Who cares if they serve beer in hell? I'm looking forward to the flaming cocktails.

This book is currently the most popular book in America. 

This book is #1 on the New York Times non-fiction paperback bestseller list. It is the top-sold book on Amazon.com.

It is 154 pages about a four-year-old boy who has a “near-death experience” when he goes under for an appendectomy, comes back, and tells his Nebraska-based evangelical pastor father about all the flying angels in heaven and the size of God’s chair.

It was ghostwritten by Lynn Vincent, responsible for the sewage that is Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue."

If you know me, you know I’m the ultimate cynic about all things theological. I think religion is a crock of shit wrapped in a doily and mass-distributed at Walmart. 

However, I genuinely respect human beings who genuinely have faith and allow said faith to be the guiding force in their lives. I have no disdain for those who care about things like charity, and helping your fellow man, and look to a higher power as giving them purpose and meaning on Earth. It's not my bag, but to each their own, right?

But you know what’s bullshit? Exploiting your four-year-old’s dreams to sell a fucking book in which YOU preach your point of view that the last epic battle is coming and all us non-believers are going to have the proverbial – or, mayhaps, the literal – sword of the righteous thrust into our chests. 

According to the - ahem - prophet Colton, he did all kinds of awesome heavenly shit behind the pearly gates. It's beautiful and all cloud-like and adorned in gold and God just hangs out and gives you high fives every time you win a ping pong game against John the Baptist. Everyone is beautiful and shiny and happy and fit and everyone who doesn't repent is on a one-way broken escalator to Lucifer's lair. Totally unique take on the afterlife.

So here's the thing: if heaven is so “for real” and so totally rad, why did it take SEVEN YEARS for Colton’s story to be told? Colton is now 11. Wouldn’t you think he and his parents would want to share the awe-inspiring revelations about Jesus’s white skin, blue eyes and purple robes right after it happened? I mean, meeting God is a BFD, right?

Also during Colton’s supernatural jaunt, he meets his miscarried sister. Apparently, four-year-olds understand procreation, miscarriages and the pain of losing a wanted unborn child. And apparently, preschoolers are the new darlings of the pro-life movement. If this isn’t thinly-veiled anti-abortion propaganda, I don’t know what is. And this is why I want Todd Burpo’s house to burn down.

It isn’t enough, Burpo, that you get your own podium every week, but now you’re going to pimp your kid to shove your bullshit down the throats of mainstream America? You’re going to make a fortune simply because you had a child with a vivid imagination and everyone in the Midwest hates their lives so fucking much that they’re going to eat up your fanciful tales of eternal goodness and light for all Christians, and damnation for the rest of us?

This is why I hate 95% of America. Because 95% of America is so fucking brainless that instead of reading books about  history or civil rights or economics, people would rather read poorly-written novellas about the alleged otherworldly experience of a child who can’t even tie his own shoes. If you really want to be a Christian, READ THE BIBLE, not this pointless drivel.

The main supporters of this book claim it is ‘encouraging’ and ‘inspirational.’ That means that all the people that are reading this piece of crap are hoping, praying, and patiently awaiting their arrival on some beautiful, peaceful faraway plane. These people are wasting their lives on Earth – truly, the only lives that they have – simply because they believe that something better will meet them on the other side. So as much as I find them repulsive, I also feel sorry for them. If you’re a forty-five year old woman who has to ask a four-year-old to tell you where you’re going, you’ve never really lived a day in your life.

"Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one." – Richard Dawkins

the post in which I make fun of abstinence-only sex education and die a little on the inside.

I was your run-of-the-mill suburban WASP type. I grew up in a house where sex was NOT discussed, save for a conversation with my mother at age 19 when she confessed that she found oral sex disgusting. Needless to say, everything I learned before having sex, I learned from inept, conservative, middle-aged sex education teachers. 

I didn't go to school during the era of abstinence-only education, though, and I thank the non-existent higher power for that. I was given enough of an education to know that condoms are effective, all chlamydia requires is some penicillin and the nearest abortion clinic was 35 miles away. I didn't learn about female orgasms (naturally, the discourse of desire fails women), but that what was my trusty $12 novelty vibrator from Spencer's that my boyfriend stole for me was for.

So I'm frustrated to see the outright lies that these government-funded "educational" groups lay thick on kids nowadays. A sampling:

- You can get HIV from sweat and tears

- 40-day old fetuses are "thinking people"

- Condoms are effective less than 70% of the time

- Abortion causes breast cancer and sterility  

Not to mention the fact that they either stigmatize queer youth or leave the LGBT experience out of teachings entirely, and perpetuate ridiculous gender stereotypes that are designed to boost the patriarchy and keep women devalued.

Apparently, as part of the curriculum in many states, they make kids in junior high draw (I use the term liberally) posters depicting the ills of sex and the joys of retaining your hymen. Note, of course, the onus is on girls to stop boys before they go too far - and if they get knocked up, it's their fault. I'm not criticizing the kids that make these posters - how are they to know better? I'm just furious that moralistic assholes who want to spread their bullshit gospel put young people's lives in jeopardy because they refuse to acknowledge reality and give teens the tools to protect themselves.

Let's read the inanity and weep, shall we?

 

I think this is probably the best advertisement for the rhythm method that I've ever heard.

I really like how this one throws in a "but," like, getting STDs is wicked awesome, but, then you might have to blow all your after-school job money on some offspring. Bummer, dude.

WHO GETS PERMS ANYMORE?! I'd much prefer a sticky white substance over an hour of burnt hair smell and months of poodle hair.

This bitch makes it sound like "intimate affection" is a bad thing. I bet her mother makes her douche with Lysol.

Reach for the stars! 

Intercourse: a one way ticket to quadruple-bypassville.

Uh, kiddo? Nobody told you about how propagating the species actually works, did they? Awkward.

Sex kills! So wait until you're married! So you don't die alone! I'm going to go kill myself now.

I'm not a candy. I also do my Kegel's. Nobody knows the difference.

I'm pretty quick to refute this one. Talking is dangerous. Talking is where your heart gets broken, not when someone's between your legs. It's pretty hard to tell someone their grandmother died mid-coitus.

It terrifies and saddens me that we're making junior high school students submit anti-abortion propaganda for a school project. The "mother" emphasis also really blows my mind. No wonder she aborted you - that's fucking obnoxious.

This is a great message, but it negates itself. First of all, if I'm using condoms, the implication is that I will not have a baby to feed. (That's what condoms are for, FYI, you adorable little undereducated tweens). And all I gotta do is put some Alpo in a bowl labeled "BABY," plop it down on the floor and we're good to go. Like pets, only you birth them!

There will be someone who will come along in your life. Someone incredibly attractive who you will think about from time and wish that you had bedded. And trust me, until you masturbate to someone you haven't seen in five years, you don't know the meaning of "too late."

I can't stop reading Mormon lady blogs.

I can't help myself. I feel like I'm on a different planet than these people. They're all shiny, attractive, wrinkle-free and wholesome. They've never smoked a cigarette in their lives and they don't watch cable television because it's too crass. They got married at 19 and knocked up at 20 because they're all dying to address their sexualities but aren't allowed to do so outside the contract of matrimony. They think coffee is the work of the devil and they all end up with men that are pre-med but somehow have the money to buy new houses and cars. These people live in an alternate universe where no one is black, gay, fat, poor, or cynical. They put on a happy face and pretend that life is beautiful while they suffocate under the burden of being perfect. They chastize the drunks and addicts but make sure to take their Prozac and Xanax every day, claiming the hand of a doctor somehow divine. They redress doubt not through exploration or rejection, but reaffirmation.

Now, don't consider me an expert. I've only met three actual church-going Mormons in my life. The first two were missionaries brought into my Comparative Religions class in high school. The only things I remember about them were their strange, stilted way of speaking about their church, and the long dowdy skirts they wore. The only other Mormon? A closeted beefcake of a man who slept with Joel. My interest in the culture of LDS and Utah grew, naturally, through the depiction of a polygamous fundamental LDS family on a critically-acclaimed cable television show. Yes, I'm talking about Big Love.

 

I don't know what I find more fascinating - their complete naivete or their thinly-veiled pretentiousness. They're so excited about "helping" people, but their version of helping is bothering people at home and telling them their religion is unsatisfactory and that they need to join the "one true church." They post RENT lyrics and videos of Kristin Chenowith on Broadway, yet pay their tithes to an organized religion that works to ban gay marriage and the ERA.

I guess what intrigues me most is that elements of my life that are SO mundane and banal - getting an iced coffee, dropping an F bomb, wearing a short skirt, buying condoms, having a beer after work, criticizing authority, giving homeless people change - all these things that create the backdrop of my life are not even present in their sheltered little world. Experiences that I find fundamentally American in nature are never experienced by these people. It continues to astound me how multi-layered our society is.

Furthermore, I can't hide my disdain for LDS. I can't pretend I'm not disgusted by the fact one of the faith's founders claimed to have a "calling" just so he could sleep with as many teenaged girls as he wanted without receiving disdain from his followers. I won't trust a religion that refuses to allow the "non-worthy" into their temples, even for their children's weddings. A true church would not turn anyone away. THAT'S "charity"... not baptizing someone posthumously against their wishes. Religion has nothing to do with building $3 billion malls... and it never should.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to stop reading about their alcohol-free Cinco de Mayo festivities and their Vegas honeymoons sans gambling. There are, apparently, numerous Americas - and I'm happy to live in one of them that's real.