Barack Obama keeps insisting that religious people don’t need to leave their morality or ideals behind when they go into politics. Why? There’s a reason we aren’t very popular in the Middle East, and I don’t think it has to do with New Coke. I briefly considered hyperlinking every one of those words to some separate atrocity, but decided that would be a little over the top. I would be perfectly happy if I never had to talk to anyone about religion ever again – it’s a black hole of intelligent discussion, because there simply isn’t a basis for it besides a bunch of musty old books. The use of the Bible as a foundation for moral or political discussion is akin to swapping the police manual out for Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective and telling the cops that everything they need to know lies in there.
I stopped believing in Santa Claus long after I stopped believing in Jesus. Shit, I stopped believing that babies came from storks long after I stopped believing in Jesus. I mean, think about it. Santa Claus brings me a Nintendo once a year; what did Jesus ever do for me?
This is a tricky question to bring up, because people instantly respond “HE DIED ON THE CROSS 4 U !!11!1″ That’s not something I’m willing to accept, for a number of reasons. One, it’s patently ridiculous – there’s no particular reason to believe in Jesus rather than Apollo or Allah or fucking Beowulf. Cute stories, just like The Night before Christmas. Second, I didn’t ask Jesus to die on the cross, so it’s not like he has an I.O.U waiting to collect on that one. What’s more, who said that everybody was forgiven? Say you lived in Rome and somebody owes you a thousand bucks. All of a sudden, some long-haired honkey gets himself killed and nobody has debts anymore? America already tried that, it was called 1968 and it didn’t change shit. Third, motherfucker was the SON OF GOD. That means, among other things, that he would live through it, as he evidently did, and that dear old Dad knew exactly what was going to happen. I’ll let you reflect on whether letting your son get nailed to a board translates to good parenting skills; my gut says Ben Spock does not agree.
This all seems pretty self-evident to me. Yeah, I get why people do the church thing, but the fact that America continues to stick its head in the sand about this really puzzles me. Who else still tries to run shit like their religion is a moral paradigm? Fucking Muslims. How has that been working out for them? I’m going to say terribly, with the caveat that black is, indeed, a slimming color. Discussion about this in America seems to conveniently forget that any religion that tries to even moderately conform to common scientific opinion has been through more revisions than Michael Jackson’s nose – see Mormonism, which received a vision from God in the late 1970s that maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to continue to bar blacks from the piresthood, ever since that whole inferior race thing went out of style (about the same time as swastikas and eugenics). The really ridiculous thing about this is that Mormon people weren’t in the least bit skeptical, or even angry with this revelation. They were relieved. Relieved! Mitt Romney says he pulled his car over and cried, because he was so happy to hear the news. That means that all these people knew ( or at least claimed to know) that this whole “the blacker you are, the more god hates you” thing was a bunch of crap, but they continued to live like that because their chief old white guy hadn’t yet received the vision. Preposterous!
This brings me to my point for the day – Sarah Palin, who happens to think that schools should “teach” creationism in addition to evolution, and “let students choose.” Let students choose what? Whether they would rather deal with a Fairy King who supports genocide or effing science? I have a better idea, Sarah Palin. Why don’t we agree to let students decide whether televisions run on electricity or tiny little men with paintbrushes inside?
I’m proposing a written letter to Sarah Palin, typed up on a nice letterhead with “From the Desk of God” set on the top margin. Maybe some gold leaf around the edges. I’ll write:
Dear Sarah,
Sorry for the late notice, but it turns out that I actually don’t want you to run for President. I’m sure that if you’ve seen Air Bud, you know I often work in mysterious ways. Keep fighting the good fight – I know it seems ridiculous that you have to drill in ANWAR and kill polar bears to get oil, but I couldn’t think of anywhere better to put it.
PS – I’m glad you won’t let your daughter get an abortion. If women all of a sudden were allowed to take control of their lives, they wouldn’t all have to turn to me for answers.
PPS – Barack’s a Muslim. You heard it here first.
Sincerely,
God
