Caleb: the upbeat Christian.

My grandma has always, as long as I can remember, been a very religious woman, and very active in her church. It has been her primary social network, and through this network she met a family who lived just down the street from her place. They had a kid named Caleb, and one weekend day while visiting my grandma, she wanted my brother and I to go play with him.

I was in 7th grade at the time. Caleb was a year or two younger than I was, and my brother several years younger than he was. My brother had met Caleb previously while visiting my grandma.

Being a grunge-obsessed junior high cretin, I kept asking Caleb if he liked any of my favorite bands. He didn't like any of them, and would always answer by telling me about his musical preference.

"Do you like The Smashing Pumpkins?" I'd ask.

"No, not really," he'd answer. "I'm pretty much just into upbeat Christian music."

"You don't even like Nirvana? Kurt Cobain is the coolest!"

"No, I pretty much only listen to upbeat Christian music."

He took my brother and I into his room and popped a tape into his cassette player, so we'd be able to experience upbeat Christian music. He told us it was the tape was of his favorite singer. Before anybody even started singing, I knew it sucked. It lacked the distortion and roughness that I required in my listening. It was offensively soft to my ears. When the singing started, it just got worse.

"It sure beats Hell. It sure beats Hell. Anyway you look at it, you're doing pretty well. It sure beats Hell. It sure beats Hell. Anyway you look at it, you're doing pretty well."

After the song finished, somebody on the tape started taking.

"See? He's a comedian, too!" Caleb told us. He kept chuckling as the guy spoke, but none of it was funny. It was all fire and brimstone. He'd bring up a bad scenario, and then say "It sure beats Hell!" and Caleb would laugh as if it were a joke.

"You might think you've had a rough day, you stubbed your toe and your dog died. But lemme tell you something: It sure beats Hell!"

Caleb had a Super Nintendo, and we kept asking if we could play with it. We didn't have video games at our house, so it was always an extra treat to play when we could. Caleb didn't want to, though. He was bent on playing soccer. He kept asking us if we wanted to play, and we'd say no, and ask again if we could play video games. Eventually, instead of playing video games, he put on some shin guards, even though we had never agreed to play soccer.

We never played soccer, though. We went back to my grandma's house shortly after he put the shin guards on.

He's a mean one, Mr. Grinch.

I didn't always hate Christmas. When I was a little kid, I thought it was awesome. It was that special time of year where we didn't have to go to school for what seemed like forever, and then one night, while running around and playing with our cousins, we got a bunch of new toys. It was great.

I didn't know that Christmas had anything to do with Christianity until I moved to Indiana, where everybody was deeply religious. I was 10 years old by that time. My family wasn't religious, but I hadn't developed my contempt for religion by that point, so I didn't really care. Christmas was still the time of year for not going to school and for getting a bunch of new toys. It was still my favorite holiday.

It wasn't until high school that I began to hate religion. I got sick of all the assholes using Jesus as their excuse for sexism and homophobia. I got sick of the self-righteous bastards pointing their fingers and telling me that I was going to go to Hell for completely absurd reasons. I got sick of being seemingly the only person, among smart people and idiots alike, that didn't believe in silly ancient superstitions about a man being nailed to a stick and saving everybody's souls. I was so disgusted by the prevailing irrational beliefs that I stopped celebrating Christmas.

But not really.

A friend of mine invented a new holiday, Cakeamongo, that I began celebrating. Cakeamongo was the non-denominational celebration of cake that involved nothing more than eating cake and exchanging gifts. But like the early Christians who had hijacked the December 25th holiday already celebrated by the pagans, renamed it, and ascribed it new meaning, we had just taken the December 25th holiday already celebrated by the Christians, renamed it, and ascribed it new meaning. For years, I was still celebrating Christmas, but I was calling it something else.

As I grow older, I find that my distaste for organized religion has changed. It's not that I don't find it stupid and annoying, because I certainly still do, but the more I think about it, the more dangerous it seems. I honestly believe that religion is by far the greatest threat to mankind that we face. As technology develops, it becomes easier and easier to kill huge numbers of people at one time. We live in a time in which thousands of people can be wiped off the face of the earth in a single stroke, and still huge numbers of people believe in ideologies that teach that the killing of believers in the wrong god is okay. I don't believe that religion is the primary reason that people kill each other, but it sure as hell is a great motivator and justifier. It certainly helps people divide themselves into groups, rather than thinking of themselves as members of one species. If the middle east was populated by poor-as-fuck Christians, and America was populated by wealthy, spoiled Muslims, I don't think things would really be much different than they are today. Millions of Americans believe that we're living in the end times, and that incredible amounts of death and destruction are just part of what's required for Jesus to come back. If things got bad here, I'd expect to see Christians become just as murderous as the Muslim extremists we hear so much about. I don't think it's an accident that the craziest strains of Christianity are followed by the poorest, most uneducated people in the country, just like the craziest strains of any other religion worldwide.

And you know what? I don't want to celebrate a holiday that has anything to do with those crazy, irrational, and downright fucking dangerous old myths.

It's not just the religious aspect of Christmas that I hate, either. I find mindless consumerism to be ridiculous, as well. I do find it kind of funny, though, that the American public has been suckered by huge, money-making corporations into believing that the best way to celebrate the birth of the ultimate anti-materialist is to buy lots of stuff. Still, I want no part of it. It's kind of sad when people believe that the best way to show that they care about a person is to give them material possessions. Material possessions that, in many if not most cases, the person would not have purchased for themselves if given the money and opportunity.

"Sorry I haven't talked to you all year, but I still totally care about you. To prove it, here's some stuff I purchased for you, wrapped in festive holiday paper."

I understand that many people, religious and secular, think of Christmas as a time of goodwill. They think of it as a time for family. That sounds good, but what about the rest of the year? In December, you're nice to your fellow humans, you see your folks, and then you get to be an asshole the rest of the year? I'm all in favor of being a good person, and I'm all in favor of being close to your family, but I think it's horribly selfish to only do it once a fucking year.

I've been called a Grinch, and a Scrooge, and a cheapass for not wanting to participate in holiday gift-giving. It's not that. It's just that I dislike Christianity, consumerism, and the idea that there are only certain times when you should behave like a decent human being.

"Why don't you draw me a picture?"

One day in fifth grade music class, we had to take some sort of written test. I was the first one done, and raised my hand to ask what I should do with my test.

"Why don't you turn it over and draw me a picture?" the teacher said. She was an old, kind lady who made us sing songs about the glory of the Lord. It was a public school, but in rural Indiana, they just assume that absolutely everybody is a Christian, or at least should be, and nobody ever complained about their kids having to sing religious songs.

Being a Dungeons and Dragons nerd, I turned over my test and drew an Orc. He was holding a sword, dripping with blood, and his face was slashed and bleeding, because he had just been involved in a battle with some other ferocious monster.

A few minutes later, the teacher started walking around collecting tests from the kids who had finished.

"Let's see what you drew me," she said with a big smile stretched across her face. As soon as she saw what I had drawn, though, her smile instantly disappeared, replaced by what could only be described as a look of shock or horror. She didn't say anything as she walked away, collecting tests from other students, her upbeat mood shaken.

I'm not really sure what she expected a fifth grade boy to draw. I'm pretty everything my friends and I drew at that age had some element of violence to it.

Mr. Lame loves Jesus, hates nerds.

Mr. Lane, my sixth grade science teacher, was incredibly popular. When an assignment was given in my English class to write a letter to any teacher, the vast majority of them went to him. He was considered to be way cool by most of the students, the exception to the rule being any social outcasts or people smart enough to see through his bullshit. He hated me, and I hated him.

He loved to tell awful jokes that the cool kids just ate up. I didn't find him particularly funny, and he once booted me out of class for laughing too loudly at one of his wisecracks. I guess I wasn't subtle enough in my effort to make fun of him and everybody in my class who thought he was a real laugh riot.

"I told you before not to do that," he said as I was walking out. It wasn't true.

He loved using his clout to push his self-righteous moral guidance on the class. There was a poster on the wall that was a montage of people involved in various outdoor activities. He loved to point out how he had conspicuously used a marker to black out a cigarette that one of the people on the poster was holding. There was also a story he told, which I later realized was probably entirely made up, about how he had never broken a single law, except for one isolated incident. He was driving with his wife and kids, and was the only car stopped at a light at an empty intersection. Somebody approached his car, offering him handfuls of drugs, and Mr. Lane had floored the accelerator, running the red light and saving his family from certain doom.

Mr. Lane liked to talk about God, and even though I was at a public school, he got away with it because we were in the middle of nowhere, and nearly the entire student body consisted of a mix of Christians, other Christians, and some more Christians. Oh, and me. This may have been where his distaste for me originated, as he was a member of one of the bat shit crazy denominations of Christianity that considered Dungeons and Dragons to be the work of the devil. I was an awkward nerd, and my handful of friends I had made by carrying around my D&D books with my school books.

"Is this for a class?" he asked me one day, spotting a hardback tome emblazoned with a picture of a guy fighting a dragon sitting on top of my science book.

"Uh, no," I said, wondering if there was some awesome class that somehow involved Dungeons and Dragons.

"Don't bring it back to my class," he said.

I sat, dumbstruck, wondering what his problem was. I asked around later and found out that many people there honestly believed that Dungeons and Dragons was completely "Satanic", though nobody could explain exactly why. Annoyed, I began stopping at my locker before his class to drop off my D&D books, and stopping again after his class to pick my books back up. Prior to that, I carried most of what I needed with me all the time to minimize the number of trips I made to my locker.

One day I had a small paperback book sitting on my desk. It wasn't a Dungeons and Dragons book, but it had a picture of a guy with a sword fighting some kind of monster on the cover. I learned that day that the "Satanic" label applied to basically all fantasy fiction.

"I thought I told you not to bring that stuff to class anymore," he said, pointing at my book. He made me go put it in my locker.

Every day, students that didn't have band or choir practice had an hour-long study hall to work on their homework, or read if they didn't have any. The teachers all took turns doing study hall duty, which consisted of sitting there and making sure nobody acted like an idiot. In Mr. Lane's case, it also included making jokes, flirting with 12 year old girls, and harassing nerds.

I had just made a new friend, when this guy I had never spoken to saw me hauling around a Dungeons and Dragons book. He didn't have any homework, or just didn't feel like doing it, so I let him look at a couple of my D&D books during study hall. He sat towards the front of the class, and when he unfolded a big dungeon map, I knew Mr. Lane was going to see him and say something crazy. Moments later, my prediction came true.

"Is that for a class?" he asked.

"No," the kid said.

"Put it away and don't bring it back," he said.

Kinda late, but still...

I wanted to post something like this earlier, but I couldn't draw with MS paint, which is why I gave you Danny Elfman as Satan. I just got this in my email box from Tommy, so here you go...