Note: I shall roast in hell for at least one eternity for the contents of this blog if there is a God, because by all accounts He is one humorless bastard.  I have read the bible twice (yes, really) and the Holy Quran once. Nowhere in either of these tomes did I run across the phrase “… and God laughed mirthfully”, not even in the books of Job or Ruth, which were heavily loaded with the grist of humor: pain. Not even a chuckle from the old bastard.

Oh well, I’m fairly sure with all the folks down there in InfernoLand I’ll be too busy chumming around and meeting everybody to worry too much about the hot poker shoved up my ass or the scheduled twice-daily flayings by the demons. Besides, after the first couple of lifetimes spent in hell, I’m pretty sure the torture will become routine.  “White hot needles in my eyes again? Can’t you devils come up with something new?” Ho hum, indeed.

Heaven is a very empty place, and probably very boring.  If Dante spent 80 pages of “Il Paradiso” (yeah, I read that shit, too along with “Inferno” and “Pergatorio”– NTIEDMAFG) just describing the types of harps available, I think it is fair to compare heaven to any waiting room you choose to think of, only all the magazines are copies of “Golf Digest” from 1973 with all the pages oddly stuck together. It sounds more and more like the Judaic “Sheol” or “waiting place” where you hang around with your relatives until… what exactly?

I took the name of this article from an Elvis Costello tune from “Spike”. The chorus of the song says “now I’m dead” which is very much where we all end up. If you didn’t want to die, you should have skipped the whole existence thing; but it’s a little late for that, so get ready for the end game, because entropy gets us all.

I’m pretty sure there is an intelligence at work in the universe, and for lack of a better word, I call it God.  Things could not be this fucked up if it were not so– it takes something that calls itself intelligent to louse things up so badly. That intelligence seems arbitrary at times—not malicious, just arbitrary.   Many people confuse the concept of being arbitrary with maliciousness, especially when they think the universe is being tough on them.  My middle stepson thinks that something is “unfair” when it does not go in his favor…  a subjective definition of “fair” that I think applies to most people that I’ve met. As uncle Frank says, “Fuck Hydrogen, Stupidity is the most common element in the universe.” Never attribute to evil what can be chalked up to idiocy, the more likely cause.

God essentially meets the 3 requirements of godhood described by my wife’s former neighbor, Robert A. Heinlein: a god must be invisible, capricious and omnipresent. We certainly have that. I haven’t seen the Fella in a while, His rules and physical laws are a puzzle, and He’s supposedly watching everything. Kind of like a peeping Tom who’ll never get caught and runs the police department anyway, so you’ll just have to put up with it.

I think where we go wrong is that we think that God is on our side. This is a dangerous and very vain assumption. God has shit to do and we are the material He uses and then discards. At best, we are the sensory organs of God who (being a narcissist) wants to understand Herself and perceive Her divine creation.

God is also a woman. Birth is entirely the domain of woman. Men invented the male God to assuage their sense of worthlessness at only having to contribute a tablespoon of genetic material to the equation. Men therefore had to denigrate and belittle the concept of a female God. Woman is sin and must be blamed for all the shit that man has got himself into.

She doesn’t mind, She’ll get them. The fuckers.

Is there just one God? Definitely not: even the first commandment (“I am the Lord thy god, thou shalt put no other gods before me”) spells that out pretty plainly. Fuck those other guys, I am the only one you’d better worry about. Pretty much makes the point there, so forget the Muslim “there is no God but God” horseshit.

All but four of the commandments (don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t fuck your neighbor’s wife, and don’t kill) are there to protect Her franchise, and the four that don’t are there to help societal cohesion. In short, God is essentially a very powerful, narcissistic social engineer.

And taking the Lord’s (Lady’s) name in vain? That one was fucked up by religion itself. Saying “God dammit” is not taking the Lord’s name in vain. It is at worst a blasphemy. No, taking the Lord’s name in vain is what my uncle Robert did almost every time he told a story: “by God, I told that asshole to leave my property or I’d get my gun.” Swearing with God as witness is taking God’s name in vain, and people do it all the time. Burn, baby, burn. Maybe the demons will turn your soul once one side is well done.

The God game is one of ego from top to bottom, side to side and front to back. I have a former friend who is an atheist and I am absolutely certain the reason he’s a non-believer is that there is not enough room in the universe for his ego and God. Hell, it’s mighty crowded with just his ego. One of them had to go, I guess it was God. God does not appear to be seriously put out by this.

So what does God want?

We only assume He (sorry, I should say “She”; but old misogynistic habits die hard and you know who I mean: G-O-D) wants us around; but the geological evidence does not support this theory. Every few million years God pretty much wipes out most of the living things on the planet. It could be sport, cleanliness, compulsion

The analogy I can think of is that God has this drying rack with all these pretty planets on it that are as clean as a new cue ball: God likes empty planets, because there are so many of them; but every once in a while they get polluted with that icky life crap. God is off somewhere in the lab fucking around with singularity anomalies, but every once in a while he comes back to the drying rack to check on things, and this one planet “Earth” has all this fucking life on it.

“Me dammit!” He exclaims and picks up his favorite cleanser (Comet: He keeps an infinite supply in the oort cloud) and scrubs that scummy life right off the surface of the Earth and grumbling to Himself puts it back on the rack and goes back to the important shit. Fucking life, screwing up His pretty, clean planets!

We assume that we are important to God’s plan, that we are agents of God’s will, and we may very well be in that we are at this time the principle agent of extinction at this time. Maybe if we do the job for him all he’ll have to do is wipe us out . Dirty cue ball problem solved.

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God is also an experimenter. Maybe we are not an accident; but we are not as crucial as we think we are to the final result. Imagine God with a big-ass whiteboard that He draws out His plans for Earth on. It starts out about a billion years ago completely blank, He draws some proteins, they collect into a complex bundle of amino acids over a few million years and then He makes a single-celled organism.

Cool so far. He sits back and considers for a couple mill then joins a few of the singletons into a multicellular creature. At first, it’s sessile, but it breaks off the surface and starts swimming around. He gives legs to some of them and they become trilobites (three lobed critters). He fucks around with them for a while, then frowns, picks up the eraser, says “nah!” and wipes them out.

Okay, so those free swimmers. Let’s call them proto-fish that He draws into fish. He gives some of them legs and lungs and some of them crawl up on the land. Some form three-chambered hearts and become amphibians: they live on land but have to raise their kids in water. That’s bullshit–it’ll never fly, so He gives them 4 chambered hearts, makes them scaly and makes it so that their offspring can be raised on land, having hard egg shells. He decides that these reptiles should dominate the world.

They get huge, their brains get small (by design or oversight we’ll never know). At this point in geological history, I consider God to be developmentally the same as a 6 year old. He’s fascinated with these giant monsters, so He spends a few hundred million years letting them battle each other: the first gladiatorial games on a planetary scale. Meanwhile He’s sketching this new concept He has of creatures that give live birth to their offspring. He makes them warm blooded and gives them hair, at least until middle age.

God eventually grows tired of the giant monster battles, picks up the eraser, and says “nah!” and wipes them out.

Now those mammal things he kept in reserve have some potential. He starts specializing them into different kinds of creature. Some are fast, some are smart, and some are the ancestors of man. He makes the mancestors walk upright, drops the tail, gives them an attitude and lets them start using tools and discovering neat things like fire and health insurance. They are very clever, but not very bright. Heck they even believe in Him and He kind of digs the worship. The dinosaurs never kissed His ass like these critters do. Kind of nice.

After only a few thousand years the hairless apes He’s turned loose are kind of running amok. They are in the process of wiping out all His other options on the whiteboard and they’ve even put up junk up in orbit around the planet and destroyed the oceans, so He picks up the eraser and stands there thinking a moment…

Maybe He can work with the fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, algae, insects and plants to start over again. He’d better act fast, because we’re taking away His options. Maybe he’ll just say “fuck it” and start over again. Like I said, He has lots of empty planets out there.

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Maybe God, as pointed out in the excellent film “Fight Club” is an absent parent. He kicks off life on a planet, gets it all grown up and smart, and then walks away. God is busy elsewhere starting a new family– people who are not familiar with His bullshit yet, and won’t get wise for a while. He has no interest in sticking around and answering questions from ingrate kids that no longer take his word for things as they get older. He sure as hell has been quiet since setting up Islam, and no, He was not around for creation of the Mormon church. Even He thinks those fuckers are crazy. The Mormon church is kind of like a kid who was still in the womb when He split. That child is going to be fucked up and there’s little He or we can do about it.

This scenario is one that definitely indicates that God is male. Although I don’t understand this behavior at all, it has occurred many times in my personal experience, even though I am not a perpetrator of it. I know of a family where the practice has occurred in three consecutive generations– have kids, they get cranky and dad splits and starts a new family. “Setting up franchises” as Tyler Durden would say.

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God is so big, so vast, and so incomprehensible to our tiny ephemeral minds that it is sheer vanity to even remotely hope of understanding its nature—let alone that we would be made in God’s image.   It’s far more likely that the entire universe is in God’s image.

The old fable about the five blind men and the elephant is applicable, but just to demonstrate the seriousness most people place on their religious beliefs, imagine that the five blind men are highly opinionated, on prozac, packing weapons, and have an advanced coke habit.

Each of the five blind men walk up to an elephant and try to tell the others what they’ve found.  The first blind man grabs the tail and says, “it’s plain that this is a frayed rope—anybody that disagrees gets a round in the gut.”

The second blind man feels the moving trunk and says, “you idiot—it’s obviously a snake and if you don’t retract your ‘rope’ argument, I’m pulling the pin on this grenade”.  The third man feels the leg of the elephant and proclaims that the thing they’ve found is a tree.  The fourth guy completely passes by the elephant and wonders if he’s going to have to put the others out of their misery before they do something rash—obviously a rabid atheist.

What about the sixth blind guy who finds the pile of elephant dung and has no idea what the others are rambling about?  I mean, shit is shit, there’s nothing wall or tree-like about that…

People take this stuff so seriously because if they allowed something to erode their faith their house of cards on which they have built it might crumble.

The analogy I prefer is one in which God dispenses a culturally-biased intelligence test based on God’s culture (whatever that is), and based on whatever culture we happened to be raised in—Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Rastafarian, Cthuhluist—we fill out our answers.  Only God knows the right answers—and he’s not about to give them out until the time is right, but we smugly sit back, having finished the exam early since we know all the answers.  Each of us turns to our chums nodding that we got the answers right and that they—the slobbering unbelievers—are going to fry big time when the scores are posted.

And what about frying?  What about hell?  What about Evil?  Is there an entity responsible for universal evil—a Satan, a Kali, a Limbaugh?

And an evil being?  Sounds like a scam to shirk personal responsibility to me.  I mean—you get caught doing evil things and all you have to do is say “the devil made me do it” and everybody shifts blame to the horned-one.

Who says that God wants us to live and be happy, anyway?  Sometimes I think that the whole of existence is a form of game preserve for the big G to use to kill us in new and interesting ways.  Why wouldn’t God hunt us?  It makes as much sense as “saving” us.

So I’m going to start my church—“The First Church of Jesus Christ, Deadeye”.  Instead of being our savior, God will be referred to as our “stalker”.  A parishioner who dies will not be thought of as deceased, but as “bagged and tagged”.

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I’ll post more as I go along, so be warned.