Of course, I continued to read. And search. And wonder. WTF? WTF? What are you going to do with your life? What's worthy?

Sometime during this period, puberty finally kicked in, the testosterone started pumping, and I discovered this new animal roaring in my BVD's.

I had grown up learning about sex from a very early age, courtesy of the encyclopedias I'd read. I knew all about what went where and why long before I was old enough to do much about it.

I had my first sexual experience.

I recall thinking how much more fun it would have been if someone else had been there. :-)

I remember my smartass reply to my dad when he clumsily broached the subject. He told me he wanted to talk with me about the birds and the bees.

“Sure, Dad, whattya wanna know?”

This to the father of six.

He popped me one. End of discussion.

But now my dry academic knowledge became, shall we say, an order of magnitude more urgent. I needed to look into this sex thing.

While I found a lot of hypocrisy, weak theology, muddled thinking and outright lies, nowhere did I find the teaching and doctrines of the organized Xian religions more screwed up than in their attitudes toward the Deed of Darkness.

They contradicted everything scientists, biologists, or anybody with an objective view had to say.

The Church preached that masturbation was bad, psychologists said it was healthy.

Preachers said homosexuality was a sin, biologists reported that same sex behavior is observable in nearly all species from insects on up, and seems to be due to random genetic mix-ups.

Gee, do beetles have Original Sin, too?

The Scientists had Proof. The Church had Faith. I knew who I was betting on.

I read the Kinsey report, Masters and Johnson, and all of the other sex surveys I could find.

I read about the rates of divorce, of adultery, of all the, “deviant,” behaviors. I read everything I could get my sneaky little hands on, and I knew the library pretty well, as you might guess, and I babysat for the neighbors, who always left a copy of Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid To Ask on their coffee table.

I decided that there is no area in which our society is more neurotic than that of sex. This neurosis manifests itself quite openly.

This is where I need another 10 pages on idiotic nudity taboos, sexual violence, prostitution, censorship, yadda-yadda, but breathe easy, folks, I'm not gonna go there …

I was maybe fourteen.

(A funny aside here. I knew what and where a clitoris was, what it looked like, on paper, anyway and what you were supposed to do with it, when I was about nine or ten. But I didn't know how to pronounce it! It was years before I ever got the nerve to ask. Why I didn't look in the dictionary, I'll never know.)

I finally got to use my booklearnin' at about age sixteen, when I finally stumbled across, (in drama class, funnily enough) an older girl who took enough of a liking to a bookish little runt from the boy's school next door to hers to let him get some real life experience.

I dated her for awhile, and then through the rest of high school had several more relationships, all of them pretty pleasant.

My book learnin' was serving me pretty well, as I've been told since most adolescent males don't really have any idea what the hell they're doing.

I went to college, finally got a growth spurt, started pumping iron, and filled out. I was pretty cute in them days. I could make 'em laugh, and that's halfway to their bedroom.

So, while all this philosophical disquiet simmered on the back burner, I stayed pretty busy chasing that bird dog whenever he started barkin'. :-)

But not so much that I stopped reading.

This being the 60's and 70's, the Hippies were revolting, preaching free love, "Open Marriage" was a best seller, and several outspoken primatologists were discovering and reporting that our closest genetic relatives, the bonobos, are very promiscuous indeed, and based on common physical traits, a substantial degree of promiscuity would be predicted in humans.

More grist for the mill.

In high school and college literature courses, I learned how the notion of lifelong romantic attachment was a modern invention. It's a derivative of the concept of courtly love, pretty much a fiction of some sixteenth century Italian poets, popularized during the Renaissance by authors such as Shakespeare.

I learned that throughout most of history, marriages were arranged, for economic reasons, and the idea of actually being in love with your husband or wife was pretty unknown. It is surprising to many people that have not studied the issues to note this: today, the rate of successful marriages, in the cultures where arranged marriages are still common, is about the same as when couples choose their own mates.

Well over fifty percent of all marriages fail. We would not tolerate such an abysmal rate in nearly any other human institution, yet we are so conditioned not to recognize the truth that few see it, and even fewer are brave enough to speak out and say that the emperor has no clothes.

Amazingly enough, people still seem to assume that when a realtionship dies, it is somehow due to the nature of those in the realtionship, and not the nature of the institution.

I read of alternatives to the nuclear family, of new (well, not new, rediscovered) types of marriage; polygamy, polyandry, communal marriages, line marriages, open marriages. All of them seemed to have both strengths and weaknesses, but most of them seemed to be clearly better alternatives to the high divorce rate, broken homes, single parent households, and all of the other difficulties that our present system breeds.

Even at that age, I knew that what my parents have was very rare, and bound to be even more so, as more women began to work outside of the home, thus giving them the economic freedom to live independently.

This is the dirty little secret that no one, (or few, to be fair) wants to shout. The traditional marriage was economic subjugation of the female, and women have long been forced to remain in unhappy marriages or starve.

But this economic liberation is not without it's drawbacks.

Now they get only a slightly less palatable option, work and pay a minimum-wage stranger to be the mommy, the Child Care Solution. Or course since Everybody Does It, it Has To Be Good.

Don't even get me started, it drives me into a Fucking Rage every time I think about it. Kids need a parent at home until at least he age of six, and no, I don't give a cat's ass which one it is.

I also knew from my childhood how happy and secure it was to live in a large extended family.

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I managed to graduate and get into a good school despite my stormy relationship with the shamans, and an absolute refusal to do homework.

I think of still more questions today. I don't hang around religious folk, for the most, but I'd like to ask a pointed questions of some Grand Poobah in the Church.

I'd ask them about their continued efforts to bury sexual abuse by the clergy, the AIDS epidemic amongst the priests, and their policies on contraception.

But mostly, though, I'd like to ask them about their money.

“Father, if the Church needs money for the starving people in (insert favorite third world nation here) Philippines, how about they just sell La Pieta at open auction at Sotheby's?

“Whattya think Bill Gates, or the Japanese would pay for that?”

Frickin' paintings are going for hundreds of million.

A billion?

Probably more.

Dogdam, he's sittin' on the world's largest collection of art, jewelry, and real estate.

“Just sell off a little tiny bit at a time, you'd have to do it that way to keep from flooding the market, get some hot dotcom IPO's, maybe a little Cisco, AOL, T-bills, get those assets to work for you, Father. You could feed a lotta homeless on that kinda income.”

Let's email the Pope. How come he hasn't thought of that?

“Holey Schmoley, Papa, whatyya think Disney could do with St. Peter's? Talk about a theme park! Thinka the royalties! I bet those guys at Industrial Light and Magic could do a helluva job at staging some of those miracles, live in real time, get the Penn & Teller to consult on the gig, you know, the Ascent into Heaven, and for the low-lifes, or during sweeps week, hey, pull out the stops - which one of the apostles was it that got crucified upside down? Paul wasn't it? And the dude with the arrows, Sebastian, he'd be good, too.

“The WWF got nothin' on this stuff!

“It'll be huge!

“Hey!!!

“GodTV! Let's go register it right now!

“GodTV.com!”

(Already taken, by the way)

But I digress, as I am wont to do.

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I decided about age ten that the shamans didn't have the answers, no matter which creed they were pushing on the rubes.

I was an altar boy, and went to Mass six days a week. I knew it in Latin, the sounds, not the meaning. The words were mere nonsense syllables. I liked the ritual, the chants. It was like meditation, and it always left me feeling relaxed.

“Om mani padme om”

“Et cum spirit tu tuo”

Then the pope decided that the Vulgar tongues were the new order of the day. Relearn the prayers, in English this time.

Say what?

I read the Bible cover to cover. A couple of times.

It didn't make sense. Read some Catholic history, the stuff the nuns weren't mentioning.

Now I know why the Church had delayed so long in translating the Bible. I think a purblind idiot can see the cause and effect relationship between the printing press and the Great Schism.

But I digress, as I am wont to do.

Back to the books. Looking for somebody with a clue.

Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. Zoroaster and Ra and Moroni and Augustus and Gilgamesh and Odin and Ceres and Athena and Mithras. None of it made any sense! They were all fucking wrong! They had to be.

Deism and Humanism seemed to be the only things that were even close.

Then, as a teenager, I stumbled upon Letters From Earth, and some of the other writings of Twain's latter years. My fate was sealed.

By this time, I was in high school, being taught by the Jesuits, the shock troops of the Inquisition. I was required to take theology classes, and comparative religion.

Boy, did I have some questions for them. I got my ass tossed out of class on a number of occasions, twice so hard they wouldn't let me back in school for three days. My questions about Pope Alexander VI, complete with bastard children, buying the papacy centuries back, and therefore sorta straining the concept of papal infallibility, were not well received.

Did I yet mention that I had long since become a pretty sarcastic smartass punk?

I had to have my ass kicked a few times before I grew out of that habit.

In theology class, as a sophomore at the Jesuit school here, I asked the priest teaching the class how the Church explained the concept of eternal damnation as congruent with God being infinitely merciful.

This has been a topic on which theologians have broken their teeth since the third or fourth century, I forget.

There was in fact a schism in the early church over this very topic, though the priest had no idea I had read anything about it.

I'd be surprised today if he knew much about it, but wait, he's dead now, so I guess not; he knows all about the afterlife, such as it is.

After he proclaimed some mealy-mouthed platitude about some thing not given to man to understand, God's ways are mysterious, yatta-yatta …, the conversation went something like this:

“Uh, Father, aren't we supposed to be God's children, and isn't his love supposed to surpass any love we imperfect humans can feel?”

“Yes.”

“And is his capacity for love also not infinite?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let's say I was the worst human that ever lived, and spent my entire life doing the most evil things possible, murder, rape, whatever.

“I live to the age of eighty, and die unrepentant. So I go to hell.

“I'm there, say, a thousand years.

“Isn't that enough? No?

“How bout a million years? A billion?

“Is that enough yet?

“Don't you think I'd have learned my lesson by then?

“Where is this Infinite Mercy?”

Of course, while that didn't go over very well (remember, the Jesuits were the shock troops of the Inquisition), I didn't get thrown out of the class at that point.

He'd been trying to shout me down during this tirade, with little success.

Only after his answer, something about it was a fair system because Jesus dying on the cross gave us all a chance at redemption, that God was Merciful, but that he was also Just, did I really screw the pooch (sorry, old Marine lingo cropping up).

“Well, Father, I'd like you, the Pope, and everybody in between to try and find a parent that would be hard-heated enough to torture one of their children for one year, much less eternity.

“I don't think you can.

“Even Hitler only wanted to toss the Jews into the ovens long enough to turn them into soap.”

I think God <= Hitler, delivered with a pretty dogdam sarcastic manner, was the kicker.

Ban the heretic from our midst.

They wouldn't even discuss Galileo.

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