At Unreasonable Faith, VorJack has a post questioning the veracity of some stories Christian evangelists tell:

I once worked with a fundamentalist who wanted to tell me all about how bad he used to be. He told me about his former friends who were into the occult and about the time they all formed a satanic heavy metal band. It finally tripped my BS detector when he couldn’t name a band heavier than Motley Crue.

I once had a friend who dragged me to a storefront church where the preacher told us all about the horrible person he used to be. It seems he was once a bartender who was selling drugs and dating a satanist. The story culminated in a drive-by shooting that killed the two men standing next to him, but left him alive. For some reason this meant that God had saved him, rather than meaning that God had it out for the other two guys.

VorJack goes on to suggest that these stories are wildly implausible and makes the crack “Why was I never invited to an occult sex party?”

In the first story, the fact that the guy’s musical knowledge didn’t match his story may be evidence that in his particular case he was BSing. But otherwise, there’s nothing actually implausible in the story. Human beings have been known to say, believe, and do some pretty weird things to define their identity, and for some people this means deciding that they are going to worship a Satan who they believe is a literal supernatural being (Vjack, of Atheist Revolution fame, used to be one of them.) There are probably plenty of groups of teenage boys who’ve gotten some instruments together and told each other they were a “Satanic heavy metal band.” In the case VorJack relates, the fact that the Christian told him about “the time” they formed the band, rather than what band ever did, suggests it wasn’t much of a band, but that in itself isn’t evidence of out-and-out lying.

As for the bartender: of course there are women who’ve gone around telling people they’re Satanists, and some of them have been men’s girlfriends. I’m under that impression that there aren’t that many drug-dealing bartenders out there (why mess around selling illegal drugs when you’ve got a gig selling a legal one?) but surely there have been bartenders who’ve sold pot under the counter to regulars, which is all that’s required for the story to be true. Finally, while the drive by shooting bit sounds improbable, of course there have been drive by shootings where not everyone in the group being shot at got hit. (If the preacher had claimed to be one of the guys killed, that would be another matter.)

As for the occult sex party thing, I’m not entirely sure such things really happen; all the real-life sex parties I’ve ever heard about have been secular affairs. But probably a few occult ones have happened, at some point in history. Specific claims deserve skepticism on the grounds that most people haven’t had as much sex as they’d like others to believe, but we definitely aren’t in alien-abductee territory here.

The correct response to these kinds of claims is not to dismiss them because of how crazy they are, but to roll your eyes at how banal they are. If you’re emotionally swayed by a preacher’s story about the “one time” he and his friends formed a Satanic heavy metal band, you deserve to find other people having a laugh at your expense, even if it could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the story is true.