The Stolen God (Gravity, One.)

We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: "save the planet." What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet! We don't care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet? I'm getting tired of that shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day. I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract, they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles ... hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages ... And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn't going anywhere. WE are!

We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam ... The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?"
"Plastic... asshole." ~George Carlin

...

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

I saw this last week.

Answers In Genesis...you know, the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter people, whose whole damn point is to bamboozle dumb-fuck Americans into giving them money because Jesus...are on Threads. I didn't even know those jackoffs were still around.

AIG was founded by Australian evangelist Ken Ham back in the 1994 and...to be honest...was even a joke among most of the Christians that I knew, and an absolute rhetorical punching bag among the various Atheists, Agnostics and assorted other non-Christians I knew who were aware of it. In other words, whatever this is, it's not effective Evangelism.

But then, if you believe in a literal six day Creation and that (to paraphrase Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station) two of every animal lived within walking distance of Noah's house and that he built a boat the size of a WWII battlecruiser with Bronze Age hand tools, it follows that you're going to believe every other fantastical-sounding lie that somebody tells you.

Like I said, I didn't even know AIG was still around, aside from the fact that the dopey creationist museums still apparently exist. And I find it kind of interesting that the one real negative Threads has is all these Evangelical morons, most of whom...if you actually look...are selling something. 

Not only that, they're bothering alleged Atheists (or, far more likely just random people) in Walmart and using that to post videos and sell whatever bullshit merch they're trying to foist on their ignorant-ass followers.

And here's the thing, if you want to know why Republican politics is full of useless, grandstanding motherfuckers who'd be fine with overthrowing America if they thought they could get away with it, and who functionally do nothing otherwise except kiss Donald Trump's ass and suck up to flabby wannabe corporate Overlords...that's why. And yes, a lot of them did learn this bullshit from their preachers. Hell, some of them have said so. Well, that's not what they thought they were saying, but it's what they actually said.

Most of these Republicans claim to be Christians. It doesn't matter if they are or they aren't, really, Christianity permits this fucking horseshit to be done in its name.

Sorry, but one of these things very much does follow the other. If Christians are fine with Christianity being used as a grift by people who basically want to burn down Civilization for shits and giggles, and could give a damn about anything that their supposed Savior actually said, well that's the kind of people they're going to get.

And of course these same fucking people very much, from the highest preacher or politician to the lowest street-corner preacher weirdo who reeks of cat piss and bath salts, all believe that God is basically some kind of a big stick that they can use to beat their alleged "Enemies" with.

For example, Greg Locke here, RE: the fact that the President of Iran was killed in a helicopter crash late yesterday. Not that the President of Iran is particularly important in the government of that theocratic State.

(And, from what I know of the man, fuck him, the country will probably be better off without his ass.)

And, to be honest, I think the only real reason that guys like Greg Locke or the average Republican don't like Iran is some level of professional or religious jealousy because they'd like a Christianized version of the same damned thing in all or part of America if they thought they could get away with having it.

And nobody seems to face any level of judgment or penalty until they're dead?

Yes, a lot of us...not least of all these fucking people...believe that the Soul is eternal, so that whatever punishment administered in said Afterlife will indeed have effect.

But these fucking people sure don't act like they believe they're going to suffer for Eternity if they're jerks to the rest of us here on Earth, do they??

In fact, most of the time it seems like they think the bad behavior, the petty little cons and the shitty politics is the entire goddamned point of their religion.

I mean, look at what the Christian MAGA types say and do, same with the Hamas fanatics or the Jewish Zionist settlers. It's all the same shit, their religions are ethnic creeds, an excuse for a middle finger and a shouted slogan at the other person at best, or for a 5.56mm bullet in their guts at worst.

And it doesn't seem to matter if it's good old fashioned American Evangelicalism, Russian Orthodox Christianity or Twelver Shia Islam, does it??

The love of Christ, or the peace of serving the God of Abraham through Islam or Judaism doesn't even seem to enter into it in the fucking least.

What's even the damn point??

Thou Shalt Not Steal??

Bitch, these motherfuckers stole God.

It's all bullshit. The Truth is simple, Love God and love your neighbor. Man makes it complicated (and political) because he does not want to obey.

There's not much money to be had from what's actually in the Bible, or the Koran, or the Torah. And whatever excuses there are to dominate or kill or steal from other people have generally been overruled by modern secular laws. So people have to make up all type of crazy shit.

And the thing is, I have to believe that God is good.

But I sure as hell don't have to have "faith" in the scumbag behavior of so many religious people, do I??

Which of the two, do you think, is going to win out??

I don't have to believe in Gravity, or the physics of the earlier-mentioned 5.56mm bullet. I'd have to believe in the goodness of a god or in Young Earth Creationism...and if I'm wrong for not especially believing in the former and laughingly rejecting the latter...by the time I find out I'm wrong it's too late to do anything about it anyway, and in some interpretations I'm not even aware of what's going on for fuck knows how many years plus a thousand years *After* the End Times.

Think about that, for a second.

I don't have to believe in Gravity, if I push too far in testing that, it'll kill me either way, and we already have empirical, visible proof of what it does and that it works.

Likewise, I know what Evil is. I've seen it. Mass graves in Bosnia, for starters. 

And while I'm less sure, these days, of what is Good...I know good doesn't go around pestering people in the hope that somebody clicks on the link to their T-shirt shop that's in their bio, and then decides to buy something.

Good doesn't go around invading its neighbors, trying to overthrow countries, or taking people's rights away.

Evil does that.

But if you look at how Christians and some of these other people present themselves, they've become exactly what the Bible talks about RE: People calling evil good, and good evil.

Seems like kind of a broken system, doesn't it??

And we're the only ones who can fix that.

If they stole God, it's possible the rest of us can steal Him back.

(Or, if we prefer, simply make Him irrelevant, which should've always been the case in a secular society.)

So get after it.

Слава Україна!

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan.

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God knows he's perfect and we're not and we can never be but he expects us to be. And he punishes us if we're not, you know what I'm saying? God is the ultimate gangster. The supreme-o boss, you know what I mean? Forgiveness, live by he code. Deadness, if we don't. Yo, he never has to talk to us face to face and he never has to explain exactly why he does what he does. Know what I'm saying? Nigga sits up there in Heaven somewhere, drinking a cappuccino, chillin... *Singing* He's got the whole world in his hands...

He got the whole world by the balls.

~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series "Oz" episode 1.3 "God's Chillin'"