God, No! (18 page)

I have a very good friend who read this one and said that it really has to depend on who your family is. I guess, if I want to be logical, I have to accept that that’s true. But it breaks my heart.

ONE ATHEIST’S FIFTH SUGGESTION

Be there for your family. Love your parents, your partner, and your children. (Love is deeper than honor, and parents matter, but so do spouse and children.)

Sister

I
was at the Terrorist Starbucks with Sister and a bunch of my goofball friends. It’s the Terrorist Starbucks because they say the 9/11 religious people planned part of their murders at this Vegas Buckys. If you went there for coffee in the first few years after the Twin Towers attack, some of the baristas would claim to have watched them plotting for god. I don’t believe the killers were really ever there. After that much evil hits, our memories all get a little fucked. But I still call it the Terrorist Starbucks.

I didn’t leave out the word “my” before “Sister.” That was what I always called her. Her name was Valda, the same as my mom’s name, but calling her by her first name would have seemed disrespectful. My sister was twenty-three years old when I was born and married when I was three years old. I was her ring bearer and I was cute as a button, motherfucker; I’ve seen the pictures.

Sister and I were full siblings and have no other brothers or sisters. No one between us. I suppose it’s possible that our parents planned to have two children twenty-three years apart, but it seems more likely that I was a mistake. They might have used the word “surprise,” but I never talked to my parents or Sister about sex. They weren’t the kind of people
who talk about sex. I am the kind of person who talks about sex a lot. I’m hoping that I can get through this tearful writing about Sister without writing about my cock.

Reading about Jack Nicholson and Bobby Darin each finding out, as adults, that their sisters were actually their moms, I was kind of ready for that surprise. I was so close to my mom, but I guess I could have been that close to her as my grandmother. However, there was no deathbed confession from Mom and no deathbed confession from Sister, so I guess I’m not destined for anything as great as
Chinatown
or that psycho translation of “Mack the Knife.” There were people in my hometown who had been in the hospital with Mom when I was born, so if they were lying about it, they sure did a good job.

I had Mom and Dad in my life for half of their lives. I was born when Mom was forty-five, and Mom and Dad both died at around ninety. I was fifty when my daughter was born. Having older parents is great, except for that dying thing. Sister being older was wonderful, but she recently died too. She got to watch me on
Dancing with the Stars
with her friends at her very nice nursing home, and she got to meet my children before she died. Going on
Dancing with the Stars
sure is goofy. It can knock out of one’s head any illusions one has about being in the “arts,” but if you have elderly people you love, it’ll make them very happy and popular with their friends.

Sister died a little young of old age, and when she died, there went the only person I was in contact with who knew me as a child. There was no longer anyone to call every day and talk about what my toddlers, Mox and Zz, had done that day and compare it to me when I was a child. When my mom and dad died, it seemed impossible that I could miss anyone more. When Sister died, I missed her more.

People used to say that Sister and I were opposites. She was so quiet and polite. I’m not quiet. She was sweet. I’m not. Everyone liked her. There wasn’t a Facebook page dedicated to calling her a cunt, like there is for her brother. Being a tour guide at Historic Old Deerfield, taking three people at a time through the collection of two-hundred-year-old
crafts, was as showbizzy as she ever got. Her brother was on
Dancing with the Stars
and knows Wayne Newton.

Because of all our fucked-up generations, I guess you could say she assumed the role of grandparent for me. She would take me on Sundays when Mom and Dad went to numismatic shindigs. Sister would care for me and give me all the candy I wanted. She had her own children, so Mox and Zz’s first cousins are now knocking on fifty years old.

If you want to raise a monster like me, just fill your children with unconditional love. Not just California heart-on-the-sleeve-hug love (when Mom was on her deathbed, I told her I loved her. She said, “Well, of course you do, you always do, why did you think you had to say something like that?” Saying I loved Mom and Dad was like saying I was breathing; it really didn’t have to be mentioned. We didn’t hug much, but our hugs were not like hugging my agents in L.A.), but real love. And while you’re at it, throw in pure unconditional love from a sibling. That will give you a person who is twelve feet tall and bulletproof.

Back to the Terrorist Buckys. The conversation turned from the 9/11 terrorists to the Unabomber. Everyone took turns commiserating with the brother of the Unabomber turning in his dangerous and mentally ill brother. Each one of the show folk at the table talked about how hard it would be to make that decision.

Sister didn’t get it. She was sincerely puzzled. She was often left out of our conversations—we talked about music she hadn’t heard or movies she hadn’t seen—and she’d sit politely as we rudely left her out.

I still hadn’t said anything myself about the Unabomber’s brother. I was watching Sister. She was really confused and showing it. Sister knew about what was going on in the world; it was hard to believe she didn’t know about the Unabomber being turned in by his brother.

“Sister, you know the Unabomber, right—the environmental guy who killed and wounded those scientists? His brother turned him in.”

“Yes, I know. I just don’t know what’s hard.”

“They’re talking about how hard it would be for his brother to
turn him in to the Feds. The brother figured out his brother was the Unabomber. His brother turned him in; that must have been hard.”

“Yes, I know about the Unabomber and his brother, but I don’t see what’s hard about it.”

Everyone got ready for Sister to explain that if someone was killing people, you had to stop them. She was such a gentle person. She had raised money for the police of Greenfield, Massachusetts, to buy bulletproof vests.

Nope. That’s not what she meant.

“I would never turn in a member of my family. Never. Not to anyone for any reason. I would never turn against Penn. Never.”

Sister was never confrontational. She didn’t say crazy shit like her brother does. My friends were shocked. She left no room for debate, but my dirtball friends elbowed in some room for debate. They came up with a few variations on the Jack Bauer torture argument: “Penn has put an atomic bomb in the center of Manhattan. It will kill everyone, millions of people. If you turn him in, they can stop it from going off, and it’ll save millions of people. You’d turn him in then, right?”

It was like they had said to her, “You can flap your arms and fly under your own power, right? And then you can eat a twelve-pound bowling ball in one bite, right?”

“No, never. I would never turn in my brother. I’m on his side no matter what. There’s nothing he can do to change that. Nothing.”

I had never seen Sister push this hard in a discussion. She always sat on the sidelines; now she was in the center. Now they were hypothetically off in outer space, with me blowing up the whole world, and it could all be stopped by her dropping a dime. I was no longer listening. I was just looking at Sister and thinking. Here was a seventy-three-year-old gray-haired New England woman dressed in her Sunday clothes to be out at a Starbucks with her brother’s collection of musicians, comedians, and showgirls in jeans and tattoos, and she wasn’t budging. She couldn’t even understand that it was a question.

I can’t imagine loving Sister more. I can’t imagine it. And as much as I feel that white light/white heat diamond-bullet love for Sister, she
loved me more. I might decide not to rat her out in these hypothetical games, but I would have to think about it. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t understand ratting me out; she couldn’t understand having to think about ratting me out.

Shortly after that trip to Vegas, she started getting sick. She had a few little strokes and a lot of trouble walking. She got MRSA in the hospital. I saw her a bunch more and we visited her with her little niece and nephew wearing masks. We had lots more talks and I held her hand. I looked at her.

But when I think of love, I don’t just think of her holding little Zz and singing songs Mom used to sing to us. I think of Sister not even understanding that there was a decision to be made in choosing me over the world.

I sure hope I learned something from Sister. I want Mox and Zz to feel that pure immoral love that Sister felt for me. If Moxie and Zolten Jillette make plans to set up nuclear devices all over the planet and I know about this plan and how the FBI can stop them . . . you better kiss your ass good-bye.

“Nuclear War”

—Sun Ra

Passing Down the Joy of Not Collecting Stamps

T
here was a book out a while ago about atheist parenting. I’m not going to tell you what it was called. They asked me to write an article for them. It was like no money, but I thought it was a good cause. I wrote the article and the editors told me it was the only article they wanted to change for content. They thought I was too negative toward religion, and they thought the word “fuck” would turn people off. I tried to explain that sometimes the word “fuck” turns people on. Who cares? I let them water down what I said, but I promised to never mention the book by name anywhere. If you still want to read it, go fuck yourself. Why would anyone want a book on atheist parenting that teaches atheist parents to be half-assed about their beliefs? I liked what I wrote, and now I have my own book, so I’ll go through the original article and make it even more negative toward religion, and I’ll write “fuck” in various forms.

Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, wrote, “Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man.” Some web pages say that might really be Francis Xavier’s quotation. Others say it was “some Jesuit” who said it, and all the careful scholarly web pages credit it to “some guy.”

Little children have to trust adults or they die. Trust has to be built in. So while you’re teaching them to eat, stay out of traffic, and not drink too much of what’s underneath the sink, you can abuse that trust and burn in the evil idea that faith is good. It’ll often stick with them longer than not drinking bleach. It seems if someone snuck the idea of faith into you at an early age, you’re more likely to do it to your own children.

If your childhood trust was not abused with faith or if somehow you kicked it in your travels down the road, your work is done. You don’t have to worry too much about your children. You don’t ever have to teach atheism. You don’t have to teach an absence of guilt for things they didn’t do. As atheist parents, you just have one more good reason to keep your children away from priests. Tell your children the truth as you see it and let the marketplace of ideas work as they grow up. An “anonymous reader” of James Randi’s Swift web page wrote, “Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.” Maybe it was Francis Xavier.

You have to work hard to get children to believe nonsense (outside of their make-believe sessions). If you’re not desperately selling lies, the work is a lot easier. My children are still in preschool, but even when they were babies we were still a little bit careful of what we said. When someone sneezes we say “That’s funny,” because it is. We don’t have any friends who are Christards or into any kind of faith-based hooey, so our children will just think that “damn it” naturally follows “god” like “fucker” naturally follows “mother.”

That’s cool. That’s easy.

It’s an unfashionable belief in the atheist community, but truth just needs to be stated; it doesn’t have to be hyped. I know, I do a lot of hyping of atheism, but remember what Bob Dobbs said: “I don’t practice what I preach because I’m not the kind of person I’m preaching to.”

There is no god, and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

Without hype, Lot’s salt-heap ho would never be thought of again. Without science, Earth still goes around the sun, and someday someone would find a way to discover that again. Science is so important because it’s a way to find truth, but the truth doesn’t depend on it. Reality exists outside of humans. Religion does not. The bad guys have to try to get the children early to keep their jive alive. We good guys should try to get the truth out there, but the stakes just aren’t as high for us. Most anyone who is serious about science will lose some faith. Maybe not all their faith, but they’ll lose a hunk of it before getting that Nobel Prize. No matter how bad the polls on the general population of Americans look, the people who do science for a living aren’t being fooled. Evolution is the truth. And with truth comes a lack of panic. I don’t lose sleep over creation myths being taught in public schools. Who trusts anything from government schools? Does anyone besides me really believe that marijuana is a gateway drug? “Better to be uneducated than educated by your government,” as either I or Thomas Jefferson said. The bad guys always have to fight for their ideas to be taught. They must cheat. Government force, propaganda, and hype are the tools you desperately need when you’re wrong. Truth abides.