'Splainin' my moniker

..because my last diary and a few of my recent comments have gotten me some comment on it.

A few years ago, I was posting regularly on an atheist/agnostic board. (It got boring after a while :-)).

Anyhow, as this wasn't a moderated board, quite often we'd get the Thumpers disruptin' the place. Often their technique was to post wildly-out-of-context Bible quotes, designed to support whatever right-wing-nuttery they were pushing that day.

Most people--as in a lot of places--felt compelled to argue with the trolls. Which just led to more arguing. After a couple of times doing this myself, I decided on a different technique. I started answering the Bible quotes with quotes from Bruce Springsteen songs.

It's surprisingly effective. A lot of them stopped the wingnuttery cold, if only because they didn't know how to respond to my pointed comments disguised as frivolity :-). Plus, since I do worship The Boss, it was also fun. And since I'd just post my quotes and then shut up, the wingnuts would be arguing with a ghost.

Thus, "Church of Bruce." I have a couple of usernames/Email names I use, and that's been one of them ever since. My name is actually Frank :-)

In closing, I'll give you one of the most pointed lines in music history. It's the line that gives the lie to the right-wing Capitalistic Market Forces Utopia. It's the line guaranteed to make a winger shut up, at least for the ten minutes it takes to penetrate his foggy brain. It's from the song The River, a song based on the true story of Bruce's sister getting pregnant at 17, and it goes like this:

"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?"