Bill Burr talks about religion in his standup. In one routine he talks about how disturbing it would be if he made it to heaven and he waited for his friends and family to join him, but they never made it. After he waited for hundreds of years, he explains he'd have to conclude that they had gone to hell. He imagined that he wouldn't be able to enjoy heaven anymore knowing that all those loved ones were being eternally tortured.
I grew up without religious parents so I didn't spend much time thinking about heaven and hell. But then I had a common experience. I learned about heaven and hell in high school when some classmates invited my buddy Mario Alzone and me to start attending their church’s Wednesday night youth group meetings after I asked some Christians at school to explain to me the lyrics of the song “Supper’s Ready” by the band Genesis. The song is twenty-four minutes long and ladled with biblical verses about the Apocalypse. I had several questions for my Christian classmates: What are Gog and Magog? What is the significance of the numbers 666? What is the New Jerusalem? My classmates said the pastor could answer my questions at the youth group, and that there would be complimentary lasagna and Kool-Aid.
My friend Mario had no curiosity about deciphering Genesis’ quasi-religious lyrics. However, he loved free meals, especially since he was “bulking up” in his quest to be an international bodybuilding champion. Bodybuilding was our shared passion since I had met Mario during my freshman year of high school. Three years my senior and having hulking trapezius muscles that gave him the nickname “No Neck,” Mario told me he wanted to be so big and muscular that he no longer looked human. He aspired to be a horned monster with webbed toes and fingers that instilled fear and awe in the hearts of men. “To get really big,” he had said, “you have to eat the steak fat and throw away the meat. You have to drink the fruit cocktail syrup and throw away the fruit. And after your workouts you should have a nurse push you around in a wheelchair to allow your muscles maximum recovery.”
He wanted to prove all his doubters wrong by someday being so muscle-bound that when he took off his shirt people would fall to the ground, weep, and worship him as Lord.
After a few weeks of attending the megachurch’s youth meetings and being told that we “had to make a decision for Christ,” Mario was expressing doubt over the concepts of heaven and hell. “Truth be told,” he said, driving me to the Wednesday-night youth group in his candy apple red Ford Ranchero, “I need to see it all on film. Jacques Cousteau captures his underwater journeys in his documentaries. If I’m going to give up fornication, there had better be movies that show me that hell is a real thing, not just some scare tactic.” Mario would have to hear the heavy French accent of Jacques Cousteau, submerged in the bowels of hell, describe in detail its horrors before he gave up fornication, for Mario was a disciple of the flesh, a regular at the Moonlight Ranch and other such establishments where he could fulfill his ambition to be a Billy Goat.
As we wound up the hill and approached the giant three white crosses that towered over the nondenominational worship complex, Mario continued to say that renouncing the flesh would be especially hard during the summer when, as we were prone to tanning at the lake after working out at the gym, his lust meter tended to rise to unbearable levels.
To add to his doubts about joining the church, his favorite bodybuilder—and mine—1978 Mr. Universe winner Mike Mentzer was an atheistic, self-described existentialist philosopher fond of quoting Nietzsche and other likeminded thinkers in Muscle Builder magazine. “If Mentzer ever finds out we’re listening to these fairy tales with these sheltered little brainwashed children, he’ll laugh at us. He may even have us kicked out of the International Bodybuilding Federation.”
“He can laugh all he wants,” I said. “I for one don’t want to go to hell.”
Unlike Mario, I didn’t need the Jacques Cousteau footage to be haunted by eternity. I was having nightmares about burning in hell. One morning, I screamed out to Jesus to save me so loudly I woke myself up in a lather of sweat. One Sunday when Alzone and I were in the church’s private prayer quarters after a service in which we were invited to accept Christ as our personal savior, I told the pastor about my dream of burning in hell and how I screamed out to Jesus to save me. On the way home, Alzone scolded me for telling the pastor about my dream.
“I should kick your ass for telling him about that dream. Were you trying to make me laugh, or what?”
“What’s so funny about having a dream about burning in hell?”
“No one has dreams like that, asshole. You’re making that shit up. We’re in a prayer room, and you decide to be a comedian all of a sudden. I had to pinch myself to stop laughing.”
Ironically, I had to pinch myself to stop laughing when Mario, during the same meeting, asked the pastor if fornication was a sin. For Mario, accepting the Lord as Savior might be achieved if he could strike a deal with the pastor, persuading the minister to give him a special dispensation for the sins of the flesh, a kind of fornication allowance. But the doughy, double-chinned pastor with a green plaid suit, long bangs, and bushy mustache made it clear that there were no exceptions when it came to sex before marriage: Fornication was a sin. The pastor’s pronouncement made Alzone sink in his chair and pout like a dejected child.
That fornication was a sin and should be avoided at all costs was reinforced at a youth meeting when the pastor showed us a Josh McDowell film in which the evangelist lectures the importance of preserving one’s virginity before marriage. McDowell’s presentation was peppered with jokes that made Mario cackle like a drunkard, but when the message sunk in, that celibacy was a sign of obedience to God, he became sober.
On the drive home from the Sunday morning service in which I described my dream of burning in the flames of hell, Mario said he doubted he would be able to abstain from sex, which he said came as naturally to him as breathing, sweating, and going to the bathroom. It was, in his mind, a natural body function that could not be denied.
He and I had a conversation with his older sister Brenda, an attorney still living in the home, about his struggles with the Christian faith and his attempts at chastity. We were in Mario’s room when she told us abstaining from sex before marriage was not realistic. She was wearing a low-cut red halter-top and skimpy denim cut-offs, made popular by Daisy Duke from The Duke’s of Hazard. “In modern society,” she said sitting on Mario’s bed, “everything has been so sexualized there’s really no way of avoiding it.” She then looked at the wallpaper in her brother’s bedroom. It featured duplicate images of the same topless woman with features that reminded me of Sophia Loren. Mario was literally living inside a room with wall-to-wall breasts. His sister smiled at the nearby wall featuring hundreds of pendulous breasts and said, “Is this Christian wallpaper?” Then she looked at the cache of Playboys and similar magazines stacked on his desk next to his Incredible Hulk piggy bank and said, “Are those Christian magazines?” She had a triumphant smile as if her observation of Mario’s erotica was proof of religion’s futility.
I told Mario we should tear down the wallpaper and burn the magazines in his backyard. Mario wouldn’t let me touch the wallpaper, but he agreed to burn the magazines. We stacked the magazines on the grass in Mario’s backyard, doused them with gasoline, and threw a lit match on them. Soon, charred pages and ashes whirled in the wind making a huge mess, a sort of porno apocalypse, and Mario’s 260-pound, disheveled, squinty-eyed father emerged from the house presumably having been wakened from a nap. He was wearing nothing but white boxer shorts and black socks. His pale thighs were covered with thick black hair, but his bulging calves and shins were bald from the constant friction provided by his black nylon socks. He scowled at us and said, “Clean up the mess, dumb shits,” before disappearing back into the house.
Mario was in ill spirits after incinerating his private magazine collection. He decided we should wash his car, which was coated with ashes. We were in the front driveway when a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses approached us. Mario barked at them to leave the area, but not before he blasted them with the jet spray of his garden hose. Putting the kibosh on premarital sex and his illicit magazines was proving too much for him. As I recall, after the bonfire he had quickly replenished his private magazine collection and within a few months his collection had grown tenfold.
During one of our drives to the Wednesday-night youth service as we approached the megachurch’s parking area, Mario told me he was still struggling with his vows of chastity. “Take away sex,” he said, “and what’s left for young men in their prime like us?”
“Salvation,” I said.
“What if it’s not true?
“What if it is?”
Neither of us was familiar with Pascal’s Wager, but unknowingly I was operating on that principle. Better to be safe, and avoid hell, than be sorry. But for Mario, hell insurance wasn’t compelling enough to stave off the impulse for fornication. And he didn’t believe the young church members were abstaining from sex either. “Look at those women at church,” he said. “All made up with false eyelashes, mascara, short skirts, with their boobs hanging out. You don’t think they’re there to get laid? Shit. Everyone wants sex, my friend. Christian, Muslim, Jew, and atheist alike. It’s in our blood. It’s what makes the world go round. And guess what? God gave us the desire, so why should He condemn us?”
“No one said it was going to be easy.”
Once we discussed the sin of fornication with his mother in the kitchen. She was seated at the table having her 2 P.M. martini. Behind her was a wooden plaque her husband, the manager of a sausage processing plant, had nailed to the wall. It read, “The man makes the living, and the wife makes the life worth living.” Mario’s mom told her son he didn’t need to worry about sex before marriage. “We’re Catholic,” she said. “In our religion, we can have all the sex and alcohol we want from Monday through Saturday. Then on Sundays we confess our sins to the priest.”
“How do you get to Heaven?” I asked.
“Don't commit murder, don’t steal, and don’t cheat.”
Regarding the latter, I knew that Mario’s father was being investigated for income tax fraud, but I kept my mouth shut.
The giant three crosses cast a shadow over the fire red Ranchero as Mario looked for a parking place next to the youth center building. After telling me how much easier it would be for us to be Catholic, he said, “Screw these youth meetings. Screw chastity. We should go to my parents’ church. There’s more leeway.”
“The Bible tells us that God will not be mocked.”
“You take the joy out of life. Why I continue to hang out with you is a mystery, my friend.”
Giving up on the Catholic angle, he turned the discussion to atheism, bringing up atheist philosopher Mr. Universe Mike Mentzer again, and my grandfather, a socialist atheist, who believed sex before marriage was healthy and recommended it for men of our age, words that made Mario venerate my grandfather as his lifetime hero.
“Mentzer and your grandfather would both agree that young men like us should not be repressing our sexual desires. And believe me, it’s going to be harder during the summer. It’s bikini season. Do you know what that will do to our testosterone?”
“I don’t want to go to hell,” I said bluntly.
“But how do you know?”
“How do I not know? And what about the biblical prophesies?” While Mario was driving, I had been reading aloud excerpts of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and scaring both of us about The End of Times. “We’re entering the nineteen-eighties. We may be living in the age of the Anti-Christ, the Mark of the Beast, and the Rapture. Do you want to get caught with your pants down?”
“If she looks good, why not?”
“Shit, Mario, this is not a joke.”
To add to my fear of hell, I was spending a lot of time listening to the scariest Voice of Hell on Planet Earth, Family Radio’s Harold Camping. His cranky, humorless voice dripped with contempt for the “lovers of the flesh” who were doomed to scream for all eternity in the flames of hell. Listening to Camping’s voice on the radio, I felt like the trembling Cowardly Lion in the presence of the Great Oz. Camping specialized in damning the human race as if he relished in his position to be a spokesman for a God who saved only a remnant according to his own discretion. “I don’t know about you,” Camping once said on his radio show, “but the idea of going to bed at night unsaved with the fear of not waking up and your next moment of consciousness being in eternal damnation is enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. If I were you, I would throw myself at the Mercy Seat of Christ and say, ‘Oh, Lord, if it would please you to be saved from the hell that I deserve, please, Lord, save me.’ And then perhaps, Lord willing, you could find mercy.” Over and over Camping told callers to his radio program that being afraid of hell was the best thing that could ever happen to them because, after all, the fear of the Lord, Scripture tells us, is the beginning of all wisdom. Unbeknownst to himself, Camping seemed to take gleeful delight in talking about hell and how only “a remnant were chosen to be saved according to God’s private pleasure.” Whom God saved and whom He destined for hell were none of our business, Camping was fond of saying. It was all in His divine discretion. When callers protested Camping’s God that predestined a remnant to heaven and the overwhelming majority to hell, he would end the call with a passive-aggressive curse of politeness: “May the Lord richly bless you.”
Whenever my mother heard Camping’s radio show through my bedroom walls, she’d come into my room and tell me to turn that shit off. And I could take my Bible and throw it out the window, and if I didn’t do it, she’d do it for me.
Recently divorced from my father, my mother was a secular Jew who saw Christianity as being too often an anti-Semitic force as it accused Jews of being Christ killers. And the notion that our family members who had died in the Holocaust had to face an even greater hell, provided by the Christian God, after their death in the concentration camps didn’t sit well with her either. I agreed with her that this notion of hell was morally abhorrent, but unlike her I could not disbelieve in this doctrine that offended and tormented me.
In her concern for my fear of hell, Mother used her connections to arrange that I speak to a couple of liberal pastors, kind-hearted men whose formula for getting into heaven proved far more generous than Harold Camping’s, but their implied universalism, the belief that everyone eventually gets to heaven, never sunk in. Reading the words attributed to St. Paul and Jesus and listening to Harold Camping and others convinced me that being a Christian was about being saved from eternal hell. “Weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth” in the outer darkness was the result of knowing that you had the chance to get saved, but that you had told God to shove it. You were more interested in asserting your own will, your own selfish desires, and making yourself the Lord of yourself. You were the defiant Frank Sinatra singing “My Way” to God. The price to pay for loving the Darkness more than the Light was not just moral dissolution here on Earth but eternal torment in hell. The torment of the damned was to look afar at the believers ecstatically feasting at God’s table while the unsaved watched, outsiders looking in, forever banished from the things they longed for.
My mother accused the Christian faith of being a disgrace for at least two reasons. For one, in Judaism there was no such "sickness" as the belief in eternal hell. For two, the Christian religion was tinged with anti-Semitism. This became evident at the megachurch I attended when one night, around Easter season, a film was shown about Jesus, probably taken from the Gospel of Luke. In one scene as the dark-skinned hooked-nosed Jews threw rocks at the light-skinned blond Jesus, the white Christian audience gasped in disgust at the dark complexioned Pharisees, and a young woman sitting in front of me said, “Those people make me sick!”
During my high school years, I observed that disdain for the Jews was evident outside the church as well. Kids at school used Jew as a verb whenever they tried to get a price down on something during a negotiation. The story of Judas Iscariot, the greedy Jew who sold out Jesus for twenty pieces of silver, forever branded Jews as money-hungry scoundrels.
My senior year in high school I had a crush on a girl, Sandy Templeton, who worked for a Jewish doctor and one day at school, not knowing I was half Jewish, she told me working for this obnoxious Jewish doctor was too much for her, that she would avoid Jews for the rest of her life. Then there was my very best friend Mario whose father read the weekly newspaper The Spotlight, an ultra right wing anti-Semitic publication that denounced Zionism, accused the international Jewish community of crazy conspiracies, and denied the Holocaust, or at the very least, claimed it was an exaggeration. Mario told me when he was a little kid he had a Jewish babysitter who was so cheap she turned off the heat in his house and he almost froze to death. I imagined his parents re-told him the story over and over during his youth, so that he grew up believing, “This is what the Jews do. They kill their children—and others’ children if they’re given the opportunity—with their cheapness.”
When I told Mario my mother was Jewish, he said he knew it all along, that he “could spot a Jew a mile away,” and that the implication was that his accepting me, a Jew, as his friend was an exception, not a rule.
In spite of the anti-Semitism that he had absorbed from his father, Mario had been my best friend since I was fourteen and he ended up embracing my Jewish socialist grandfather as his own, being drawn to my grandfather’s warmth and wisdom more than his father’s disdain for his family that made Mario and his two older sisters walk on eggshells whenever they were in their father’s presence.
In spite of my misgivings about Christianity—my suspicion that it was anti-Semitic, my assessment that eternal damnation was an unjust punishment for the finite sins of the human race, and my sense that St. Paul’s writing style smacked of excessive, self-aggrandizing piety —my fear of hell proved too great to fight and one night at a youth meeting when I stood up to accept Christ as my savior, I was congratulated by Christians, many who attended my high school and who had been eagerly waiting for me to become saved.
Word spread about my conversion, and at the next day at school a classmate approached me, shook my hand, and looked into my sad eyes. “Why don’t you look happy?” he asked. I was in fact the saddest man in the world, joining a religion whose God damned people for all eternity, but I didn’t tell him this. Nor did I tell him that my Jewish grandmother, who had died a year earlier from leukemia, weighed heavily on my soul because some of my new church friends told me she was in hell. I had begged God to save me from hell, but there was nothing I could do about dead Jewish family members who didn’t know Jesus. The idea of them suffering in hell made it feel impossible for me to be happy or to experience the perfect love of God. And I was told if I questioned God’s perfect love I myself would go to hell. I told myself I didn’t need to have all my doubts and questions answered right away. The important thing was to get my hell insurance. Then I’d have some breathing room and could bide my time while I waited for God to answer the questions that continued to eat away at me.
During the summer, a couple months after my conversion, I left the San Francisco Bay Area to spend time with my grandfather in Los Angeles. He was still grieving the loss of his wife who had died from leukemia seventeen months earlier. I didn’t dare tell him what the church people had told me about her eternal fate. But I did tell him I was going to church. I knew he wouldn’t be happy. He was an atheist socialist whose favorite philosopher in college was Nietzsche, a man some of the church people called the “Anti-Christ.” He asked me why I had turned to religion, and I told him I was afraid I was going to hell. He laughed and said that once I started college and talked to history and philosophy professors they would set me straight; they would show me that religion was nothing but a bunch of fairy tales and a bogus creation designed to control the masses. He said that most religious people he had met over the years were weird. I didn’t want my grandfather to think I was a weirdo or a stupid person who believed in fairy tales, but I was hurting. My whole world had collapsed when I discovered the universe was ruled by a god who threw people into eternal hell. And I was commiserating with people who were telling me my grandmother was damned. I tried to explain my fear of hell to my grandfather, and he said, “If you want to be afraid of hell, be my guest.”
It was just like my grandfather to not argue with me about my beliefs. He must have known that arguing wouldn’t change my mind. When he and I spent time at the machine shop with his best friend and fellow socialist Forbes Sherry, he told him about my fear of hell, and Forbes, a small wiry man who worked over sixty hours a week in his machine shop and gave all the money he could to the socialist movement, said to me, “Don’t let them suck you into their cult. That’s all it is—a cult—just like the rest of them.”
Calmly, my grandfather said, “I think it’s too late.”
I felt wounded, perhaps even despair, upon hearing my grandfather’s words because I knew what he said was true. How could the idea of eternal hell, so powerful and so terrifying, once implanted inside someone ever truly vanish? Only a miracle would make it do so, or I would find a way to make a peace with the God of heaven and hell. For me, God was a real being to be feared, but for my grandfather, God was the product of fairy tales, ancient stories made up in the desert during tribal warfare, and were best discarded in favor of secular, practical strategies to help build a better world.
I envied my grandfather for having no fear of hell and for seeing the Bible as nothing but fairy tales. His life seemed so much easier than mine. The only thing he seemed to fear were birds—poultry in particular—because his siblings threw a headless chicken at him, the legend goes, when he was a little boy and he had a lifelong phobia to all forms of poultry, so that on Thanksgiving the hosts had to make him a special dish featuring a non-bird protein. Once when we were at someone’s house with a pet macaw perched outside its cage, my grandfather cowered and his whole body shook until the owner put the bird in another room. So there you had it. My grandfather cowered in the presence of birds. I cowered in the presence of the New Testament God.
If I had to choose between a lifelong fear of chickens and a lifelong fear of hell, I’d take the chickens.
I often long to have my grandfather’s point of view, that the Bible is a bunch of man-made fairy tales, but the fear of hell was so deep inside me I felt I couldn’t afford to be wrong because if I was wrong I’d be totally screwed.
One summer after a Sunday evening church service, Mario and I went to Tanglewood apartments because Mario wanted to have a late-night swim. He said he had a friend who lived at the complex, and this friend was supposed to meet us by the gate, but he never showed up and the gate was locked, so we climbed over the gate and went swimming. Hanging by its strap on the diving board was an orange fluorescent bra. It practically glowed in the dark. The sight of the bra excited me. Obviously a woman of great bounty had disrobed there. We had probably missed the glorious spectacle by just a few moments.
Mario grabbed the bra and twirled it above his head as if he were going to fling it. Then he stopped. "Shit on a stick," he said. "It's my sister's birthday tomorrow. I forgot to buy her a present."
He didn't even wrap it. He just gave his sister this orange bra, and she wasn’t even shocked. Using an abandoned bra as a birthday gift was just another crazy thing in the life of her brother Mario.
When I think back of the two or three years I attended church with Mario, I realize I was patently depressed. People who knew me said that I looked like I had given up on life and that if Jesus was as amazing as I said He was then why was I so miserable? The reason in part is that many of the church members had told me my grandmother had gone to hell. Most of them meant no harm. They were simply espousing their beliefs, the very beliefs that insured they themselves would not go to hell. In order for them to enjoy hell insurance, they had to tow the company line.
In spite of being raised by an anti-Semitic father, not once did Mario ever say that my grandmother was damned. In fact, he was so offended when he heard it at church that one time he told me anyone who says that should be punched in the face, and if I didn’t do it he would. In spite of being raised by a Jew-hating father, Mario embraced by grandfather as his very own. The thing about Mario is that he was a crazy recalcitrant sinner, but he was the only reason I was ever happy during my “church years.” That guy could make me laugh like no other. Life without Mario was life with too little laughter, and life without laughter was hell on earth.
It doesn't surprise me that I grew up loving comedians, that my father and I had our best moments listening to George Carlin's "Class Clown," and that I find Bill Burr's theological critique both insightful and funny.
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