A Bad O’Hair Day

January 15, 2003 2:58 PM

"Madelyn Murray O’Hair In Hell" is difficult to describe... Danté meets Seinfeld? I dunno... but it's damn funny—and just a little thought provoking. I can't wait for the next installment! Brought to you by the good folks over at The Morning News.
posted by silusGROK (18 comments total)

As a theist—and one that believes in an afterlife, I must admit that beyond the humor, I also enjoyed how much it made me think... "Where do I stand?" "How am I doing?" "Could I be doing better?". Anyway, I don't want to turn this into some eschatological discussion, but I did want to submit that this story touched me on a number of levels.

Also, please note that the story does contain off-color language.
posted by silusGROK at 3:07 PM on January 15, 2003

"Also, please note that the story does contain off-color language."

And a talking cat.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 3:11 PM on January 15, 2003

And ... the Book of Lists.
posted by rotifer at 3:21 PM on January 15, 2003

Not the Book of Lists!
posted by silusGROK at 5:05 PM on January 15, 2003

eschatological: adj : of or relating to or dealing with or regarding the ultimate destiny of mankind and the world.

Given the number of ways we know the world could end it always strikes me as funny we would still consider divine intervention as a possibility. Meteors, plauge, war, etc.. We would be lucky to live on in a heaven or hell but most likely we will follow every other animal and just simply cease to exist and be replaced by the next wave of life on Earth just like the many waves before us (at least 6). Sorry to be cynical and drag things down to a base dark and dreary existence that is the blackness of my soul but I'm obviously going to hell for this post.
posted by stbalbach at 5:14 PM on January 15, 2003

I once mused to my boss, "I remember back when I lived in Austin... I used to wonder whatever had happened to Madelyn Murray O'Hair." Without missing a beat, he deadpanned, "God knows."
posted by alumshubby at 5:55 PM on January 15, 2003

Nice, but I prefer what Tony Pierce has been writing lately about his time in Hell, not mention how he got there.
posted by GriffX at 6:24 PM on January 15, 2003

Must be something in the air. Even I've been writing about Hell lately. I read something funny the other day but the site is down so I don't think I can get a link out. However I'll relate something amusing I read in The Dictionary of the Khazars. I can't find the exact place in the book at the moment but it goes like this:

There are three hells—one Christian, one Moslem, and one Jewish. Christians are condemned to the Moslem hell, Moslems to the Jewish hell, and Jews to the Christian hell. The reason for this is so that, in addition to the torments they suffer as described in the respective holy books, they also suffer the belief that they were just mistaken (as opposed to evil). Possibly because of an accident of birth.

I thought this to be delightfully cruel and it's just the sort of condemnation I would mete out if I were In Charge (In the far east there would be reincarnation which is cruel enough, in my opinion, not to require special treatment).
posted by wobh at 7:03 PM on January 15, 2003

That was a pleasant surprise, Vis10n. It's like the beginning of a quirky postmodern utopian novel. I'd like to see where it goes.
posted by UrbanFigaro at 7:20 PM on January 15, 2003

so, uh. who is this broad?
posted by mcsweetie at 7:42 PM on January 15, 2003

Extremely palatable fiction all around. Thanks.
posted by mmcg at 8:06 PM on January 15, 2003

Lovely stuff!

Mcsweetie, O'Hair was a famous atheist activist. She was murdered along with her son and granddaughter in 1995. Here's a reasonable overview.
posted by hippugeek at 11:15 PM on January 15, 2003

We would be lucky to live on in a heaven or hell but most likely we will follow every other animal and just simply cease to exist and be replaced by the next wave of life on Earth

Yep, stbalbach, that's just what Madelyn thought...

There's a whole genre of stories about Hell being just like this life, except everything's a little worse and it lasts forever. I'm thinking C.S. Lewis's book The Great Divorce might have been the first. Anybody got an earlier example?
posted by straight at 8:15 AM on January 16, 2003

O'Hair is also the favorite bugaboo of all those crazy "Save 'In God We Trust!!!!!' " or "Save Prayer in Schools!!!!!!!!!" e-mails that the religious types like to forward around all the time. I guess they tend to forget that she was murdered almost TEN YEARS AGO because she's apparently behind all these evil anti-Christian plots. Fuckwits.
posted by UKnowForKids at 8:51 AM on January 16, 2003

Did Lewis expound some of those ideas in Mere Christianity? I don't remember reading The Great Divorce, but I do remember his vision of hell as a grey rainy little bus stop of a town and heaven so hard and bright that it's painful to those who reside in hell, so they don't even want to climb the mountain toward heaven. Also a meek woman in life became a glorious queen in heaven and a powerful man in life her chauffeur or something like that. All pretty silly, but kind of fun somehow, like this story. Of course Lewis actually took it seriously, which is something else.

The only way it could be rational would be if we're living in a virtual reality world created by some previous generation, so that when we die we either go on to another "level" or get to "start over" - same character, new character, who knows. That sort of thing at least can be explained as a theory (not just "believed") and the fucked up part is, unless we destroy ourselves first, we almost certainly will eventually have the technology to do that, and knowing humanity's sense of humor, there's gonna be some 'catch people in a matrix game' going on at some point... so for all you know, it could be now.
posted by mdn at 10:01 AM on January 16, 2003

"...there's gonna be some 'catch people in a matrix game' going on at some point..."

But it wouldn't be Ethical to mess with someone's wathan like that.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 10:42 AM on January 16, 2003

"Did Lewis expound some of those ideas in Mere Christianity?"

There's a disclaimer at the end, that Lewis doesn't believe heaven/hell are like what he writes in the book. He does believe that the various self-centered traps that the damned characters can't get out of are the sorts of things that may really keep people from heaven.

In the book, the damned are free to go to heaven anytime. If they do, then they've only been in Purgatory, if they never do, then they've been in Hell all the time. But they don't want a heaven where they can't, for example:
* Be Apprecaiated for the Important Artist I Am.
* Have someone (a child, a spouse) they can "love" by controlling and posessing him/her.
* Be in control of how others perceive them.
* Manipulate people with guilt trips.
* Keep talking about God instead of actually meeting Him (they'd rather "travel hopefully" than arrive)

Even if you don't believe a word of Lewis's Christian theology, he was a pretty astute observer of the kinds of twisted control games people play with each other and the lies they tell themselves (evident in this book and in Screwtape Letters).
posted by straight at 11:42 AM on January 16, 2003

There's a whole genre of stories about Hell being just like this life, except everything's a little worse and it lasts forever.

Heaven too.
posted by timeistight at 4:47 PM on January 16, 2003