Religion – Lauren's Hot Blog

Still Working on It

Memoirs of an Immortal is taking longer than I expected. It’s also going to be longer than I expected, which goes along with the extra time writing the thing. The fact that the lovely Zara’s life spans a little more than 6600 years is another factor. It isn’t so much a matter of which periods to place her in as which to leave her out of.

I still think this is more or less what Zara should look like, though I think she’d be a bit older than this model as she stopped aging at 36, young. but not this young.

I did make a conscious choice to keep her mostly out of biblical times or, at least, biblical events. Religious people tend to get upset when you make fun of their mythology, so Zara won’t be interacting with anybody found in the Bible. Not even the fictional ones, thought that, honestly, takes in most of them anyway.

It’s kind of a pity. Abraham and Sarah fall so nicely into the sort of story I tend to write, what with them being half-siblings who share a father. It’s always struck me as curious that the founding figures in two major religions were a couple whose marriage would be strictly forbidden by either of those religions (the third Abrahamic religion traces itself back to a different son of Abraham, whose mother was not the man’s half sister). My Sarah will not be meeting either of them.

It was a bit harder to resist inserting her into Esther’s ancient Persia, since historians are just about unanimous that this story is nothing more reliable than an ancient romance novel. The proto-rabbis who admitted Job to the canon themselves declared that story to be exemplary fiction; history says Esther is likewise fiction, for neither she, nor Mordechai, nor Vashti, nor Haman, nor anyone like them ever appears in Persian history. Still, I’d prefer not to find myself being burnt at the stake if the evangelical types ever manage to get themselves into power.

If Zara finds herself screwing any historical figures, count on them being long dead. She certainly won’t find herself involved with our current president at any time during his career. I like to think she’d have better sense.

One of my projects today was doing a thorough update on my website. I had my regular IT guy over, he of the salt and pepper hair and huge dick. He gives me a nice discount if I suck his cock. That’s something I’d do whether I got a discount or not, by the way, so don’t think it’s some sort of exploitation.

One way to get discount IT services (but, no, this isn’t me, she’s a model).

While I was working on Memoirs, I took a couple days off to write Left on Their Own, which has been submitted and is now awaiting cover design and publication. It’s the story of twins, brother and sister, left to their own devices by the parents, who’ve gone off to the big city for a will reading. It should be appearing at Lot’s Cave shortly. Once it does, I’ll link it from my site.

Lately, I’ve been thinking of writing a porn short subject script, then publishing it and inviting readers to shoot their own movie from it. I suppose the problem with that is that this sounds like some sort of contest scenario, and I have nothing to offer as a prize beyond a free, and obviously non-exclusive, license to shoot it. I may do it anyway, just to see what results.

Double Event

Today brought something unique. Usually, I send a manuscript in to Lot’s Cave and a couple months later they’ve created a cover, formatted everything, and the book or story is released on as many platforms as will take it. Because a lot of my stories contain incestuous relationships, that generally means that you won’t be able to buy them on Amazon. There are a couple there, but while they still have lots of sex, no one is related to anyone they’re having sex with.

In a bit of a surprise, Lot’s Cave released two of my stories today. Wet took about as long as usual, but the second book, The Donkey Show, was significantly faster getting to market. Wet is a continuation of my autobiography, with an emphasis on the pissy aspects. Not pissy as in bad, pissy as in peeing. Peeing in the woods, peeing in the tub, peeing on a friend, being peed on by a friend, that sort of thing.

If you think that one is potentially controversial, The Donkey Show makes it seem pretty innocuous. When four friends take a trip to Tijuana in search of that legendary show, they discover a club where there’s actually a donkey, and there’s actually a stripper who comes out every night and has sex with the beast. There’s loads of sex in this one. Tom and his sister, Tina, have been getting it on for several years. George is the sort of guy who thinks its perfectly normal to pull out his dick in a strip club VIP room and cum all over the stripper, so it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone when he gets a blow job from a hooker while he’s watching the donkey show in the night club. If George checked out the hooker a little more closely he might have been in for a surprise, since the lovely Carla was originally the handsome Carlos. We can only speculate on what George would have done had he discovered the pretty girl with his dick in her mouth had one of her own between her legs.

Meanwhile Al, the nice one, has a thing for middle-aged call girls who are willing to play “mommy” games while they fuck him. He certainly knows how to idle away an afternoon at the hotel while they’re waiting to go to the club.

Like I said, I don’t see two books coming out on the same day very often. I felt the need to celebrate, even before I sat down to write about it. That’s not actually me in the photo, but it does a nice job of demonstrating how I celebrated the releases. Masturbation and a nice Chablis, my recipe for a good private party.

Meanwhile, Memoirs of an Immortal is coming along nicely. I’ve got Zara/Sarah from Moronia in the 47th century BC to Rome in 46 BC in a little over 20,000 words, with another 21 centuries to go before she’s up to modern times. There was a very large skip there, by the way, from about 1948 BC to where she is now. She spent most of that time in ancient Israel, and while I have no problem with arguing that the biblical record is almost entirely fictional, I don’t see any reason to irritate my readers by including it in the story, either. Exodus was exciting and all that, but it never really happened, and the Israelites didn’t really come into Canaan and conquer it since they originated there, making the conquest not so much an invasion as an expansion. You’d think the modern Israelis would emphasize this, considering it actually strengthens their claim to the land.

Sarah will be interacting with people a lot more now that she’s in Rome. Caesar is assassinated in a couple years, the imperial system begins, Caligula and Nero both provide horrible examples, all that sort of thing. Then there are the middle ages to work through, Boccaccio and the black death and horny clergy, Tudor England, colonial America, the Victorian era, a couple of world wars, and on into today. Lots of time and opportunities to get the girl laid.

Merry Christmas 2018

I suppose some people will wonder why I give a shit about Christmas, considering that I’m essentially an atheist and tend to look upon organized religion as a massive con. The reason I care, at least a little, is that most of the celebration is actually secular, or derived from sources that have nothing to do with the sort of pleasureless, guilt-ridden Christianity that I was raised in. The Romans, who first started celebrating on December 25 in thelr Saturnalia festival, would have no doubt looked quite favorably on the young lady on this year’s Christmas card. Romans were into orgies; Christians, generally, are not, despite adhering to a religion centered on the necessity of human sacrifice for the atonement of sin and revering cannibalism as the core sacrament of their faith.

Anyway, if that sort of thing turns you on, fine. It’s no sillier than any other ancient religion, beyond the obvious problem that people still believe it while all of God’s contemporaries were long ago consigned to mythology.

To my way of looking at things, Christmas is an excuse for getting together with friends and any family members you’re still talking to. It’s a good time to watch old movies, forget your diet, remember why you adopted that mutt five years ago, buy presents for your nieces and nephews, buy presents for yourself, binge watch the first three seasons of Lucifer, all the while wondering how much racier it’s going to be after moving to Netflix, stick the DVD of Teenage Twins in the player and masturbate while wondering just how they ever got away with that one, and generally just have a good time for one day when almost no one has to work. That’s more or less what I’ve got planned, other than the porn feature. Most of the time I don’t masturbate while I watch feature-length porn because I’m too busy taking notes just in case I decided to write a review.

So, just have a merry Christmas. Or have a drink. Whatever seems best to you.

VOTE

You did know that porn and erotic literature are at stake in this election, didn’t you? The Republicans are in thrall to big business and big religion, and would like nothing more than to present their masters with a chance to accomplish all of their goals. For business, this would include things such as eliminating all defined-benefit pensions, ending anti-pollution measures, and getting rid of OSHA.

For the religious, it would mean making the fundamentalist Christian version of morality the standard for the entire country. Let’s face it, fundamentalists and evangelicals tend to hew to an old Puritan stereotype, the fear that somehow, somewhere, someone may be having fun. They’ve been trying to get rid of erotica of all sorts for years. It the Republicans can maintain a majority in the House and Senate, they’ll be able to continue appointing judges whose loyalty to Christian mythology is a good bit stronger than their loyalty to the Constitution.

So get your asses to the polls and vote. I’m going to suggest you vote for the Democrat and, for cryin’ out loud, do not vote for a third-party candidate. That’s how Republicans win.

Desire

DESIRE (Sonnet II)

O, thou dearest object of desire,
Perfection’s form to worship from afar,
Dare I approach thine incandescent fire,
Or kneel before thee, brightly shining star?
As I behold thee tenderly unfold
Thy secret place of pleasure’s sweet repose,
I would that my poor tongue might be so bold,
As there to deeply seek, and lust expose.
Deep probing pleasure not to be delay’d,
With virile simulacra thrusting true,
My jealous soul doth clamor thus to trade,
Thy vinyl love for all I’d wish to do.
Dear fantasy, thou art perfection’s gift,
Whose beauty doth my heated soul uplift.

I find beauty inspiring. The young lady in the photo inspired the sonnet. It’s all fantasy, to be sure. The photo is posed. For all I could say, the young lady succumbing to a vinyl-inspired orgasm may actually have been bored out of her mind.

I don’t actually care. I deal in fantasy. I am, largely, a fantasy myself. How much of the real Lauren appears in what I write? Some, certainly. Since this is being posted at the end of International Blasphemy Day, I suppose it won’t hurt to admit that the general dislike of organized religion is part of the real me. I don’t hate God, obviously, I just don’t see any evidence there is one. It’s hardly a secret I tend to think most big-time evangelists are nothing more than con artists. Marjoe really was an accurate documentary, and while there aren’t as many traveling revivalist con-artists today, the breed lives on after moving from tent to television and continues to take their victims for as much as they can wring from them.

I’m going to keep up the poetry, though I can’t promise to write something daily. If I’m to judge by blog stats, people seem to like it. Or, at least, they’re interested enough to check it out, resulting in a significant increase in visitors.

Naturally, while you’re here, I’ll urge you to wander over to my author’s page on Lot’s Cave and check out my books and stories.

International Darwin Day

In 1859, Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The world really hasn’t been the same since. Darwin’s book laid down the basic principles of evolution. Or, perhaps, it might better be said that he organized existing principles into a unified theory. Evolution wasn’t new with Darwin. His own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had written on the subject. So had others.

What Darwin did was put it all together. He then sat on it for years, only finally collecting all his ideas into a publishable whole after receiving a manuscript from Alfred Russell Wallace, whose own theory closely matched his own. It has been suggested that Darwin’s tardiness in publishing had a lot to do with his wife, who was quite religious. Concern for his wife’s feelings has also been cited as the reason Darwin was reluctant to make public statements about his own atheism.

If you haven’t guessed by now, this is going to be one of those serious posts. Sex is involved, certainly, for that is the general means through which evolutionary changes are transmitted. It’s just not the main thrust of the essay.

Some people, my own mother among them, hate the very idea of evolution. Their concept of human origins begins and ends with Genesis, so anything that suggests this isn’t how it happened is simply ignored. You can’t entirely blame Christians for this attitude, of course. If Adam and Eve weren’t real people, and the events chronicled in Genesis never actually happened, then there’s no reason for their religion to even exist. The whole thrust of Christian belief in Jesus is that his willing sacrifice served to atone for original sin. If there was no Fall, no forbidden fruit, no garden, no first man and woman, then there is also no original sin to atone for.

Original sin is a weird idea to begin with. It was apparently something Paul thought up, because I’ve spoken to a number of rabbis and they all agree that it’s not a Jewish concept. Neither is hell, for that matter. There doesn’t seem to be any fixed notion of what comes after death, but they all seem fairly sure it isn’t eternal punishment. More of a three-part set of vague possibilities, consisting of heaven (or maybe reincarnation), a one-year or shorter sentence in Gehenna, or complete oblivion and it’s as if you never existed.

Evolutionary scientists today tell us that there was never a first man or woman in the sense of a first male or female member of our exact species. At some point along a scale including millions of generations we gradually evolved from earlier forms. And, while we are presumably a discrete species today, and would be unable to mate with, say, Homo erectus and produce fertile offspring, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some point along the evolutionary trail where the current version of humanity couldn’t have successfully mated with those on either end of the generational trail. There’s no reason, really, to even think that both sexes reached the same stages of development at the same time. As long as they got there within a few hundred generations of each other there’d be no problems with reproducing.

It’s like the chicken/egg question. The only really logical answer is the egg, since whatever chickens were before they became unquestionably chickens was still a bird and still laid eggs.

There are those who like to argue that order cannot arise from chaos. They think of evolution as just a lot of random events, and argue that the odds of them all coming together are simply too high to be possible. The “747 assembled from a junkyard by a tornado” analogy is a common one. But that’s not how it works. Evolution doesn’t just gather up all of these random parts and toss them together. It’s a cumulative process, occurring over thousands of generations. Some mutations prove to be useful and, if they give the carrier a slight advantage over others when it comes to reproduction, they can be incorporated into following generations. If they’re not useful, they tend to die out. There’s none of this X-Men, sudden ridiculous superhuman abilities sort of thing. Several million years ago, our ancestors were as hairy as any modern great ape. Over the generations we lost most of that hair, probably because we didn’t really need it, or perhaps because less hairy individuals were thought of as more attractive and were therefore more sought after as mates.

I can think of several of my female friends who would welcome a genetic mutation that finally eliminated all body hair except what’s on top of their heads. Perhaps, one day, this will come to be. For now, they just have to shave, wax, or use some other technique to get rid of unwanted body hair.

When an anti-evolutionist uses that 747 tale as an argument in favor of “intelligent design,” he’s really arguing against himself. Intelligent Design argues that whatever we see today was made just as it is, by a brilliant designer, who always turns out to be God. The thing is, when they throw in the 747, they’re rather forgetting that if you applied intelligent design principles to the question, you’d expect the Wright brothers would have designed and built a 747 in their bicycle shop in 1903, and not wasted all those years as airplanes evolved from what was, essentially, just a powered glider.

Evolution is a theory. That means it’s been proven about as thoroughly as possible given contemporary scientific capabilities. Theories are, in science, essentially facts. It’s simply that a basic tenet of science is that any theory has to be falsifiable. There has to be something that could prove it wrong, which means that even the most robust theories, like evolution and gravity, are always subject to revision in the face of new evidence. The proverbial Devonian rabbit, for example. This is why God has never risen to the level of a theory. There’s simply no possible way to prove that he exists, or that he doesn’t, because the very definition of God includes being outside of time and space.

By the way, if you get someone telling you a theory isn’t a law, point out that, no, a theory is a higher classification. A law is something that will always produce the same results under the same conditions, so Newton’s laws of motion are laws because they always work, but they’re only a part of the theory of gravity, which includes them and a great deal more. Science keeps getting closer. Einstein modified Newton, Hawking has modified both, and in the future other mathematicians and physicists will no doubt further refine the theory.

Personally, I accept evolution. Notice I said “accept” and not “believe in.” Evolution isn’t a belief, it just is. You either accept that this is how everything living today came to be, or you don’t. If you don’t, then I suppose you can watch a movie such as Is Genesis Real? without laughing your ass off while wondering where the hell these clowns got their PhDs.

Religious Freedom Day 2018

Some officially proclaimed “days” sound a lot better in the abstract than in reality. For instance, yesterday, in addition to being Martin Luther King Day, was also National Hat Day and National Strawberry Ice Cream Day. Today, January 16, is National Fig Newton Day, National Nothing Day, National Without a Scalpel Day, and National Religious Freedom Day. I can certainly get behind National Fig Newton Day. After all, observance is easy and tasty. National Without a Scalpel Day sounds a bit odd, but honors one of the greatest advances in medicine in centuries, the modern ability to perform many surgeries without making a large incision. Anyone can do nothing, so National Nothing Day is also easy, if perhaps a little silly.

The big one today is National Religious Freedom Day. It merits a public Presidential proclamation, and some presidential tweeting. It just sounds so essentially American, arguing that everyone should have the freedom to observe their own faith, according to its tenets. That doesn’t stop it from being a horrible idea.

(Wikimedia Commons. Public domain in USA)

President Trump’s proclamation includes the sentence, “No American–whether a nun, nurse, baker, or business owner–should be forced to choose between the tenets of faith or adherence to the law.” This sounds good, but the reality is far from good. What Fearless Leader is saying here is that religious belief should be held as superior to actual law. There has never been a time in history where this has worked out to everyone’s benefit. Civil law made murder illegal, but religious law said burning witches was just fine and the Church used to have the power to tell the civil authorities what to do. (The church, technically, never killed a single witch or heretic, as the ecclesiastic courts that handed down the sentence turned the prisoners over to the local civil authorities for execution.)

The problem is that those religious figures shouting the loudest that their religious freedom is being infringed are almost always those whose real complaint is that their freedom to persecute someone with different beliefs is being infringed. The President’s proclamation repeats the myth that some of our ancestors came here seeking religious freedom, a statement nearly always meant to refer to the Pilgrims of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Oliver Cromwell (Wikimedia commons; public domain image)

The Pilgrims didn’t have the slightest interest in religious freedom except for their own sect. Anyone else could go hang. If you disagreed with the religious/civil authorities in the colony, you either went into exile, like Roger Williams, made a show of outward conformity, or ended up on the gallows. The Puritans weren’t subjected to any real persecution in England, so much as they were expected to support the established church, which they believed to be corrupted. Not that many years after the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, their Puritan brethren back home fomented a rebellion, launched the English Civil War, murdered the King, and installed Oliver Cromwell as a religio-military dictator. Things might have improved slightly for Puritans during that period, but they were fairly horrible for anyone else.

The United Kingdom of today, while it still has an established church, no longer tries to enforce conformity to that church. At least, not beyond the rather narrow confines of royal succession, which requires the monarch to be a communicant of the Church of England. Given that the monarch is also the titular head of the Church, it’s not illogical to make membership a requirement for the office.

To modern, militant American Christians, religious freedom today is strongly connected to suppressing gay rights. Christians dislike gays, which is curious, really, since the “prohibition” is Old Testament law, and Jesus never said anything on the topic. The New Testament condemnation comes from Paul, not Jesus. I don’t even find that surprising. If you’re actually paying attention, particularly in the hours before the crucifixion, it’s difficult to miss the gay overtones in Jesus’s life. Here was a man who never married, spent most of his time hanging around with a dozen other men, and, in the final hours of his life, informed the disciple “that [he] loved” that, from that time on, Jesus’ mother was now his mother as well. The final act of Jesus’ life was to die on a cross. The next to last was apparently an impromptu gay commitment ceremony.

James Madison (Wikimedia Commons; Public Domain image)

The religious freedom that the President and his supporters are trying to impose is mostly the freedom to discriminate. They aren’t even remotely in favor of true religious freedom. And they forget that the only true guarantee of religious freedom is a strictly secular government. This is what our Founding Fathers created for us. For all the blather about how our laws and Constitution are biblically-based, even a casual look at the original sources calls that a lie. Probably the closest thing to an influence is the constitutional requirement for two witnesses in treason cases, which reflects a biblical law requiring two witnesses in a capital case. Except the Constitution also allows confession, while Jewish law forbids it. And there’s certainly nothing in American law that requires a perjurer to be punished with the same punishment as he was trying to inflict on his victim.

In any case, the United States wouldn’t even exist if our Founding Fathers had actually been strong Christians, since they would never have violated God’s clear command to just do whatever the hell the king told them to do. Kings got their powers from God, and disobeying a king was exactly the same as disobeying God.

The fact is, religion is incapable of moderation and inherently immoral. Each religion aggrandizes its own members, and denigrates everyone outside its reach. And if the Islamic fanatics of ISIS are being condemned by many American Christians for their actions, it may be as much because the Americans wish that they could do the same thing, not because they think there’s anything wrong with persecuting and even murdering non-believers. Christians have a nearly two thousand year history of doing exactly that, only becoming “civilized” in the last couple hundred years, and only because most Christians live in countries where secular governments have managed to limit their power. Where Christianity is not limited by an effective government, they still like to kill people who disagree with them. There are places in Africa and Oceania where Christians are still burning witches at the stake, or slaughtering neighbors who don’t share their faith. The efforts to impose the death penalty for homosexuality in Uganda were heavily sponsored and encouraged by American missionaries.

The truth is, what we need even more than freedom of religion is freedom from it. I’m not going to say that, without religion, there would be no wars, but there would certainly have been a lot fewer of them in the last twenty years.

And, yes, I know this is after midnight, but only in the Eastern time zone.

Return to LaurenMilfinger.com

Merry Christmas, Wanna Fuck?

That’s the sort of question I like to ask on Christmas. I don’t really observe the holiday for the religious aspects. There’s roughly zero chance that Jesus was actually born on December 25. Isaac Newton was, but Jesus was probably born sometime in March or April. That’s when you’ll find shepherds in the fields, watching over their flocks by night, not in the middle of December, when the sheep are mostly kept in the barn.

The truth is, the only reason Christmas is on December 25 is because the early Church couldn’t get the people to stop celebrating the Roman Saturnalia, which fell on that day. This was celebrated with parties, gift giving, and orgies. Roman orgies were legendary, though, truth be told, they generally tended to be a lot more about eating and drinking than sex. The wild sex angle was largely Church propaganda, trying to make pagans seem “evil,” because they would “give in to the base desires of the physical body.”

I never really understood that. Fundies seem to think that body and spirit are two entirely separate things, with completely different agendas. The spirit aspires to elevated thoughts, pure and serene desires that center on God and Jesus, while the body just wants to corrupt itself. Okay, the body wants to enjoy itself, but it’s the mind, which is where all conscious and unconscious thought resides, not in some symbiotic “spirit,” that tells the body what to do.

Adam and Eve, being horrible and messy. Eating apples leads inevitably to blowjobs and swallowing cum.

I’ve known a few fundies who honestly believed that, if Adam and Eve had behaved themselves and never eaten that fruit, God would have found a way for them to reproduce that didn’t include anything as horrible and messy as sex. My mother thinks that way. It’s always been sort of a joke between me and my brother, Sam, that, since there are three of us kids, it seems very likely Mom and Dad have had sex exactly three times, and probably didn’t enjoy it. You’re not supposed to enjoy it, according to Mom. Uncle Ralph, Dad’s brother, once told me he was very surprised when she married my father, because “she’d have to fuck her husband, and she was saving herself for Jesus.”

So, what are you having for Christmas dinner?

Usually, on a holiday, I’d have my brother over and fuck his brains out, but he’s married again, and they’re off to an unnamed theme park in Florida to commune with the rodents. Instead, my friend Sarah is coming over. We expect to open presents (I buy my gifts from Vibrators.com), sit around my apartment naked, and eat each other’s pussies until we can’t cum any more. A basic, traditional holiday, in other words.

Return to LaurenMilfinger.com

Cumming at Carlisle’s

My latest book was released on Saturday, December 9, to the usual blast of promotional tweets and no noticeable critical attention. They All Cum at Carlisle’s is part 3 of my “autobiographical” series. The other two books are The Life of Lauren, which started it all off, and Across the Pond.

The series isn’t exactly chronological. The first book starts with me in high school and finishes fairly recently. The second is set between my freshman and sophomore years in college, and Carlisle’s is set when I was 30. That was a helluva year, because I spent the summer at Carlisle’s Nature Resort, where the dress code was officially “clothing optional,” but “just go naked” was more what was meant. Usually, the only person you’d regularly see wearing anything was Julia Carlisle, the 26-year-old co-owner (with her brother, Jordon) of the establishment. Julia was often seen in a bikini, because she spent a lot of time in the office, on the “public” side of the boundary fence and hedges. That was where people checked in, and where there was a reasonable expectation that the odd non-nudist might show up from time to time.

Julia was a gorgeous brunette, who bore a certain resemblance to a young Bettie Page, and did everything she could to emphasize that. Jordon was actually three years older than his sister, but absolutely hated anything to do with bookkeeping and the tedium of running a popular resort property, so he did the maintenance and let his sister run the place. He was fairly popular with the female guests, since he was handy, could fix stuff if it was broke, and had a 13″ dick that always seemed ready to spring to attention at the first hint of interest.

The sort of thing you might see by the pool at Carlisle’s. Full photo set will be in my member area.

Carlisle’s was what you’d call an “adult” nature resort. No kids allowed. Most naturist places are crawling with the little darlings, and, in general, they’re safer there than they are in the clothed world. Social nudists are, for the most part, surprisingly prudish. Carlisle’s, and another place I used to go, Hidden Cove, didn’t allow anyone under eighteen, so the usual horror of hardons didn’t apply, and people would sometimes fuck right out in the splendors of nature. It used to be that way, at least. Hidden Cove was bought by a fucking church, so now the place is clothing-mandatory and praise Jesus.
Considering it was Reverend fucking Killjoy’s church that bought the place, I couldn’t help wondering if he was still pulling the “holy anointing oil” and “tower of blessing” stunt on the high school seniors.

Not me, and not Rev. Killjoy, but a pic just like this is more or less what got me my scholarship. (set and video in member area.)

I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much about the old pervert, though, considering he paid for an Ivy League education for me once I had pictures of him with his cock in my mouth. I wouldn’t call it blackmail, exactly. Okay, maybe I would. The statute of limitations ran out on that years ago, so what does it matter?

Julia and I became great friends during my stay. Neither of us are lesbians, exactly, but we’re definitely flexible. Perhaps not as flexible as my friend Hilda, who’s a professional contortionist, and can eat her own pussy, but flexible enough. (Hilda might be worth a story on her own, come to think of it.) Julia and I took the train back to my place in New York, which was an experience in itself. If you’ve never had sex in an Amtrak roomette, you haven’t lived.

There was a lot of this stuff going on at Carlisle’s.

While I was at Carlisle’s, I found myself teaching a creative writing class. Some of the stories my students produced are included in the book, and some of them are pretty wild. One of the students stated, very clearly, that nothing in his sister’s story of a family orgy upon their arrival at the resort was true. Naturally, we all figured that it was. One guy apparently wants to be the next John Norman. Norman, if you’re unfamiliar with the guy, wrote the Gor series, which includes a lot of “women should be sex slaves and men should be the masters” nonsense (along with some mistress-slave relationships as a counterpoint). His story is included, and it’s fairly awful, but might just appeal to a certain demographic. Everyone else can just read and say, “This guy’s an idiot.” (My student, not Norman, whose day job is philosophy professor.)

They All Cum at Carlisle’s is fairly typical of my autobiographic books, or, for that matter, my Lot’s Cave books. There’s a lot of sex, a certain amount of incest and, I hope, some decent literary value.

Return to LaurenMilfinger.com

International Blasphemy Day

Today is International Blasphemy Day, so be sure to get out there and insult the god of your choice.

This is going to be one of those serious posts, despite the lead. Because blasphemy is serious. Americans are free to speak against God, or make fun of him, or to simply ignore him. That’s not the case in many other countries. If the evangelicals have their way, it won’t be the case here, either.

In a number of Muslim countries, blasphemy can be punished by death. The same applied to Christian countries until fairly recently, a couple hundred years or so. A long time for individuals, but for humanity as a whole, not that long at all.

A couple posts back, I put up a story about Adam and Eve, after being expelled from the Garden of Eden, figuring out how sex worked, and the idea that this was why God created them in the first place, because he was bored and wanted to watch them having sex. “And on the eighth day, God created voyeur porn,” or something like that.

It’s been said, not always jokingly, that the major passtime for the dead in Heaven is watching their descendants fucking. I don’t personally believe that. I tend to feel that once you’re dead you’re simply dead, no longer exist in a conscious form, and consequently never actually realise you’ve died because you’re no longer there to notice.

In Saudi Arabia, posting that paragraph could get me executed, if I were Muslim. Which I’m not. What I am is, according to my mother, “a poor, lost sinner who’ll surely spend eternity burning in hell.” Christians are so fucking charitable about that sort of thing. What’s the best way to raise your children in your faith? Scare the living shit out them, obviously. Anyway, that would make me a lapsed Baptist, and a former member of the 2nd Baptist Faith in Jesus Tabernacle. Except, I’m not sure “lapsed” is the right word. Lapsed implies a temporary pause, like a lapsed driver’s license, which can be renewed. I find it very unlikely I’ll ever renew that membership, or even encounter any real evidence gods exist.

No, what I am is an atheist. One of the classical ones. I don’t hate God. Sorry, very few atheists do, no matter how big a cliche that is in evangelical belief. We don’t hate Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Jesus, Vishnu, or Odin, either. God’s just a fictional character, invoked to explain a lot of shit that science hadn’t yet caught up with. Where did the universe come from? What is life? Why am I here? These are questions today, and they were questions in the bronze age, too, but with fewer answers.

Science still hasn’t caught up with that last one, but I think philosophy has. The correct answer is probably, “No particular reason. You just are.” Just because you feel like there should be a reason for everything doesn’t mean there actually is one.

Saying that is blasphemy, too, by the way. Believers generally believe that God is actively guiding the world, ordering things, only putting people here with a special reason. When you confront a Stalin, or a Hitler, or a Mao, or a Pol Pot, you do find yourself wondering just what sort of purpose any of them could serve. Unless you’ve read the Old Testament, after which you might just be able to remember what a genocidal asshole God actually declared himself to be.

Saul lost his kingdom because he pissed off God by failing to slaughter the Amalekite king, Agag, and sparing some of the cattle to offer them as sacrifices in the Tabernacle. Notice he was going to kill the cattle in any case, so his crime was not wasting them, not not killing them. So Samuel declared that God had abandoned Saul, then took a sword and chopped up Agag.

Even when we were learning about this in high school, I found this story a little hard to buy. Did Saul piss off God? Or did he just piss off Samuel, who was, after all, the one actually issuing the orders? Just because the old “prophet” intoned, “Thus saith the Lord,” (we were pretty much a King James Bible type of school), that doesn’t mean the Lord actually said it. Maybe God wasn’t a genocidal asshole. Maybe Samuel was.

Or maybe Samuel was just making this stuff up as he went along. Maybe he was a control-freak psychopath who wanted to see just how far he could get the king to go. Because, if you look at that story, it seems fairly obvious that Samuel had the real power and merely used the king to exercise it. Just as the religious right today tries to manipulate any politician they can influence.

And, of course, it’s also possible that Samuel himself was invented by a later writer. The young George Washington never chopped down that cherry tree, or made that “I cannot tell a lie,” admission of his childish misdeed. That was just something Parson Weems made up and threw into his biography because he thought it would provide a good example for young children.

It’s the same with a lot of people in the Bible. There’s no evidence that Moses ever existed or, for that matter, that a huge mass of Hebrews spent forty-years camped in the Sinai. There’s no evidence that the Hebrews moved into Canaan and conquered it, displacing the native people, though there does seem to be a decent amount of evidence suggesting there were always there and simply expanded and took over their neighbors’ countries over the course of several hundred years.

There’s independent evidence that Saint Paul was a real person, as well as fairly conclusive textual evidence that he didn’t write several of the Epistles that bear his name. Paul’s own writings also suggest he was unfamiliar with a living Jesus, and regarded him not as a flesh and blood man, but as a purely spiritual manifestation of God. The Pauline Epistles, the genuine ones, are older than the gospels, and the Jesus of the gospels almost never says anything that isn’t a direct quote from the Old Testament or early proto-rabbinic sources. In other words, he appears exactly as you’d expect a fictional person to appear if the purpose was the “prove” that particular prophecies had been fulfilled.

There may be independent confirmation of Paul, but there is exactly zero non-biblical contemporary documentation of anything that Jesus was supposed to have done, or even that he existed at all.

Even Jesus’ answer to the “greatest commandment” question is a quote from scripture (not to mention the Jewish daily prayers). In Mark his answer is, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, is one Lord.” Matthew’s version starts after that line, probably because someone noticed that what Jesus supposedly said was a flat denial of trinitarian doctrine. It’s mildly embarrassing when a third of your divine trinity doesn’t actually believe there is such a thing and says so in your holy book.

Oh, by the way, Jesus was a Pharisee. His complaints about them were a call for improvement by a member of the group, sort of like the handful of remaining Republicans in the GOP calling for a return to basic principles and an ouster of the plutocrats, fascists, Dixiecrats, and religious lunatics who’ve managed to take over since the 1980s. A rabbi friend of mine tells me that Jesus’ opinion on divorce identifies him as a follower of Bais Shammai, the stricter of the two scholarly schools of the time. The other, Bais Hillel, which prevailed, was a lot more lenient. Hillel (yes, the guy the campus Jewish outreach program is named after) didn’t require the wife to commit adultery before he’d allow a divorce. Burning her husband’s dinner was sufficient grounds.

So, I guess that’s enough blasphemy for now. I don’t suppose you were expecting this from an erotica writer, but I did blackmail that idiot pervert of a preacher into paying for an Ivy League education. Maybe I was paying attention.

Return to LaurenMilfinger.com