Archive for February, 2015

I can’t stand it .

I’m just in awe that any sane person could devote so much energy and acuity to such an irrelevant discipline.

You know.

The Bible.

I mean of all the scholarly pursuits available in the 21st century, for anyone to devote this much effort to a book that they can’t even know who wrote is just spectacularly baffling. Who does that?  If nothing else, has the modern world not provided ample evidence that your beliefs are hardly exclusive? That your fantasies and dogma are no more credible than those of the guy next to you on the bus eating his boogers?

How have you escaped the most notorious phenomena of the information age with all it’s cruel and hard instant truths?  The relentless data forced down our necks, synced up with our every heartbeat, pulse and biorhythm for optimal consumption and ideal absorption that render your theological obsessions just as obviously obsolete as any other of today or from thousands of years ago.

How do you folks miss this?

How do you manage to escape it?

I listen to these hopeless zealots talk about and debate it and it’s fucking comedy.  They sound like Trekkies at a convention.  It’s all about the ‘prime directive’.  Remember that SNL skit where Shatner shows up at a convention and tells them all to lighten up?  Wouldn’t be awesome if Jesus did that?

Seriously, there’s science of all kinds.  There’s language and communications.  Psychology and sociology.  Why there’s even gambling and used car sales.  Finance and astrology.

Why The Bible or any other work of mere fiction?  Might I suggest the Lord of the Rings?  It’s got genealogy and anthropology and different languages.  And it has the extra added benefit of being way less contradictory and far more sure footed in terms of a moral course.

What happens to people to make them do that?

Animal husbandry anyone?

So, fair enough.  I get it.  They are afraid.  They are humid with panic and desperation.  Searching their scriptures for solace and dignity.  And in both their hearts and minds they understand that the notion of a benevolent Santa for adults is an empty fantasy.   The id and the super-ego rage against the dying of the light while the ego haunts without malice or reservation.  No wonder they are so goddamn confused and self righteous.  I mean, that’s gotta suck.  To cling to that nonsense and get kicked in the mouth every day with proof that it’s complete bullshit.  No wonder in America most scientists are atheists and most Christians are either hypocrites or in jail or both.

My major malfunction is that they walk among us like they know something we don’t.  Like common sense is for fools and heretics.  Like we don’t know they don’t know.  It’s obtuse.  They prance and froth at the religiosity of the president like it has anything to do with his patriotism or Americanism.  And they get away with it because we have to respect everyone’s beliefs.

Because for thousands of years the cults of theism have ruled the day.

Bullshit.

All I have to do is acknowledge beliefs.

I don’t have to respect them or their efforts to infringe on my society, my morals or my politics.

Enough of this nonsense.  The lobbying.  The religious litmus test for any aspect of worthiness in public life.  Enough of the considerations afforded the pious and the holy and the bellicose.  All the dominionist, theonazi homophobes can piss up a goddamn rope.

I’m tired of this crap.  Tax the shit out of churches and temples and synagogues.  Use all the money to fund planned parenthood and food stamps and welfare and unemployment and healthcare and secular education and then maybe all these jackwagons will shut the fuck up and disappear.

Jesus Christ, I gotta stop writing about religion.

Drinks for my friends.

I’m agnostic.  An agnostic. That means I’m confident that organized religion, any that worships a single deity or deities, is complete bullshit. That means that I don’t discount the notion of a higher power because neither I or anyone else has all the answers regarding the hows and whys of the universe.  It also means I don’t dismiss the idea of souls, but I admit to being a little more dubious on that one.

Religion was only allowed to once manifest and therefore exist today because of how primitive science was as recently as a century or two ago.  Hello, Mormons.

Probably the biggest thing that chaps my ass about theists is that if I choose not to believe in their God, I have chosen to exist in a moral vacuum.  That my lack of belief means I simply have no access to any moral compass.  That the two are mutually exclusive.  That I’m capable of anything.

That God makes morality objective.

Wrong.  Morality is like it or not, subjective.  The Christian bible is so convoluted and contradictory that it’s moral message is anything but objective.  It’s no wonder Christians are so confused and so inherently hypocritical.  I almost can’t blame them.

But I do because they have chosen to be full of shit.

I’m not singling out Christianity, I’m merely taking advantage of it as a convenient example.  There’s no shortage of examples.

They would have me believe that I have a choice between door number one and door number two.   Along with the presumption of choice is the presumption that I know full well what’s behind those two doors.  Heaven or hell.  Good or bad.  Right or wrong.  Love or hate.  God or Satan. One or the other.  It’s a callow and immature insistence on defining life as simply as it can be defined.

Morality is ultimately subjective.  I choose to rape and kill as many people as I want.  That number is Zero.  Morality is the providence of philosophy and subject to the consensus ideally, of a democratic society.  This is where the concepts of justice and of law enter the human condition.  One could argue that religion is philosophy but all religions end up self disqualifying by purporting to be the one and only truth.

What if that’s not what’s behind them?  What if there are more doors?  What if doors aren’t the only choice?  They tell me that’s it. It’s that simple.  But they are notorious for providing no proof and obscene explanations.  And again, by virtue of whatever religion, they deprive themselves of one of life’s most important choices.

Whether or not to be full of shit.

“Eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God’s infinite love”.  -Bill Hicks.

Drinks for my friends.