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Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is
copyright with all rights reserved by the author
unless explicitly waived. No re-posts are allowed. No
commercial reprints are authorized. This means YOU! 

The author relishes your comments at anoninsac (at)
yahoo (dot) com. If you like this story, see my other
stories at www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/anoninsac/www.

Thanks to my proof readers, Varod and Chuck who make
it look like I actually have mastered English. Any
mistakes which remain are strictly my own stubborn
fault.

All characters are fictional. Any resemblance between
living persons or real situations and the story are
strictly coincidence.

WARNINGS: This story depicts consensual sexual
activity between men and women, or women and women. If
you are too young to read about sex please do not read
this.

NOTE TO THE READER: The references to the books of
Robert Heinlein are quite deliberate. If you haven't
had the pleasure of reading his works, you are in for
a treat. Any of the books mentioned are a good place
to start. One other book should be mentioned as well,
_Starship Troopers,_ which the recent unprovoked
attack by Hollywood on artistic taste might make you
think was not a good book. It is a great book.

I would like to acknowledge my debt to Stosh from whom
I stole this story idea. If you'd like to see his
story it is here
http://storiesonline.net/library/st_get.php?id=39504 
My Angels. As T.S. Elliott said when accused of
imitation, "I didn't imitate, I stole it! Mediocrity
imitates. Genius steals!" Thanks Stosh for inspiring
my theft.

This story is dedicated to our own beloved Curmudgeon,
Denny Wheeler.

ckought69@hotmail.com

The Temptations of Babylon 1 (intro) {Anoninsac}

Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom
meaningless by not committing them?   --  Jules
Feiffer

Prelude

I was just a country guy from a small town in the
Central Valley of California, hot, dry, dusty, and
mostly redneck farmers. My first day at Stanford was a
culture shock. I was in a daze and quickly started
wondering if I was going to make it at Stanford.
Everyone seemed so sophisticated and they all seemed
to know what they were doing. I wandered around campus
like a little lost lamb. There were more people in my
freshman English class than had been in my high
school. I got a call from my Uncle Jack, someone I had
never met before. He lived in San Francisco and took
me under his wing those first few months at Stanford.
If it wasn't for him, I don't think I would have made
the adjustment. Uncle Jack had that fine art of
puncturing fatuousness which I was confusing with
sophistication. He kept me grounded in reality and
reminded me I just needed to do the work and I'd be
okay.

Uncle Jack was a crotchety cuss, but we got along
fine. I had begun to develop a non-conformist streak
myself and Jack brought it out. Really he nurtured it,
encouraged it. Because of him I wound up majoring in
political and economic theory with a minor in art
history. We had some dillies of arguments as I went
through my sophomore phase. You know, the `wise fool.'

Jack was the black sheep of our family. All of the
rest of the family had stayed home, raised their
families and attended our fundamentalist church
regularly. We were a bunch of rock solid conservative
Bible believin' Christians. Jack had gone off and
lived in that heathen Mecca, Babylon by the Bay,
otherwise known as San Francisco. It was widely
thought in the family, and quietly commented on among
the elders, that Uncle Jack had lost sight of God and
needed to be born again in Christ.

Over the time I was at Stanford, Jack let drop during
our arguments some hints and clues about the family's
history. One time, Uncle Jack talked about his Mother
and how she put the fear of God into the kids every
day. As Jack said, she was a God fearing woman and he
suspected the fear was mutual. Wistfully, he commented
that none of his brothers or sisters had managed to
shake that fear.

I remember one time sitting at the outdoor café at
SF-MOMA. Jack liked the non-figurative minimalist art
of people like Ellsworth Kelly. I loathed it. `No
heart,' I'd say. I'd argue for people like Wyeth being
the `true' artists of the century. He loved the _Blaue
Reiter_ painters, Kandinsky and Franz Marc, and I
admitted that I liked some of Marc's stuff. Uncle Jack
smiled and said, "Boy, I think there's hope for you
yet." Occasionally, I'd even get Uncle Jack to agree
with me. Those were real triumphs because I had to
have done my homework to win an argument with Uncle
Jack.

I think what really tied us together finally was a
rejection of the church. Not God, Jack believed in
God, but he hated the Church, "Nothing but a political
entity set up to skin decent folks of their hard
earned money," he'd say. Uncle Jack's God was the God
of the philosophers. He was the creator, set up the
game and then left us the hell alone to work out our
own salvation or damnation here on Earth. If there was
evil it was because free will allowed people to do
evil things. Uncle Jack believed in complete
responsibility and freedom, "You can't have one
without the other," I heard him say many times. That
isn't an easy philosophy, being completely responsible
for your failures as well as your successes.

 From an early age I had trouble fitting into our
church. It offended my sense of rightness. All those
sermons of hell fire and damnation just didn't fit
with a loving omnipotent God. Some of the Bible
stories made me sick. Whole cites being killed by
God's word, babies having their brains dashed out on
rocks and women being torn apart. That's pretty
gruesome behavior for a `loving' God. I remember one
day we read the story about God sending 42 she bears
to rip apart a bunch of kids teasing an old man. I
went home looking over my shoulder and wondering when
God was going to send bears to rip me and my siblings
to bits. I kept thinking about how we made fun of Mr.
Scanlon the old bald janitor at school. God was surely
going to cause us to be ripped to bits. I do remember
being physically ill after that Bible class. Childhood
was a tough time for me. 

As I got older, I started to see through things when
they offended common sense. I remember in Freshman
Economic Theory we were reading Marx. Right at the
basis of his entire critique of Capitalism were
assumptions that history has shown to be completely
off base. Marx's entire critique was built on error
because his basic assumptions were wrong. Instead of
studying Marxism as an example of how wrong headed
something could be all these professors were acting
like it was valid. One day I was sitting in class and
shaking my head at the Professor when I saw, clear as
day, that it was the same as Fundamentalism. The basic
assumptions were just wrong and yet people went on
acting like it made sense. The Earth isn't flat and it
wasn't created 6,000 years ago. The Bible is chock
full of completely erroneous clap trap. The Bible says
it's okay to sell your daughter into slavery. Okay, I
can think of a few tattoo-encrusted, green-haired,
everything-pierced 'little darlings' who should be
sold down the river, but still? That's the Eternal
Unchanging Word of God? Why the hell were people
pretending something so wrong was right?

When I was young, I could tell innately something was
wrong with these ideas but everyone else seemed to
agree. They seemed to be saying that something was
wrong with me. When I met Uncle Jack, I was confused.
I knew what was right but it seemed everyone else
disagreed. When you're young it's hard to be the only
one.

Jack had followed the same path and he knew what I was
going through. He recognized it and guided me to the
light of knowledge, responsibility and truth.
Knowledge that the church desperately didn't want me
to have because I started to ask questions they didn't
want to answer. I remember once, sitting in a pub in
Palo Alto. After a beer, Jack asked me how many Divine
Creators there were. One, I said. Well then, everyone
in the world has to be worshipping the same Creator
since there is only one. I agreed that logically
anyone who worships God has to be worshipping the same
God if there is only one. Names don't matter. How can
The Creator even have a name? It's ludicrous. If you
are praying to God you are praying to God. So, he
said, why are there so many different churches when
there is, logically, only one Creator? He rubbed his
fingers together in the age old sign of greed.

Jack gave me a book with all of the Gospels, not just
the ones the Roman Bishops imposed on the Church as
the `right' ones. Can't let those Egyptians have a
say; all of the Coptic Gospels are out. And the
Syrians want a piece of the action, make those
Manicheans out as heretics, their Gospels go. The
Brits want some of the action, Pelagius is a heretic.
Only the Romans get a piece of this pie. There were an
awful lot of Gospels thrown out to make sure the Roman
Church had the whole pie. Even the Gospel of Jesus'
brother was thrown out since it didn't agree with what
the Roman bishops were trying to put over. If anybody
should have known the `truth,' whatever that is, it
should have been Jesus' brother.

The Gospels that made it into the present Bible
weren't written by anyone who was there. All of the
Gospels of the Jewish Christians at Qumran, the direct
followers of Jesus, were tossed out by the Roman
Christians. These other Gospels were written at the
same time except they tell a very different story
about this person, Jesus. These Gospels don't make the
claim of Jesus being God. He is the Righteous Teacher.
Anybody who was `Righteous' was called a son of God.
The Gospel of Q which was written before these other
gospels told that Jesus was a man, a teacher. It
wasn't until later that Paul, and following him the
Roman Christians changed the meaning so that only
Jesus was the Son of God. In some of the Gospels he
never is nailed to a cross or crucified. Luckily for
Mel Gibson, people don't much know about that or he'd
be a half a billion dollars poorer. I guess that was a
religious experience for Mel, getting a half a billion
and not even having to pretend you are doing good
works with it like a preacher would have to. He could
air-condition his dog's house and no one would
complain.

One of the things that surprised me was a letter
calling Paul; yes the Paul of the Bible, The Deceiver,
The Spreader of Lies. Wow. Turns out that Paul
completely misunderstood and changed the real
teachings of the Righteous Teacher, Jesus. Jesus'
brother and the other Jews who actually knew Jesus
were in a fight with this outsider Paul. But as a
gentile, Paul was able to spread his version to Rome.
Can you imagine how different the Bible would be
without Paul? Paul, the misogynist. The `better
married than burning in Hell' Paul. We probably
wouldn't have celibate, child-molesting priests
without Paul's influence. These other Gospels were
calling him The Deceiver, The Spreader of Lies. Pretty
strong stuff and I think they were probably right
about Paul.

Uncle Jack maintained that all the religious divisions
are just to get control of people's money. I came to
believe that he was right. It did make me a pariah at
home when I visited in the summer and broached the
subject. Even my numerous cousins shied away from me
for being a heretic. I found out that it wasn't easy
being a rational thinker in a world seeking belief
instead of knowledge - certainty instead of questions.
It's a lot more comfortable to have some Authority
give you the answers, even if they are wrong, than
having to accept living with questions that require
thought and maybe can't be answered. Jack became my
family and my visits home came less frequently.

I graduated and went to work in Babylon by the Bay as
a management trainee. Jack and I still got together
for lunch and arguments. For Uncle Jack, the arguments
were an exercise in Socratic philosophy. He said a few
times that the thing he enjoyed most was stretching
his mind, making it work along unfamiliar paths. It
was a good deal for me since Uncle Jack picked up the
tab and he liked to eat at actual sit down
restaurants.

I was relatively happy and enjoying the sights and
experiences of a wild place like San Francisco when
one afternoon I got a call at work from an attorney.
Uncle Jack had passed away. I was stunned. I felt
cold. I felt alone in the world. The voice continued.
His funeral is tomorrow and his will is to be read on
Sunday at 10 a.m. per his wishes. The attorney really
emphasized my Uncle's wishes that I be present at the
reading of his will. She asked me several times to
make sure I was going to be present even offering to
send a car for me. I declined the car promising to be
there.

I went to the funeral. It was well attended but there
was not one person I recognized. No one from the
family showed up. From our conversations, I had the
impression that Uncle Jack didn't have a large circle
of friends. But he certainly must have known quite a
few people because a lot of folks turned out for his
funeral.

That night my father called. He made it clear that
Jack had passed away at a bad time. I'm sure Jack
would have been more considerate if he knew it was
putting the family in a bind I almost said. But I held
back as Dad continued. And further, it was just like
Jack to have his will read on a Sunday when all good
people were in church. He asked that I attend to
represent the family, because I could still attend
church services that day and be at the reading. I
didn't have the stomach for the fight so I didn't tell
him I no longer attended church. I agreed to attend
the reading of the will for the family.

This explains why I was standing in front of a fancy
building near Post and Market early on a Sunday
morning.





	
		
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