumsily falling all over itself arguing nurture over nature or some other nonsense we knew nothing about in the 80's.

I remember those smug faces of the cool kids in class--the First Presbyterian Youth Group kids, two of them being the smartest kids in school. But now I realize they were right to use the bible as their reference. They were right to bring up Adam and Eve and the fruit, and all that stuff. We were arguing purely Christian concepts. It should have been the Baptists vs the Lutherans or something. We might as well have been in seminary class. But it's all routine in American public schools, isn't it?

Thanks for listening, dear diary.

To hear more, visit me at www....

2005-03-03-9:17 a.m.
Thursday, March 3

Dear Diary,

I can't believe this still bothers me, but even after 20 years it pops up and rattles around in my head.

I was a senior in a public high school, and in Contemporary World Problems class my teacher, we'll call him Mr. Christian, had a clever idea. What's a worse Contemporary World Problem than Original Sin? He gleefully announced that we would be getting into groups and debating the concept of innate evil vs innate good.

Great. 17 year-olds debating an issue that divides the Christian churches. Not that they don't want to be divided. They seem to be content to keep on dividing until they vanish all together, FIne by me.

I was not a very, shall we say, sophisticated 17 year-old. But I was no dummy. I saw through this false dichotomy right away. It took half the class defending me to get him to change tactics. Not that it is ultimately satisfying to me now, but he changed it to inherent evil vs inherent nothing.

I was proud of myself for awhile, but what gets me now is that I had absolutely no experience or education in formal debate--or informal debate for that matter. Hell--I didn't really even know that there were other religions that had other positions on the very concept "ood and evil." I was still suffering under the influence of Christianity, so much so that I thought it was perfectly ok that "the other side" was using the Christian bible as its one and only reference. Our side was clumsily falling all over itself arguing nurture over nature or some other nonsense we knew nothing about in the 80's.

I remember those smug faces of the cool kids in class--the First Presbyterian Youth Group kids, two of them being the smartest kids in school. But now I realize they were right to use the bible as their reference. They were right to bring up Adam and Eve and the fruit, and all that stuff. We were arguing purely Christian concepts. It should have been the Baptists vs the Lutherans or something. We might as well have been in seminary class. But it's all routine in American public schools, isn't it?

Thanks for listening, dear diary.

2005-03-02-1:37 p.m.
Wednesday, 2 March

Dear Diary,

Pastor reads passage. Then pastor says, "What Paul meant to say in this passage was blah blah blah ad nauseum. It's all in there.

Liberal Christians say God is Love, and Jesus was a feminist, and loves gay people. That's not in there.

God warns the people that if they sin, the women will be hiding their babies and afterbirth because it will be their only food. It's all in there. God orders Joshua to stone a family-father, mother, all the children and the animals because the father took cursed objects. The family was stones and then their bodies were burned to ashes. It's all in there.

What is all this reading between the lines. Can't you read? Jesus is talking about people burning up in hell forever. Jesus is saying the laws of Leviticus, like stoning disobedient children, were righteous. It's right there in black and white and red. I have a couple of bibles. I have all the context I need. It's all in there.

People claim that this is a book of morals, but they must interpret scripture by reading it upside-down, backwards, encoded, wearing special rose-colored glasses in the dark in a children's dentistry office in felt-board figure form, where the figures are talking vegetables. That way, they can't see the carrot twins having sex with their father carrot. They can't see the Broccoli god throwing the garlic and onions into the fire and roasting them forever.

But god damnit, it's freaking in there. Read the damned thing, and stop telling me that it's good. It's not good, for cucumber's sake.

Thanks for listening. I'm Hellbound Alleee. To hear more, please visit www.hellboundalleee.com . That's A Double L Triple E.

2005-03-01-10:55 a.m.
Tuesday, 1st March

My dear internet diary,

" University of Alabama Locks Nude Sculpture in Closet"

Nude Sculpture Draws Ire of Local Group
Ashcroft's Avengers term new work "Attack of the 40-Foot Perverts"

B.C. vandals chop penis off nude statue
Mayor David Perry and several citizens have demanded the statue be removed.

It seems that North Americans have been transported back in time again. This time as far back as possible--I think it was about 3 pm, around the time Adam and Eve ate the fruit and realized they were naked.

It's really quite rare, looking through western history, that people have been outraged over the Nude figure in art. Maybe in the Victorian era, but even then they didn't mind it as long as it depicted classical mythological figures. Today we can't even allow that, considering the Breasts of Justice, or the Labours of Hercules in Olympia Washington's Legislature building fiascos.

This is not somthing I got from art history class. Never took it. Perhaps this seems over-simplified, but the meaning of the nude figure in art seems simple. It represents humanity period.. The nude figure is a purely sympathetic character, it's vulnerable and totally honest.

The message that these religious and government groups are sending is clear: to lock up, destroy and tear down humanity itself. The evidence of these groups' anti-individual stances just keeps piling up, yet we keep going back to them to decide for us what is moral?

Your friend,
Hellbound Alleee

Come visit me at www.hellboundalleee.com! That's A -double-L-Triple-E.