The pope has just released a number of brand new sins! They include drugs, pollution and genetic manipulation. I am not sure how he gets to do this, but if he can, I think everyone should be able to! So here are some new sins from me (not in any particular order…)

Tailgating. Thou shalt not drive too close to other cars. Mortal sin. People can get killed. One time, I was being tailgated so close on the freeway that it felt like the other car was raping my car. I mean it was a vehicular sexual assault. He kept pounding the back of my car until his car just blew up and sprawled across multiple lanes blocking traffic up for miles. Isn’t that just like a man?

Talking too loud in someone’s ear at a club. Thou shalt not try to talk over the booming techno beat, shattering your friend’s eardrums and annoying everyone in the process. You don’t even get heard, you strain your voice, you hurt their ears, no information is that important. Thou shalt wait til thou is outside.

Homophobia – thou shalt not be a homophobe! (this is something the pope cannot get enough of!)

Sexism and racism in the presidential race. Thou shalt not try to use gender or racial stereotypes in order to undermine presidential candidates, no matter who thou might vote for!

The Scott Peterson trial began last week. With the murder of Laci Peterson being absolutely one of the most unavoidable crimes in recent memory, it is hardly certain whether or not he will receive fair treatment in the courtroom. As highly publicized as it is, I know very little about the crime itself, just that Scott’s physical appearance seems to have changed drastically in the past year, and he seems to have modeled himself after Ben Affleck. Who knew you could get self tanner in jail?

The official decision by investigators that this was actually not a ritual killing by a Satanic cult made Peterson the chief suspect. I wonder if the public still has not really gotten over the Manson Family. I don’t understand why people still think that Satanic cults exist anywhere other than in the imagination of law enforcement officials, Christian extremists and mothers who hate heavy metal.

Growing up through the 80s and 90s, when backwards masking on records was considered a real danger, even then, I never bought it. Judas Priest having to actually go to court to defend their own lyrics was ludicrous and insulting not only to lovers of hard rock, but to all artists. Imagery like pentacles, a hand with raised index and pinky fingers, blood sacrifice, cannibalism, cauldrons, swastikas, occult text, dark gatherings in the middle of the night in the forest and the numbers 666 do not necessarily add up to any historically accurate context. It is a hodgepodge of symbols of perceived evil. If there’s smoke, there’s hellfire. The idea of ritual and crimes possibly committed during them lives in the vibrant fevered dreams of a stifled, ignorant culture. Not to deny the presence of cults, I am sure there are some out there, but I tend to think that they are a dinosaur of the 70s, when parents were worried sick about their teenage daughters and there were actually jobs for deprogrammers.

The phenomenon of the religious cult to me seems to be outdated, as their discoveries are few and far between, and almost always end in their own self-immolation, like the Branch Davidians or the Heaven’s Gate people. The Jonestown massacre was the prominent cult mass suicide/homicide of my early years, and Jim Jones remains an odd anecdotal figure in my life.

My grandparents held their 50th wedding anniversary party at the recently vacated People’s Temple, not long after the tragedy in Guyana had occurred. The venue was quite affordable, and my family was not particularly squeamish. They don’t stand on ceremony. Leave it to my family to party at a crime scene, dancing and destroying evidence. Still, I thought the empty rooms held a ghostly allure, morbidly emptied out of all its secrets by police. Nobody had said a word about it at the time, and this reflected my familial religious beliefs, which was a fairly hard scrabble Christianity with an austere flavor of Zen Buddhism. Lots of rules, no sentimentality. Satan didn’t exist, not in the way that was warned about in the hour long news shows. Bad people were real, as were bad belief systems that were destructive, that were willfully ignorant or intolerant. But the devil with the horns was looked upon as a kind of fool’s gold, taught to dummies too stupid to grasp the honest ideology of actual wrongdoing. If I did get any values from my family of origin, then that is the only one I hold dear. The claim of something or someone as “Satanic” always helps me find the idiot within.

There is an actual Church of Satan, which was founded by Anton LaVey in the 60s. He, as legend has it, was the advisor on the set of “Rosemary’s Baby,” a scary movie to be sure, and a nightmare premonition for director Roman Polanski. The supposedly extensive kingdom of the Church of Satan is rather minor, compared to most religions. It is a rash reactionary afterthought to Christianity, and therefore could be considered an offshoot, its own peculiar denomination. Lots like Lucifer himself, merely a fallen angel, a disgruntled employee, setting up his own shop and trying to compete across the street from the big guy.

All religions have elements of sacrifice, which is essential in the Catholic tradition of communion, the bread and wine standing in for the body and blood of Christ. Or the idea of being repentant for sin in Protestant faiths because of the acts of He that ‘so loved the world.’ That one must give something or receive something for God to continue to give life is the very nature of religion itself. Humanity assumes that you never get something for nothing. Ass, gas or grass, no one rides for free.

There are dark mentors, methods of worship that are self serving rather than compassionate, people that just do shitty things, but “Hail Satan” is an empty phrase to me. You may not be able to sell your soul to the devil, but you could sell your soul to anything, which might be equally as bad, making the world an awful lot more treacherous than we had previously thought. All is not lost. Black Sabbath are reuniting for Ozzfest, which is proof that there is a God.