Naseni sent me a note at DA and I've slept a couple of hours and am waking with coffee and synephrine. Since my antivirus is running at the moment it would take about five minutes just to check where I left off at the last post, other than I'd left a link to Webshots and had been going on about the Evolu series and energy-patterns.

But I think that I shall get down to it, I often ramble my way through a subject. Atheism is a long streak in me, going back to my early childhood, when I was first put in Sunday school. It was a Prrresbyterrrian hausse o' worrrship, c'mpleat wi' Scots ministerrr. Nae th' Prrresbyterrrians ha' ga' nay sense o' humorrr aboot rrreligion, an' especially theirrrs, an they ha' nay sense o' aesthetic an th' beeyootayf'll eyethirrr. The long and the short of this was that I was made to feel sorry for some guy in a dress named Jesus, who could walk on water and make food out of nothing. Since I liked taking nylon curtains and wrapping myself in them to play dress-up so I could be a girl for a while, and then get my ass whipped for it, I could feel Jesus and his dress-up friends real close. And walking on water was definitely cool. I was four, by the way, Protestant cults are very lax about getting the kids in the door from day one. The only ones who can match the Catholic and Orthodox in this particular vigilence are the neo-nazi fundamentalist groups. (Note to myself: post entry some time about my stint as Baptist Sunday School teacher) My parents had not so much as mentioned the G-word up until this time, but my mother began by leading with her left. God, she explained, was some guy who lived in the sky who watched everything that everyone did, especially when they were alone. (Nylon curtains, picking my nose) She made it plain that he was on the same team as her and the old man, which kind of was a shoot-down. Two vultures in the house was bad enough, but one in the sky who was like a super-cop who would bend the world to pumish me for putting on lipstick or putting golf-balls under my tee-shirt to mimic breasts was a total bummer. To add insult to injury, shortly after being dragged into sunday school I was dragged into the regular church service for good measure. The church's interior is dark old birch with crudely-made stained-glass windows. Its one feature of merit is a well-made pipe-organ with real sixteen-foot stops in all of the traditional voices; it was a gift of one of the few modestly wealthy members who'd founded the church back in 1890. Old Betsy was trammeled upon by an organist who'd studied organ in Europe but cancelled her career when marriage / baby carriage came along, and she could make those pipes thunder and rattle when she got going. When she did it was always something in a minor key. It is not good to be four and have your bones rattled in a minor key by an organ and choir which seemed focused upon singing about how great my new third parent, God, was. My reaction was basically, wtf? In words, it came out like this: ''Mommy, I don't need this.'' Her reaction was a very swift, ''You will go to church.'' To quote my poem War in Heaven, ''I learned the fear early, the black of the abyss in other people's eyes.'' The ''war,'' however, was not in Heaven, but within my own abused life.

To learn ''God'' as Primal Fear is a good inducement to a very practical atheism. I was, to all practical intents, a prisoner of war in a war over which I had no control and of which I had very little understanding. The natural reaction of any rational human being is, ''Lieben heis lieben.'' Any prisoner of war will tell of episodes during their captivity when they literally kiss the collective ass of their captors in an effort to reduce the stress of the knowledge of the basically powerlessness of their lives. Because Christianity in its numerous hydra-like forms is based upon FEAR, every ''good Christian'' is a terrorized inmate of a huge concentration camp called the Church. The fist in the mink glove of the Church is, you are going to hell no matter how you grovel, kiss ass, be good, give it all away. I cannot at this point in my life understand why this is not THE conversation topic for those who take this mind-control seriously: ''So, what do you think THEY'RE gonna do to you in Hell when you die?'' ''I don't know, me, I'm hopin nano-technology will be developed enough when I'm older so that I just don't die.'' ''Yeah, I feel dat.''

I have a theory that when we first began to speak, some women and men saw that they could gain control of others simply by out-Godding them. Although the Rousseau/Engels model of the origins of civilization and property-ownership has severe limitations, enough of the basic concept is sturdy enough to have survived into the Post-

Structuralism of Levi-strauss himself. (Blasphemy!) The mythical First Tribes, an essential outgrowth of Rousseau's Noble Savage, did in fact have one attribute: generally, if you wanted to eat, fuck and have a home, you did your part of the gathering, hunting, fishing, whatever. The chicanery developed when the First Jocks said, ''Hey, we're busy protecting you pussies, we ain't got time to fucking gather and hunt. Give us some of that food, and some of those sexy kids, or you can defend your own skenk ass.'' Not to be outdone, the medicine men said, ''Hey, you wanna ward off the displeasure of the Ancestors and famine and pestilence, you better give us some of that food and those sexy kids, we ain't got time to fucking gather and hunt either. Of course if you think you can do your own healing, your own warding off the displeased Ancestors..." And here you've spent sixteen hours in the bush looking for little pigs, roots, berries and birds that weren't as big as you, or out in the water hoping that Nessie was looking for fish in some other place than where you were; ''Jesus God, HERE. Matilda, Brian, you go with these guys and do what they say.'' ''But Daddeeeee!''

To the best of my knowledge there have been only a handful of Spartacus-like revolts against the tyranny of religion as FEAR. As is becoming painfully clear, in the history of Western culture there were only three all-out assaults on the Structure:

1. Gnosticism, which almost toppled the authoritarian Church. Almost.

2. The philosophes of revolutionary eighteenth-century France, almost doing the same.

3. The psychedelicism which Doctor Timothy Leary launched in 1959.

Without apology I count Marxism under the aegis of number two. Karl Marx was Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Marat, de Sade and any other philosophe you care to name all rolled into one scrufty little Jewish guy who haunted the Library of the British Museum for many years, and managed to unify the discordances of the Age of Reason into a single and accurate critique; the bourgeois will do anything to control the proletariat. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. America is a nation of the lawyers, by the lawyers and for the lawyers. It is ironic that the elitist aristocratic LAWYER Thomas Jefferson, who set the American law-machine in motion, is on the face of the $2 bill, while the funkier businessman Alexander Hamilton stares sudeways from the $10 bill.

Imagine the conversation in you wallet:

$10: ''Haha, Tom, I'm on a higher denomination than you!''

$2: ''Alex get real already, my laws determine where you go and how you get used.''

Think I can't bring this around? From my vantage-point as the steward of the Outlands Community, which acknowledges a Deity of other-than-the Structure or Languages' ability to conceive or even think about, in those terms we all of us are ATHEISTS. We have nothing to do with any sort of god, divinity, deity, ground of being which is about fear, control, manipulation or the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, and I am writing with the angelic steward of the Community with his hand on my shoulder saying ''Go, Roy, Go!'' We are revolutionaries and today is the day: throw of your fucking chains, kick these bastards into the cold dark depths of the universe and let them go back to hunting and gathering with the rest of us. To quote Paul Kantner:

''We are the forces of chaos and anarchy

Every thing they say we are, we are,

And we are very proud...of...ourselves;

Up against the wall, motherfucker!''

- from his We Should Be Together