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.