why I'll never go to church again

Driving around Normal this afternoon, I pass one of the many churches in town. This is one that puts up one of those ridiculously stupid pun-phrases--they're so stupid that I can't think of a single one except the one I saw today. I was mad because it actually made me think for about a nanosecond.

You think it's hot here.

That's it. Christ.

I was scared away from religion at a very early age. Seven, to be precise. That was the year I went to my first confession and didn't know that I was supposed to say "forgivemefatherforIhavesinned" because I had skipped the week before and sat in the park talking to the pigeons like an old man. I remember that on confession day my Sunday School teacher held my hand until we got to the confessional entrance and then she sort of pushed me in. It was dark. I held my head down, afraid to look up. After a couple minutes of heavy silence, the priest asked me if I had anything to say. I began to say something about having stolen a quarter from my mother’s purse the week before (a lie). He stopped me in the middle of my confession, steered me back out of the confessional, and reprimanded my teacher for not having properly taught me the rules of confession. Bring her back when she knows the rules. Imagine if I’d confessed what I’d really done that week: Would the father have forgiven me for confessing that I’d sprayed cologne on my sister’s toothbrush, hoping it would kill her? Would he forgive me if I’d confessed that I was angry that it hadn’t seemed to work? That I was still cursing God? Even then I knew that it would probably be better for me to make up a story about a stolen quarter than to admit my deepest desires: that my sister keel over dead from ingesting my mother’s Jean Nate.

A rhetorician at age seven.