CRIMINAL MINDS: ATHEISTS AND SATANISTS

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILER!

For those of you unfamiliar with this TV show, it’s a fantastic show, intelligent, well-scripted, strong characters and plot (and Lola Glaudini is an absolutely GORGEOUS woman), begins and ends with salient quotes.

There was a recent post at god4suckers.net that starts off with this:” So I’m watching A&E, and City Confidential is on. They’re talking about a group of teenagers from Pikeville KY, this was probably on the news a few months/years ago and I just missed/ don’t remember it. Anyways, there are these fucking teenagers, who called themselves “atheists/agnostics”, but dress all Goth like and claimed to have dabbled in satanism.”

Well, it was upsetting, to say the least. Atheists get lumped into those amorphous ‘others’ in society, pagans, satanists, and all sorts of sundry fringe groups. This was in relation to the Kentucky Goth murders of 1997.

So I’m watching this episode,
"The Popular Kids" Episode #110. ”When two high-school students are murdered in a small town, Hotchner and his team suspect they may have been the victims of a cult killing.”

And a fringe pariah group that called themselves the ‘Lords of Destruction’, who effect all the trappings of your standard Goth/Satanic stereotype (heavy metal, black fingernails, upside down pentagrams, that sort of thing) were of course immediately fingered (A tree near the decomposed bodies and the fresh one had ‘SATAN IS GOD, combined with a reversed pentagram, with the intials LOD underneath, all of course drawn in blood).

The ringleader is dragged into the local precinct (small town: but of course!), and when closely questioned about his belief system, he launched into a fairly decent speech about the hypocrisy of xtianity, how it’s shoved down throats regularly, and he tagged him and his ‘followers’ as “We’re atheists. Aggressive atheists.” He also explained that the word Satan stems from (this, from answers.com): “The English word "Satan" is from a Hebrew word meaning, "to oppose" or "adversary."

All in all, it was a great show, dispelling quite a few common myths (satanic human ritual killing has never been proven in this country, most serial killers aren’t Satanists). I wasn’t too fond of the lumping in of atheists with Satanists – but it was fairly clear in the context of the show that these were extremely young folks, who took the easiest shock route.

BUT: it most certainly didn’t end the way one would expect. In fact, the LOD was exonerated completely.

Let’s see, on the telly, there have been multiple references to non-religion. Malcolm in the Middle, one Xmas Hal and the boys decide to go into the Xmas tree business, they undercut the Catholic priests around the corner. The priests confront them, and one of the boys (Reese) laughs when they’re threatened. “Hey, in case you didn’t know, you’re talking to a bunch of godless heathens, so take your ghost stories somewhere else!”

Episode of Bones, about Voodoo, the two main characters are talking about zombies. The romantic interest (buzz-cut and square jaw type) gets upset when the lady coroner says xtians believe in zombies. “Jesus was NOT a zombie!” “Hey, he came back from the dead, didn’t he?” I roared.

The main character in ‘House’ is an atheist.

The commercial about Capitol One, where the guardian angel keeps screwing up (EXCEPT when the ‘watched over’ starts to use the wrong card).

One of the beauties of the American culture is this: ain’t nothing sacred.

Slowly, surely, we are becoming a part of the culture. As of 2005, the atheist/non-religious/agnostic portion of the world is now at 16%.

Slowly, inexorably, our numbers are growing, piecemeal, but growing.

I take comfort in that. But it may be too little too late.

Here’s hoping that it will be in time.

Till the next post, then.