Born Unplugged pt. 5

(Click here for PART 4)

In 1997 HBO aired a tribute to comedian George Carlin called 40 years of Comedy.  The special included clips from many of his classic routines such as ‘The seven dirty words’, ‘Football vs. Baseball’, and ‘The hippy-dippy weatherman’.  The program went on to feature the guest of honor himself performing a bit from his most recent special at the time, You’re all Diseased.  The finest moment of the show came at the midway point and would go on to be known as “Religion is Bullshit.”  This was the sincerest, most crucial turning point in my journey and the crux of this entire blog.

The set was mirroring almost the same exact words that were bouncing around in my head since grade school.  With this man on the screen saying it loud and proud, this is pretty much where the switch got flipped.   At first I was shocked and a little afraid. I remember thinking. ‘He’s allowed to say this stuff?’ but as he went on, the words just sunk in.  And I mean REALLY sunk in. Before all of this, I was always told about god and the devil, and while I never gave it any real credence I never questioned it either.  By the time that show had ended I had come to the somewhat partial understanding that A) I wasn’t wrong for thinking the way I did, and B) I was not by myself.  There was a great deal of comfort in knowing there was at least one other person who wasn’t “drinking the kool-aid”. 

There wasn’t a lot I could do to keep my mother from pissing money away when the collection plate came around or tuning into Bobby Jones gospel on BET which was a show that every now and then would feature half-baked musical acts that were offered as an alternative to mainstream music. I can recall one Sunday where I was called away from an episode of Biker Mice from Mars to hear a ‘rousing’ rendition of a gospel remix of the hip hop song “Jump” (FYI, having the exact same beat and rhyme flow, peppered with ‘god’ and ‘jesus’ and bible quotes isn’t all that original).  Fortunately artists like LeCrae (of whom I will unreservedly admit to being a fan) bring the subgenre of holy hip hop some artistic credibility.

It wasn’t until I sat reading the letters page of a comic book called The Savage Dragon that I finally learned the word for what I was: Atheist.  And that was it. There was no huge epiphany, no “I hate god for making the world this way or that”; as far as I was concerned there was no god to hate.  So I graduated high school and entered my adulthood perfectly comfortable not having a god, not going to church, very few worries and no fear of getting burned or jabbed with a pitchfork.  You’d think everything from there on would be smooth sailing.  Even when Bush thugged his way into white house there was no way things could get any more screwed up, at least that’s what I was thinking.  In my sophomore year of college I couldn’t have imagined how much the world around me would change when I woke up for class that one Tuesday morning (can you take a wild guess at what I’m talking about here?).  From then on it was more or less the circus Carlin predicted it would be.  Muslim and Christians muscling up to go at each other’s throats overseas, gas prices shooting into the mesosphere, the patriot act, etc…and at age 19 all I could honestly say about the situation was “What the fuck?”