2. HOWEVER, I must confess that I , and several other “nonbelievers” in my family, have appropriated my Southern fundamentalist grandparents’ endearment, “bless your heart,” as an all-purpose expression of affection or sympathy. We just leave open the question of who is doing the “blessing.”

3.I love colorful swearing, the more long-winded the better. My personal favorite comes from a comic book called “Sam and Max” and it goes “Holy jumpin’ mother o’god in a sidecar with chocolate jimmies and a lobster bib!” I don’t actually use it much, but it never fails to crack me up. I also love Apu’s interjection,”Shiva H. Vishnu!” from the Simpsons, and the Monty Python routine with the Russian communists saying “Oh my lack of god!”

4. I LOVE old gospel tunes, especially the Carter Family. (Who remembers the Onion piece, “Gospel Choir Makes Area Man Wish He Believed in All That God Bullshit”?) I was the one who insisted that we play “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” at my grandfather’s funeral, much to the amusement of the other fundie relatives who thought it was dorky, quaint and old-fashioned! (Little do they know that traditional music is now cool among urban hipsters, while THEY insist on listening to truly awful, modern gospel dreck. Think Celine Dion doing the soundtrack to a Disney movie, only more treacly…)
I also love “Anchored in Love,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “Little Log Cabin by the Sea,” and many others. I try to tell myself that religion was somewhat different when those songs were written, that it’s all about context, but the truth is those songs do express something all humans long for: unconditional love and peace. All I can say is, too bad they’re barking up the wrong tree…

Thank you for the opportunity to get all this off my chest. You all rock.

But then we’re not your next door neighbors having to put up with all the screaming.

And I go out of my way to find things about religion in the news to get angry and worked up about, just so I can blog about them.

Please forgive me.

i couldn’t use the alternatives of ‘thank science/nature/the universe’…for me it’s too contrived – therefore uncomfortable and unsatisfying to use as an expletive. i previously felt my version was too challenging to use in polite company, but now i can claim that it’s my appreciation of evolutionary factors as opposed to a god-based world view that explains and justifies it.

thank fuck for that.

My personal confession, I find it hard to have intelectual conversations with religious people without it ending up in a reason not to believe there is an all loving, all powerful, all knowing thing.

As you may have noticed, I have a hard time using the word god or God. When I use the word I feel like people automatically think up some shape in their mind. Saying “thing” or “personality” instead, I think, helps them realize that there is no reason to even call it God… It’s more than that, but I’m lazy to type.