I apologize for using this somewhat direct and somewhat less than direct form for writing to you, O father of the Vatican City State and closest human being to God who exists on this planet.
Well, in theory anyway.
It’s this problem I’ve been having with my faith. I’m sure you can help out with it, because it’s the highest level problem in Christianity, and as such if any of the other 2.3 billion or so followers or 31% of the planet or however you want to divvy the numbers up have not yet faced my problem, they eventually will have to anyway, and so
that kind of makes it your job to answer it.
NEhow…
My problem is just this: the Kinsey studies way back in like the ‘50’s or 60’s or whatever showed that 90% of human males masturbate, and that kind of implies that once Christ shows back up chances are awfully good that He’s going to whack off on occasion.
You know, because he’s supposed to ‘come back as a human’ again.
Which — setting aside for a moment the fact that it seems kind of disturbing given that the church has what I’d call a ‘not very clear’ stance on ‘such matters’ — kind of makes me wonder a couple of things:
- What would Christ jerk off to?
- Is that really a selfless act or a selfish one?
And since a bunch of people are probably giggling out there mistakenly thinking that I am somehow joking about something I consider about as seriously as I consider gun violence, abortion, matters of church and state, freedom of assembly, speech, and the pulpit EVEN BEFORE I START THINKING ABOUT “so called” freedom of ‘religion’ I will do my solemn best to avoid any undue suggestion that I’m ‘trying to be’ blasphemous, controversial, or argumentative let alone ‘funny.’
Because I hardly think this is a laughing matter.
What I *do* think is a fucking joke is that you’re sitting up there so “close to God” and you haven’t shown the foggiest sense of knowing where to look for Him to be showing back up despite that he’s been overdue, in my personal opinion, for about 21 years give or take. What gives? Hasn’t the guy in charge given an inkling when another third or so of him is going to ‘manifest’ or where or how yet? No status updates?
No?
Well then it’s time to hear what I think about it. It can’t not be.
I think the church is pathologically indifferent to the plight of the ‘mentally ill’ and I think the whole idea of any church (let alone ALL OF THEM, because I’m speaking to you, Jews, you, Muslims, you, Buddhists, and every stinking last other one of you faux-religious mutherfuckers and you atheists too Sam Harris, in case you thought you snuck into the back row of this open letter unnoticed and are now proceeding to giggle into your armpit to [this time] stop trying to draw attention to how clever you can sound without being particularly clever at all versus the reverse.
How about trying to act like you know what the fuck you’re talking about, which would be better implied if you took seriously the viewpoints of others just like I have and do rather than smugly declared that the 0.00000000000{lots more zeroes, then a 1 somewhere way to the right border of the page and then a percentage sign} of what you know about this universe constitutes something “around 50%” of what there is to know about even one subject.
Yep, I just said FUCK YOU to the entire world in the loudest of possible fashions because I know something which all of you do not: Darwin predicted that Homo sapiens sapiens (to use the ‘full’ and ‘correct’ current title of the ‘most dominant species’ in the land via the self-servingly placed crown of dominance amidst this haphazardly organized train wreck of a society we currently have) was NOT the “last and best species” which would ever be, but he never said, implied, nor even mildly suggested that ‘the unification of a physical tool (e.g. a ‘computer’) with an organism’ would represent an evolutionary step of any kind, manner, or correspondence with or to all of previously recorded historical evolutionary development.
Nope. Never said it would happen. Seemed to imply quite the reverse. Which, for my money puts the next best species in an insane asylum and you Neanderthals in charge of the keys, the needles, the pills, the straps, the shitty food, the terrible showers, the uncomfortable beds and the bizarrely shocking living arrangements. Rather like letting the horses into the homestead to sleep in four poster beds while taking the homesteaders out in the middle of the night to sleep in the loft of a drafty barn while powdery snow blows through onto their noses. A bit Oliver Twisty.
In other words, I’m saying that the assumption that essentially all who are engaged in active inquiry about the subject have made is an incorrect assumption. I’m saying that biological development and socio-organizational techniques and modifications of an organic (versus an inorganic) nature are what will propel this species to higher levels of consciousness.
Not better computers, but better thinking.
In fact I already know how it has happened and I can describe it in plain terms: Homo sapiens sapiens is a species which uniformly selects the lizard brain’s preference over the cognitively more highly developed logical brain’s preference in each and every case of significant endocrine stress, and Homo sapiens bipolarus is the species which evolved to use its logical brain in Spock-like fashion to keep you legions of idiot Captain Kirks from blowing the poop deck to king-dumb-please-cum with your derelict and incomplete reasoning processes. Which you think are “guided by” stress when in reality they’re completely determined by stress versus math and sensible probabilistic analyses.
We evolved to be immune to embarrassment. And that ought to have already shown itself in my last seven years of flawless track record if it won’t be proven in the next few minutes.
And since you have no argument which is supported at all by the evolutionary record (that is you, scientists) and you religious people have been full of shit for as long as humans have been engaged in language (longer, since lots of things were full of shit long before humans ever even showed up to swing their dicks around like they knew what they ought to be pointing at) I’d say that probably makes me the chief most obvious prospect for
First metascientist of the next epoch
and
Elon Musk essentially my ‘second in command.’
Because he’s the only one of the rest of you who even looks remotely like he has a clue what he’s doing, and the most deranged part of it all is that all of you are crowding to his side of this tilting vessel we’re stamping into gravel dust despite that his way of thinking will need to be among the first of the things to go if we’re to have any chance of ‘saving this planet.’ i.e. We will need to soon STOP taking things in faux aggregate and begin taking them in ACTUAL aggregate.
The rest of you?
- You don’t know what you’re looking for
- You wouldn’t know where to look for it even if you did
- You have no hope of success even though essentially all of you still think you have hope
- You don’t even know that what you do within this incredibly short lifetime that you have means far less to the overall meaning of your life taken in a “I want my life to have meant something” fashion than what you don’t do. Even though the vast majority of people express a desire to have ‘some fealty toward’ what they want their lives to ‘be about.’ Your ONLY job is to stand up to injustice. There is no other job which even remotely compares to that one in importance. It is more important than food, water, or even air. There is no point of having any of those things without having justice, because without justice there can be no hope and without hope there is no utility in living. These things sound irrational but are rationally obvious. Read them through two or three times and try to figure out how they are true rather than taking the cop out approach of not understanding them and summarily declaring them to be false because you’re too stupid to ‘get it’ in the first twenty seconds that you manage to scrimp together enough attention to even read them. FIGHT INJUSTICE or just plain die. It’s basically as simple as that. [Though of course it then implies looking for injustice as a regular behavior.]
- Your stories are backwards for the approaches you need to develop, and hence your folklore has trained you in exactly the wrong way when it comes to identifying a leader even though it’s trained you with ‘mild’ success in the fashion of attempting to make you want to act like a leader.
And all of this is for a reason which is really quite childish. ‘Stupid’ as I used to say, because, of all the playground idiocies people could spend their entire lives pretending about, pretending to be in charge without concomitantly imagining how difficult it would be if you really WERE in charge of everything results in a fairytale ‘fast forward’ through all the work (which means exactly everything) to ‘skip to’ the ‘good part’ where you ‘get to’ boss people around and ‘say what goes.’ Yeah, don’t eat the broccoli when there’s perfectly good ice cream in the fridge.
Utterly moronic, really.
As if it weren’t abundantly evident that the best of the world leaders who ever were or ever could be didn’t choose themselves but rather were chosen quite harshly with astonishing regularity and experienced some of the harshest of the harsh lifetimes and were sometimes even heard to be saying things like,
“Please, if you can take this responsibility off my shoulders, do it. The idea of carrying a cross and getting the living shit whipped out of me and then being crucified unjustly even if I DO get to be reborn after a few days doesn’t sound like a job I actually want. The 7–11 is paying like $14 an hour and I can walk right to it. Pretty soon weed will be legal and I’ll have my video games and be able to haunt the interwebs when I’m off work as Devastatore, King of Shadowknights and Vanquisher of Eleven Million Orcs.”
Gandhi got shot. MLK Jr. got shot. Lincoln got shot. Not a penny of wisdom between the three of them, obviously, but if you take like Muhammed and cross him with like the Buddha and add some special oriental teas and shit you can really come up with a calm individual who can sight through the foggiest of the foggy darknesses on the way to the “Promised Land.” Just like we need right now.
And you think *I* tell *myself* some fucking stories. Your ‘anthill building algorithm’ moves things in such haphazard order that the easiest thing I could find to eat in the house when I took a break earlier was a vegan “bowl” which came in a bag and was packaged in Thailand made in large part of textured vegetable protein. When I drink orange juice I can almost guarantee that the label will show it is sourced from oranges in about seven different countries — which for my guess I’d call “probably inefficient.”
And there are ‘quite a few’ things which are less efficient than even that.
“Your” way of doing things has the approximate efficiency of a snake climbing a frozen waterfall in a rainstorm, and still it seems like everyone rates his or her own ‘progress’ as Lake Wobegon excellent. The dogwalking apps are just fine, mind you, but logistics is something ‘not worth taking seriously quite yet. Planet isn’t warm enough.’
Fucking wannabe leaders. Fuck you again. Happy granddad Biden posterchild for the “what we should be thinking about making people feel like when we ship them off to their cozy wing of the nursing home.”
And not even Pope fucking Francis can manage a halfway decent job of imagining he really had something seriously useful to communicate from God?
How does that even make any sense to an absolute imbecile? So what you’re basically saying is this guy is sorta ‘sitting next to’ this other guy, and they’ve got a bit of a psionic ‘comlink’ going on, in terms of, you know,
knowing the difference between right and wrong
and then, presumably,
being able to clearly speak to the difference between right and wrong
AND THEN
{drumroll please}
All we get are dried out old witticisms from a book that was supposedly written by a bunch of godfellas (Good Fellas?) a couple thousand years ago and ‘passed down’ in an ‘indians in a circle’ fashion without so much as a printing press for a good chunk of those centuries?
I mean, seems plausible it could go that way but hey, it seems somehow…I don’t know…more effective if we could get an idea about what God thinks on such things as nudity in video games and Bitcoin and whether Donald Trump is a crackpot or not. Whether it’s mathematically possible for an upper-level senior advisor to the POTUS to get exactly “accidentally” shot on a hunting trip to say nothing of people getting the wrong leg cut off in surgeries ‘once or twice’ a year.
How about taking a stand on the shitty state of nursing homes, there, Pontificus of Flufficus? How about giving us the go ahead to stop the idiocy of trying to police women’s bodies and start the common sense of making it somewhat more difficult to bring an Uzi to a kindergarten class than it is to smuggle crayons out of one?
Because even though not everything is a dichotomy, many things are.
But keep right on with the prayin’. That’s the important one, amiright? That’s the one that makes all the diff. Because praying for someone else to intercede on behalf of the weak is WAY easier than actually doing it yourself.
And guess what? OPPORTUNITY COST rules are always in effect. Which means that the ten minutes you spend in pointless prayers are far less useful than ten minutes of standing up for the weak (a.k.a. standing against bullying, striving for justice in all of the things you do, etc.)
Dichotomies galore! So many we don’t know which one to optimally pick, so glorious are the ivory playgrounds that the goodest of the good children play in. Hungry kids other places, but hey, can’t help everyone, right?
Dichotomies. Fucking piss on them.
Especially that one *really* annoying one…that…well, it’s almost like will the Christians or the Muslims or the Buddhists gather the most clicks and followers based on saying the things most pious and non-offensive, and then (much later, of course) all the others will finally admit defeat at last,
Rendering the One World Religion to be the one which hath been clicked on and followed the most to the point where a magical force appears and all those good followers of the good religion levitate to clouds and all those others 1-x descend into the fiery ashes and the dirt.
Yep, I’ve got that all checked into my lunacyestimation device. Shall I hit the “compute” button, Mr. Francis? And one more thing, can I just call you Fred?
{two pious nods}
{a return nod, then a button press}
{slight whirring, perhaps some tinkling as into a coffers}
{Small strip of paper presents.}
“Says here 99.9% chance of horseshit. Says looks like it, smells like it, feels like it, even TASTES like it. Seems to be horseshit. Apparently all of it. Utter horseshit. Says it right here. Does that mean that thousand page book you’re looking at which says things in every different direction like all good stop/start/left/right/up/down/backwards/forwards signs do is righter or wronger or maybe it’s just more confusing than be just in all that you do?
Does that mean you’re not really sitting next to God at all, Freddy?
You don’t know where he went, when he’s coming back, what’s good and what isn’t, who’s good and who’s bad, whether there’s any hope or none at all, or anything else for that matter?”
{long pause}
“I see. So you wear a lot of white, you try to avoid being seen ‘behind armed guards and inch thick panes of reasonably bulletproof Lexan’ and God really isn’t protecting even you, the most pious of the pious. Because it’s all about saving some pretty historical buildings and paving the way toward more converts…ahem..cough cough…making sure good work is done around the world and the Christian church gets the credit with all its demogogues (demigods?) in their order whether they sexually molested young children or not?”
I mean, I’m not Jimmy the Greek or nothing but I see a few problems with that theory as a “let’s do it because it’s an observably good” strategy. I don’t know that the Athenian counsel is going to excommunicate all 2.3 billion of you…I mean, how would we ‘cast you out’ of society like so many lepers? Elon doesn’t have enough working starships yet and the only planet seemingly capable of dispersing that quantity of hot air is Jupiter. Heard everything is all a gas there. Might only get to choose red as the color of your swirling mass of horseshit, but you could at least spell it color or colour however you like, because on that planet everything you say can work just as well as cotton candy. For the purpose of degreasing the engines of the minds you so readily seem to entrance anyway.
Fill them full of sugar and happy stories that keep them at the trough of the bowed heads of sheep in big impressive buildings which help people feel small and insignificant rather than directly help them feel their place in the network of life is an important one to be cherished just as much as their neighbors.
How about we try a new strategy:
Leave the “mentally ill” alone and do it before I catch you even one more time discriminating against even one of them. You manage to do that, and I’ll take this keyboard which I affectionately call Mjolnir and make sure the next time I ‘aim’ it I don’t aim it at your head with anywhere near the lackadaisical playfulness I’ve just made of this warning shot.
You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting. DO NOT BUILD PEOPLE YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO TREAT FAIRLY.
- Don’t build homeless people if you can’t be fair to homeless people
- Don’t build criminals if you can’t be fair to criminals
- Don’t build cheaters or liars or traitors or unjust people if you don’t want to be yourself cheated or lied about or stabbed in the back or unfairly handled by systems of convenience to anyone but you
But if you do any of these things make bloody sure I don’t catch you doing it again, because if I see you doing it your days on this planet as the most pious of the pious are numbered far fewer than are mine are, I can tell you that much for certain.
Why?
Because piousness, as you may well know, is defined as ‘devoutly religious.’
And pious, on the other hand, is defined as ‘making a hypocritical display of virtue.’ Which, in case you weren’t capable of standard reading comprehension (that’s maybe a sixth grader level of educational aptitude) means that what I just said roughly translates to:
“Your days of being the one most capable of laughably hypocritical displays of virtue are numbered far fewer than are mine.”
i.e. that I can pretend to be a better God figure than you without any difficulty at all.
I can do it with a sort of “born street smart” kind of skill while you’re resting high, mighty, and impotent on book knowledge from a dusty old tome that isn’t especially relevant in the new age of skateboards and bubblegum and Barbie dolls with anatomically perfect genitalia. Not sure they make the Ken dolls that way yet, but the girls all seem to want the old school plastic man guy anyway. The one you could pull in four different directions if you pinched one of his arms in a door frame, had a well trained Jack Russell terrier, and had two free other hands or at least ONE friend to play with.
Which, for the record, I did not have.
Pull him until he breaks then say sorry. It’s a great strategy [you morons.] Now go BACK to your books, hit them [with your heads] ONE more time and come back when you have a better answer than
“Do whatever you feel like doing, but make sure you ‘confess your sins’ by the bedside every night (or preferably immediately after you do something you knew was wrong at the time you did it, because hey, you never know, a piano might fall on your head at any moment and you want to make sure you get to go to the ‘good place’ so you can raise Cain all over there just as much as you do down here with your fear and your whiskey and your firearms.”
Check please. I’ve had my fill of your monkey stew, Dr. Jones. I’ll go back to my room where I can wait for Lauren the hot 26 year old nurse to come around to do night checks and make sure she looks in right when I’m masturbating thinking about her.
{fifteen minutes later, door opens, short gasp, door closes}
{forty five minutes later, three knocks, 1:45am, door opens}
“Hey Lauren?”
“Yeah?”
“You know I really…”
“Oh don’t worry about it. Happens all the time in here.”
{I can tell she’s blushing in the darkness. It’s a tone thing.}
“Oh I’m not. Not really. Just glad it was you.”
{Imperceptible gasp. Couldn’t hear it, but it was there. The pause made it obvious. In fact I knew that’s what would make it be obvious, because I knew she had the heart to respond to a person who was, inside himself, hurting far more than she might ever dare to know.}
“Well that’s strangely flattering.” {door closes}
Which, for the record, is exactly what The Second Coming of Christ masturbates about. The just-so-lovely and efficient and kind and understanding nurse who is doing a job she somehow decided she wanted to do to sincerely bring less pain and misery to the world of people who suffer as I sometimes do and can bring all of her beauties to bear on the situation in a fashion which reflects uncommon humility.
Which is a paragraph that I daresay not one in 10 million of you can even parse out for its truthfulness, because, unlike me, you cannot step into my mind with anything like the ease I can step into yours, and if you’re honest at all with yourself you’ll know I’ve just made a twentyish minute proof of that fact.
All because I ‘make my religious efforts’ up and have for some time done so in an effort to avoid offending people and scaring them off which is precisely the reason why I can offend them and scare them off like none other who has come before me. I don’t play by the rules because there are no rules that apply to me — now that every rule book which has ever been written has been thrown at me viciously, toward my head, with the objective of harming someone who has harmed none such as he himself has been harmed by outrageously unfair treatment. Another sentence which will be misinterpreted, taken as a false ‘boast’ of some unusual nature, and in various other ways be dispensed as anything but the truth despite that *I* am the huge Indian who tore the sink out of the floor and launched it through the window of the insane asylum this time:
He who walks softly need not always carry a big stick, and he who carries the biggest of the sticks need not always walk softly.
Make a note of that one, Fred. There will be a test on all this next Friday. Well, the next Good Friday I get, which, the way your clocks work could be just about never.
