The “Bare-Ass Strangler” Strikes Again

“We interrupt this segment of Boys Who Love Priests and the Girls Who Love Them to bring you a KXXX Special News Update. The Bare-Ass Strangler killed again tonight, striking the suburb of Safehaven at 8:14 p.m. with his usual lightning speed. When the 16-minute rampage was over, a 52-year-old bleached-blonde, her 100-year-old husband, and their 14-week-old schnauz-a-poo had been sodomized and slain. Bare-Ass first struck last November, and police have been trying ever since to piece together scattered clues as to his identity. 

“On his popular cooking blog, the Strangler says he calls himself B.A. because it’s easier to say than Bloodthirsty Atheist. However, local fops started calling him Bare-Ass, and—thanks to us in the news media—the name stuck. Many area residents say they prefer it because they hate atheists so much that they’re unwilling to use such a foul word to describe the killer, who, whatever his faults, is believed to be one of their own and therefore not a real atheist.

“When interviewed, several local members of the clergy made statements similar to those expressed by Rev. John Calvin-Wesley of Sour Grapes Lutheran, during a texting interview with KXXX’s own red-head, Leeza Teeza: ‘This is just the kind of thing that folks can, like, expect from atheists, and such crimes are, like, sure to increase because when atheists had God thrown out of our schools in 1962, they, like, invited Satan in. Atheists don’t, like, fear hell, and this gives them the freedom to do things that the rest of us can only, like, dream about, things like anal sex with anything that has an anus, and serial killing across age, race, gender, species, and religious affiliation.’

“Mayor Bratfink has called for a community wide prayer service at Boiling Oil Stadium for the purpose of ‘…asking the Lord Jesus to sharpen the eye and steady the hand, of anyone with a .12-gauge or a 30.06 who is lucky enough to come within sight of Bare-Ass’s ass.’ Jews and Unitarians are also invited to worship Jesus at the non-denominational service, which is to be held at dawn next Sunday. Everyone is asked to bring an item of canned food that has expired, been dented, or lost its label. The cans will be given to the Mormon Church of the Immaculate Conception for its food pantry, which was burglarized last Wednesday. Missy Massey, a frizzy-haired spokeswomanman for the sheriff’s office texted the following from a casino in Reno where she is vacationing with Studs Score, the lead detective on the Strangler case: ‘A previously unknown gang of atheists is our only suspect in the burglary because no one else would be low-down enough to steal from Mitt Romney’s kind of church. The fact that absolutely no evidence has been gathered clearly suggests the diabolical cleverness of these atheists, who are believed to be under the direct guidance of Satan and armed with missiles, hand grenades, and assault rifles.’

“When Dr. Billy Ray Moddle-Coddle, the local NRA spokesman, was asked for his opinion regarding the firepower of the atheists, he said, ‘Unlike my former wives, automatic weapons give me a whole new orgasm every time I fire, and with Old Betsy, that’s 800 orgasms a minute, so I would just say that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun; and that if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns; and that if atheists want to take away my Betsy, they’ll have to pry my cold dead fingers from around her sweet trigger, and I would just like to see them try because when it comes right down to it, I need a whole lot more long, hard guns and a whole lot fewer blood-sucking ex-wives.’

“We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.”

Don and Grady

I didn’t want my father to die (1994), but when he did, it freed me from a lot of worry and aggravation, so I felt more relief than grief and had no idea that I would end up thinking about him more often than anyone else who ever passed through my life. Next to him, I probably think most about my two best friends from boyhood, Grady* and Don.** Grady was my best friend in elementary school and junior high, and Don through high school, after which I lost touch with them. We all grew-up religious (fundamentalist Church of Christ), and Don and I both preached when we were in high school. After high school, he went to a Church of Christ college in Searcy, Arkansas, and became a full-time preacher, and I stopped going to church altogether. Grady married a Southern Baptist and joined her church (a sin that our boyhood church says he will go to hell for).

Don wrote to me about 20 years ago, and I told him right away that I had become an atheist. He suggested that he and I correspond about my atheism with the thought that he would share the wonderful life he was enjoying with the Lord Jesus, and thereby win me back to God. I said that would be fine, but I told him that converting me wouldn’t just mean demonstrating that he felt God’s presence, or even proving to me that God existed. He would have to also prove that it was his God that existed, and that I could only satisfy his God by going to his church. I included a list of preliminary questions, and he never wrote back.

I was the one to reinitiate contact with Grady. In his response, this man whom I had known as a gentle, serious, and sensitive boy sent me a picture of himself with a high-powered rifle and a dead elk that he had traveled all the way from Mississippi to Wyoming to kill. I didn’t say anything about the picture because, after all, some kindly people somehow find it within themselves to enjoy going to great trouble and expense to shoot animals, and I didn’t think any good could come from me sharing my anti-hunting sentiments (ironically, when we were boys, I would shoot animals for no reason other than that they were there, and Grady wouldn’t hurt a fly). However, when he told me about his “church home,” I told him about my atheism, and that was the last time I heard from Grady except for several months during which he forwarded religious stuff. I wrote to him repeatedly asking that he talk to me instead of sending me things that I found meaningless, but he just kept on keeping on, so I became increasingly stern until he stopped. I emailed him a time or two after that, and I also sent him a couple of Christmas cards, but then I gave up.

I’ve wondered from time-to-time how things would have gone with my former friends had I kept quiet about the subject of atheism, but I’m just not a person to keep quiet about things that are important to me. Imagine that one of them had turned out to be the one with a dirty little blotch on his character. For example, let’s go right to something really bad and imagine that he was a pedophile. I’ve had two friends—Ken and Bill—who were pedophiles, although I didn’t find out until years into our friendship, and even then it wasn’t because I had information that they could be arrested for, but because their behavior around children was so weird, and their interpretations of children’s behavior so disturbed. Despite this, I resolved to remain their friend but with the intention of gathering evidence and calling the law if I ever suspected them of molesting a child.

 

So, I’ve wondered from time to time if Don and Grady would have reacted any worse had I been a pedophile instead of an atheist. When I saw a survey last year in which most Americans said they hold atheists in lower esteem than sex offenders, I thought, yeah, that sounds about right. Just look at the way the Catholic Church has, at every level, blamed the victims of pedophiliac priests and the bishops who protected them, while readily forgiving the priests and bishops. Clearly, a great many believers see child molestation as small potatoes compared to atheism, but since God can’t be hurt by unbelief, and children can most assuredly be hurt by pedophiles, where’s the fairness in this? 

Anyway, I think about my two former friends more than I would like, and I often wonder how I might have handled things better. I see those relationships the same way I see my church experiment last year in that, whatever my limitations, I did the best I could, and I don’t see that I got a lot for it because in every case, it was the other person who broke off the relationship without even trying to address our differences. When, upon leaving the Church of Christ at age 18, I first started losing my religious friends, that in itself propelled me toward atheism because, as I told myself, if people who worship God and claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit are less loving than people who have no religion at all, then, just maybe, God doesn’t exist. The only religious people with whom I am still friends face-to-face are a couple of old people I visit and with whom the subject of my own religious views has never come up. This means that my only existing tie with the world of religion is with my half-sister who I write to but never see, and with the religious people who read this blog. I’ve been both pleased and amazed that more of my readers haven’t gone away. It brings me no closer to believing in the supernatural, but it does make me a little less hostile toward religion.

*Grady is standing in this 1961 photo in which he and I are admiring a watch I won in a newspaper contest. 

**Don is at the top left of this 1966 double-exposure, which was taken in Bloomington, Indiana, where we had gone with a preacher on revival (I'm not pictured) and stayed with a family by the name of Ellett. The Elletts were wonderful people, right up until the time I left the church and they shut me out of their lives without a word.