A disclaimer for this post: I’m not a religious person. I think religion is just about the wackiest thing humans ever thought up to excuse behaving badly. And because I was once a believer, I know the religious beast fairly well.

I was never part of the evangelical movement – my parents raised me in The Congregational Church, which is about as close as you can get to being Jewish without actually being Jewish. And maybe that explains the ease with which I converted to Judaism many years after being confirmed. (Although I did start my trip into apostasy during my confirmation. We were given a small card that depicted a cross with “Jesus” written on it. Above the cross was written “God.” Below the cross was written “You.” This was to demonstrate that the path to God was through Jesus. All I could think was, “What, I can’t direct-dial God? Is Jesus just a celestial phone operator?”)

Because I lived in Houston, I was familiar with Southern Baptists and other offshoots of Protestantism. I remember being shocked going into my first Baptist church. It was enormous, gilded at every turn, and the carpeting was red. Hot red. Lipstick red. Blood of Our Savior red. There were stained-glass windows, but modern ones, gaudy as hell. I thought it looked like a bordello.

My school orchestra was hired to play “The Messiah” at Baptist churches throughout Houston during the Christmas holidays. They would have their chorus set up on rickety tiers to make a “living” Christmas tree. Their soloists did the leads. (If you’re familiar with “The Messiah” there are a lot of solo parts.)

The soloists were almost always dreadful. They didn’t know how to keep time. They didn’t know how to sing with full orchestration. Their choral directors had never directed an orchestra before. (And don’t even get me started on how Handel wrote “The Messiah” for Easter, not for Christmas.) They also treated us like slave labor. We were high school kids, but we might as well have been field hands.

Later, when I was in college, there was a 7th Day Adventist who used to come by my apartment and try to convert me. I was smoking loads of pot at the time, and my parents had raised me to be polite, so I usually just let her in and let her do her spiel.

But I’m older and crankier now.

Read More »

Here’s something fun, for us word geeks: a modest proposal to promote better spelling and grammar on the net.

And while I’m in word fu mode, here is an online etymology dictionary. Did you know the word heresy originally meant “to choose?” Ah, for the old days, when choice was bad thing!