Okay, I wasn't going to grieve this year either just because we had lost all momentum with this place as so many people do with so many blogs but then I said something about Festivus on Facebook to which Assman posted his grievance and then my friend Zoo (Brody around here) posted a grievance which was directed straight at me. Well because it's Zoo, most of his grievances were kind of stupid but one really stuck out at me that was particularly retarded so here's my little secular rant at the dumbest grievance of all time. Sort of a counter-grievance if you will...
Zoo: And all this anti-religious propaganda and pro-Carl Saganism, it’s just as preachy as religion itself and sometimes that’s the problem, the preachiness of others.
(Bangs head against desk 58 times)
Seriously…you are an idiot. Preachiness is the problem? Preachiness? Not what’s being preached? Are fucking kidding me? I got news for you…I would love to be preached to. Preach your socks off! Tell me what I’m missing! A billion fucking people think a cracker turns into the flesh of their messiah where upon they eat him and that’s perfectly acceptable behavior. So acceptable that you can’t even be elected to high office in this country if you don’t believe it. That’s not a fucking problem, Zoo? I sit here before you today and I say…”Preach the fuck away.”
Here’s the thing Zoo…the problem is not the preachiness. It’s the inability to back up anything that you’re preaching with anything of remote substance. I embrace the shit out of the discourse yet assholes like you think it’s perfectly acceptable for people to say something and then get all offended when someone questions it just because they can hide behind the stained-glass window of Faith. See that’s the difference…I want my views constantly questioned. I’m okay with being wrong. I’m okay with not knowing things. Not knowing things is way more liberating than tying yourself to an absolute truth…an impermeable faith…especially one as retarded as the idea that a fucking Palestinian carpenter died for your sins.
I mean look at the fucking things that you’re comparing…
Carl Sagan: "Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours. In every one of them, there's a succession of incidence, events, occurences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet, at this moment, here we face a critical branch-point in the history. What we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants. It is well within our power to destroy our civilization, and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition, or greed, or stupidity we can plunge our world into a darkness deeper than time between the collapse of classical civilization and the Italian Renaissance. But, we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth, to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet. To enhance enormously our understanding of the Universe and to carry us to the stars."
Yes, I am 100% guilty as charged as having a giant man-crush on Carl Sagan but what you need to understand is that it’s because what he says completely resonates with me…it’s not because HE said it. It’s because having an understanding of our actual circumstances is fucking liberating as hell! You think this is preaching? Dropping knowledge that’s been empirically observed, tested, and constantly tries to falsify itself in order to make sure it’s correct? When has religion ever dumped billions of dollars of research into any of it’s theories to try to prove them wrong? No…they just confirm it all with revelation, authority, fear, and people like you that think just because somebody believes something than it should be respected!
Pope Benedict, aka Joe Ratzinger; aka New Hitler; aka Enabler of kiddie rapists all over the world (from Christmas Eve mass in the Vatican that everyone was so blown away by): Anyone wishing to enter the place of Jesus’ birth has to bend down. It seems to me that a deeper truth is revealed here, which should touch our hearts on this holy night: if we want to find the God who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of our “enlightened” reason. We must set aside our false certainties, our intellectual pride, which prevents us from recognizing God’s closeness. We must follow the interior path of Saint Francis the path leading to that ultimate outward and inward simplicity which enables the heart to see. We must bend down, spiritually we must as it were go on foot, in order to pass through the portal of faith and encounter the God who is so different from our prejudices and opinions the God who conceals himself in the humility of a newborn baby.
Evil fucking bastard. Now that motherfucker is what you call preaching and he gets away with it because religion has trained people not to think. It’s trained them to submit to an absolute authority. It’s trained them to be sheep. Know what the ironic thing is about congregations referring to their savior as their Shepherd though, Zoo? Shepherds don’t watch over sheep because they love sheep. They watch over sheep so they can eventually fleece them and kill them. Yet, you have billions of people happily volunteering to be the sheep. My “preaching” to those people doesn’t come from a concern for myself…I’m free from it. It’s a concern for them. It’s a concern for humanity. It’s just that as long as people like you are around, you’ll always try to frame it as some sort of unwarranted attack. People that claim to know things that they can’t possibly know should not be trusted. People that promise things they can’t promise should not be trusted. People that threaten you and threaten children with things that don’t exist should not be trusted and when somebody tells you that you must abandon reason there is no other logical conclusion to be drawn other than that they are a charlatan who is attempting to control you. THIS should not be up for debate.
Look…I get it Zoo. I know you’re way too rational to buy into any of this shit but I’m guessing you have some sort of new age hippy philosophy and like to call yourself spiritual without actually defining what the fuck that even means just so that you don’t have to answer to it. You probably think that nobody REALLY believes any of this shit but they’re just innocuously anthropomorphizing the universe is some personal way to help lead them down the right path. It’s not like a shitload of these people use religion to engineer society…to control humanity…tell you what do, what to think, and what to feel. It’s not like anyone uses it to justify their bigotry or their violence or their hatreds.
I mean, forget about all the atrocities of the past for a second. Look around you. Do you realize that a state just passed an anti-bullying law that indemnifies any act of bullying against someone as long as it’s justified by their religious beliefs? Maybe that doesn’t anger you but do you think it’s justified that it would solicit anger from anyone? What you don’t understand is that unless you outright and vocally oppose religion, all you’re doing is lending power to the people that use it oppress others. The next time you read about some assholes with a little TOO MUCH FAITH (that’s the funny thing about faith…it’s a virtue but only so much of it) watch their newborn baby die while trying to pray it back to life when a hospital visit would have surely saved it…where will your indignation really come from? How does a person who promotes an environment where FAITH can’t be criticized have any right to be disgusted with people who just believed a little too much? Those people that fly planes into our buildings killing thousands of innocent citizens…should I not preach to them too? Isn’t their only crime having faith as well? Or is their crime just believing in the wrong particular version of the wrong particular God?
It should go without saying that it is your human right to hold sacred whatever you please. I’m not trying to deprive anyone of that. What’s important though is that sacredness doesn’t live in people or books or institutions…it lives only in the mind of the person who considers it sacred. Therefore…nobody has the right to tell me that I’m forced to respect what they hold sacred just because it’s what they believe. As if you can fucking believe something into existence anyway. You want people to believe that a God would take 13.5 billion years, waiting 9 billion years to create his favorite planet, waiting a billion more to create life, and then creating species after species over another 3.5 billion years…99.9% which has gone completely extinct, just with the purpose of creating YOU? Fucking YOU? Big, smelly, Jew-fro, throw-like-a-girl YOU!?!? That was the fucking goal of all this? So that he could knock up some Palestinian Jew with the embryo of himself and then sacrifice himself to himself to appease himself in order so that he could forgive you for the sins which you might commit at some later date. You want people to tell their children that they are responsible for this human sacrifice and must believe it upon pain of eternal damnation? I mean…you’re okay with this?
“Oh but Vandelay…it gives people comfort.” Seriously…what are you fucking 2? Do you still think that Horton heard a fucking Who? Comfort?
I’ll tell you what, when we’re in some kind of post-apocalyptic nuclear winter because some asshole’s comforting delusions just didn’t sync up with some other asshole’s comforting delusions and we rub shoulders barely able to recognize each other, do me a favor…tell me that the problem is that I was just a little too preachy.
Until, then you keep on placating people and feeling good about yourself, but I’m working off of the assumption that people shouldn’t have a problem answering to a love they have for a deity that they place ahead of the love they have for their own children. In the meantime, I’ll continue on my path towards a lake of hellfire just for thinking that those people are better than their God. That they’re capable of greater things without him. I’m the asshole.
Awesome.
Carl Sagan is the tits.
Posted by: KennyBania | December 28, 2011 at 11:30 AM
From the Sagan video:
"We are the custodians of life's meaning."
"...knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace to the hard truth than a reassuring fable."
Let me first say that I agree with everything Sagan said in this clip. There's no doubt I'd rather have an understanding of our actual circumstances than be placated with a reassuring fable.
However, it's one thing to look at the world that way when you're life is ahead of you. But I wonder if Sagan, in his waning moments, held out some hope or faith that there might be more to this life than organisms reproducing and dying in chaotic fashion. I wonder if he hoped for something beyond this life.
Because it's hard to fully embrace the view he espoused without realizing there really isn't any meaning to life and, when it's over, it's over. No matter what you accomplished while alive, no matter how good you were to the people in your life, it makes no difference in the end. That's a pretty bleak thought.
Anyway, happy new year!
Posted by: Jeff | January 04, 2012 at 03:50 PM
Well I think he just means that the universe doesn't owe us a purpose, Jeff. It doesn't even know we're here. Won't know when we're gone. We're not in it...we're part of it.
But we can make our own purpose and certainly live on in the hearts of our children and others that we're close to without having to dive into anything supernatural. I mean, he's been dead for like 15 years and he's still making a difference as far as I'm concerned.
Posted by: Vandelay | January 04, 2012 at 10:14 PM
Because it's hard to fully embrace the view he espoused without realizing there really isn't any meaning to life and, when it's over, it's over.
does basking in silvery light on field of clouds with playing shitty harp music really have that much meaning?
Posted by: Mr. Kruger | January 11, 2012 at 09:42 AM
Wise man have their mouths in their hearts, fools have their hearts in their mouths.
Posted by: beats studio | January 16, 2012 at 03:12 AM
whats wrong with tubes today?? few times try to watch videos - unsuccesful ((
Posted by: mytermpaper.net | February 16, 2012 at 05:19 AM