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

I'm even slut-shamed by my cervix.

The horror, the horror.

On Wednesday I have to have a LEEP. If you don't have a cervix, skip to the next paragraph, because I doubt you'll give a shit. Basically, I have precancerous cells, and the next step is to take an electrified loop of wire and shave off a layer of tissue, after which I can't have sex, lift anything heavy, or take a bath for a month. Woohoo!

So I'm reading up on it, and here's what the Wikipedia page has to tell me about how my lifestyle is responsible for this:

"A number of risk factors have been shown to increase a woman's likelihood of developing CIN,^[9] including poor diet, poor personal hygiene, multiple sexual partners, lack of condom use, and cigarette smoking."

Alright, here is where I want to say, fuck you very much, medicine.

Oh, you had sex with a bunch of people? Yeah, it's your own fucking fault that you're well on your way to cancer. You didn't use a condom every time you had sex? Get ready for us to remove a big chunk of your internal tissue. I find it way too convenient that what modern medicine tells us is the best for women is - hmm - EXACTLY what the patriarchy feeds us. Apparently, unless I sleep with one person, live completely sober, and pop out a bunch of babies in my twenties, I am essentially inflicting myself with certain death by terminal illness. I'm sorry, but I think this is fucking bullshit.

And here's the kicker: cervical dysplasia (what I have) is caused by HPV, which I am vaccinated against. So, something's fishy here, right? Here are the options that I'm considering:

1. Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, doesn't work.
2. Doctors are fucking idiots.
3. I have been cursed by a Somalian witch doctor at the behest of my ex-boyfriend who threw a ceramic heart I made him in a river because I dumped him for someone else and he made me a video of pictures of me surrounded by flowers with an accompanying crappy poem and I deleted it off my computer without watching the whole thing and called him a creep. 
4. The changes in my cervix are my version of normal - seeing as I've had cervical cell 'changes' since I was SEVENTEEN - and this is simply a ruse, so they're terrifying me with the C-word so they can get my insurance company to pay for a somewhat expensive, not-very-necessary outpatient procedure.
5. God is really trying to get back at me for saying "Jesus shit" all the time.

Oh, and it goes on, for as long as we ladies shall live. If it's not a Pap smear, it's a hysterectomy. We can't give birth like our bodies were designed to, so we all have to have C-sections.  The medicalization of women's bodies in our culture is both pervasive and perverse. It's a way to reap maximum profits and ensure that reproductive power - the only kind of power that is strictly held by women - is chained down for society's sake.

All I have to say is, whatever painkillers they give me... they better be good enough to make me forget my own name and the fact that I have a vagina at all.

the motherhood malady.

Yesterday, I read a bullshit article in the New York Observer about this new "faminism" trend, which fluctuated between typical trend-piece-stretch (a couple famous women and some spoiled New York housewives do not a trend make) and backlash propaganda. It's basically a story about how feminism is out, and tending to thirty thousand snot-nosed little brats instead of working is what women should be doing!

It's in full effect, ladies. Run for your lives.

'Women are defining themselves more by their families than they are by themselves,' said Pamela Paul, a 39-year-old mother of three in Harlem and author of Parenting Inc. 'It’s no longer about something as selfish and self-advancing as abortion or the pill.'

 Oh, right, because not having a child when you can't afford one and not bringing more human beings into an already-overpopulated planet are so SELFISH.

What the article is trying to drive home is that it is now popular - nay, the status quo - to forego our self-actualization in favor of strollers, and view the personal as not political, but parental. Again, yet again, women are expected to find fulfillment only through motherhood. And we call this a "choice."

But I want to know - what choices, as women, do we really have? Settle down, become mothers - for whom? We're told we have more reproductive freedom than ever before in history, and the preponderance of prophylactics available in 2010 absolutely makes it true, in a tangible sense. That doesn't stop society from reminding women that our "clock is ticking," that "time is running out on your fertile years," that it's "biological destiny." It's backlash like all other backlash, it's just another way of attempting to force women to fit the mold. I find it incredibly disheartening that, even this far along, we only have the illusion of choice. Choice would imply that all options are equally viable and acceptable. There is only one socially acceptable option for being an adult female in America, and we all know what happens if you don't take that road.

I just wish for a society in which our worth is not purchased by a diamond engagement ring, and our future is not formed in a marital bed. We should all be able to want any kind of life as women, be it full of children or without any - but you shouldn't need a certain life to be a woman. I want to be living proof.