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 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.

I don't know how to love Jesus.

I would make a West Virginia joke here, but I'll refrain, because it's the Christian thing to do.

I tried; I really did. I used to go to church on Sundays with my friend's family when I was eleven. I was excited to learn the Lord's Prayer and I took communion despite the fact I was never baptized. I used to beg my mom to buy me those hurricane candles in the grocery store with pictures of Mary's face glued to the glass. I was fascinated and enamored with the quiet, cold, insular, and ancient world of Catholicism.

And then I got a little older.

I wasn't raised with a religion, an issue I would torpedo at my mother during my pre-pubescent temper tantrums. "Why don't I go to Sunday School?" I would wail. My mother, nonchalantly, would reply, "Because those fucking bitch nuns ruined my life." My dad always maintained that he didn't believe in anything really, but if he actually cared, he'd be Buddhist.

Growing up in a very Italian, psuedo-religious town, it was hard not to feel left out. Now, there was no passion in any of it - it was tradition, it was going through the motions until you were confirmed, it was something you did to set yourself up for later in life, but it seemed like everyone did it. The only people who were actually dedicated, who went to church regularly, were the old widows, who'd kneel with their rosaries and pray for the health of their grandchildren and seek solace in the words of old men, much like the husbands that left them behind.

This past weekend I attended a VERY religious wedding, with the all the classic elements - insistence on honoring God in the vows, stressed importance on having Jesus as the focus of the marriage, backhanded comments about homosexuals and civil marriage. I tried not to roll my eyes. I tried to honor the belief system of these people (both of whom I actually like very much), much as I would hope they'd honor my complete apathy to any religious system, nearly all of which have been clear in placing women below men and systematically devaluing half the species. I can't subscribe to a set of beliefs that tells us to believe in the love and power of a God who lets people starve and allows extremists to kill thousands of people in his name. I also can't believe an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient being that supposedly created everything in the universe actually has a sex and a gender.

Now, don't get me wrong - Jesus sounds like a good person. It's just all the crap surrounding him that turns me off. I won't speak badly of the guy, but due to the circumstances, I just don't think it's going to work. It's not you, Jesus; it's the assholes who think they know you. It's the self-righteous pastors and priests who condemn all of us who fornicated, lied and cheated - yet those were the people you flocked to. You knew long before Billy Joel that laughing with the sinners was better than crying with the saints.

Just do us all a favor and tell the people who worship you to lighten up.