In the Gospel According to Luke (17:1), Jesus says "It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come!" And in the Gospel According to Matthew (18:6), Jesus says "Whoso shall offend one of these little blanks which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea." Therefore I manipulated a restaurant ad to arrive at the following images.
BEFORE CHRIST:
AFTER CHRIST:
Dear diary,
I made the mistake of watching a debate yesterday. I hate debates. But I love debates. Everything about a debate that feels like a flirtatious conversation – those aspects I love. And I hate any aspect that resembles the trickeries of marketing and advertising.
This debate that I watched hovered around the topic of religion. One participant called herself an atheist, and her argument was that religion is always bad: it must be abolished, because it unfailingly incentivizes wretched behavior. And her opponent’s argument was…
I don’t want to articulate her opponent’s argument. I’m not here to report accurately what I witnessed. My job is only to pass a bit of time, so that I can go ride my bike. It’s too early right now to be outside—it is dark; I just awoke, and the sun isn’t risen. He isn’t risen, indeed.
So my mind is like a mixing bowl that endured the prep of yesterevening’s meal. Now that the morning has arrived, I get up and shuffle into the kitchen and pick up the bowl and look inside. I inhale slowly. The aromas that I sense conjure memories of what our guests feasted upon. Then I turn the key in the golden lock on my diary—the one with the pink plastic cover—and I record my impressions. I note down everything that I recall, with painstaking accuracy; for that’s why I’m here: that is my job.
So I have fragments of annoyance left over from last night’s dispute. I have general thots about atheism-versus-theism. Am I a member of either of these clubs? Well I call myself an atheist, but that’s only when I’m being boringly sincere. I’m definitely not a theist, but I like theists; and I favor their side over my own.
What is evil? It’s just a word. OK; but how do we use this word? I don’t know; I’ve never employed it myself, and nobody ever visits me in my desert hut, so I lack any opportunity to learn how to use the term properly. All I can give you is guesswork.
Alright. So now that we’ve defined the word “evil,” we can ask ourselves: Is religion evil? I answer: Yes, religion is only evil continuously; for religion is made out of life, and life is evil. Abram Lincoln said it before I even preceded him: “You rarely get good fruit from poisonous plants.” So if you gather a bunch of evil dirt out of the ground, from near the roots of a cursed tree—say, a burning bush—and you mold this evil into a shape, and you breathe into your sculpture so that the thing becomes alive, then I say: congratulations on your masterwork. You just recreated idolatry. Now bake the thing in an oven—that’ll harden it. Then place it in the midst of the garden, with a sign: “Do not touch.” Lo: watch all the people come to worship it. It’s an image of yourself—THE ONE TRUE RELIGION—and it radiates wickedness.
A man who was good from his virgin-birth forward will pause before your statue and accept the lord and savior into his heart (the plinth reads “CHRIST”), thus abandoning infidelity for faith and becoming a believer; and thenceforth this man will radiate evilly everywhere: in all places, far and wide. You can’t lose your salvation. Whoever this proselyte rapes will bring forth evil; and whoever this proselyte murders will end up evil. Even the acts of rape and murder themselves will prove to be evil, if you bother to scrutinize them.
My goal is not to make fun of rapists and murderers. I only aim to point out that if a man is bent on badness, he’ll die without purpose if he does not find religion. A woman with a good heart will do good deeds, until she comes to believe in religion—any religion will work just fine. Upon reading her scripture, she will go from bad to worse: all her goodness will rot and turn sour, because religion will direct her to deteriorate: it’ll be like administering drops of food coloring to a glass of water from the tap in your apartment: the water begins as a cloudy umber hue, and ends a cloudy brown. Your city’s pipes have got religion.
Yet now consider the other side of the story. Imagine a world devoid of religion. It is heaven on earth.
On 2nd thot, we should imagine two alternate worlds, and compare & contrast them. One is a world that was previously infected with religion but has been cured so now it’s religionless. And the other is a world that never even came down with religion in the first place – it has remained as it was born: sinless and virginal. We’ll call the former example “The Best of all Possible Hells,” and the latter we’ll call “Savior Land”, which is to say “Fun Land”.
In both exhibits, the people are wearing beautiful clothing. The furniture in their living quarters is cultured—not too big, not too small. Gold·i·locks·i·fied humanism. (A fairy-tale heroine named Goldilocks enters the house of the Three Bears and declares the finances of Baby Bear to be “just enough,” as compared to those of Father Bear and Mother Bear; thus the term Goldilocksified refers to the most desirable or advantageous part of a range of values or conditions: typically the center, as in “The Pleasantest of all Eternal Punishments.”) Fact-based Science is the statue planted in the midst of the town, noble and nude, bronze up to its clay. Best of all, there is no rap music. Here’s what David Byrne says in How Music Works, Chapter One: “Creation in Reverse”:
Hip-hop is bass-heavy, but with a strong and precise high-end as well. Sonically, what’s in the middle? It’s the vocal, allocated a vacant sonic space where not much else lives. In earlier pop music, the keyboards or guitars or even violins often occupied much of this middle territory; and, without those things, the vocals rushed to fill the vacuum.
Rap is unlike anything one could produce with acoustic instruments. That umbilical cord has been cut. The connection between recorded music and live performance is now a thing of the past. Although it may have emerged from dance-oriented disco, hip-hop has morphed into something else entirely: music that sounds best in cars. People do dance in their cars, or they try to. Yet as military vehicles enter the civilian market, I foresee this music devolving even further.
This passage lures the reader to make certain connections, so that we’re left asking ourselves: Is capitalism a religion? Certainly we know that capitalism is evil: it hollows out the middle frequencies of sound, leaving only a mass of low-end bass (the grumbling rabble) with a pinpoint 1% tiptop (the pampered rich). And it stuffs its middle-class vacancy with boastful verbiage, nonsense, empty talk: marketing, advertising, “P.R.”, propaganda.
So if the global religion is capitalism, and the banks are its churches, and its Psalm Book is rap…
Here’s maybe a passable starting point, O dummy: If a fellowsufferer says “Please treat me with kindness,” and your religion instructs “Thou shalt not be kind”, then… (insert various arguments) and you’ll achieve success.
Success, I repeat, is defined as MORE COLD CASH. Unless you’re having a baby, because babies cost money, but babies are well worth the price: they’ll add happiness to your life, for up to two years. And they strengthen the workforce. Management prefers to pick and choose from a well-populated labor pool.
And now I address all nursing mothers directly: Save your receipts!! for, someday, your child will grow up to fill a suit in the private sector, in the respectable congregation of brokerages, and you’ll need proof that you never received compensation for your decades of breastfeeding. Do not let love dampen your profiteering instinct!!
So this drivel about the human heart being the source of all good and evil (as opposed to Science being unquestionably pure while Faith is unequivocally sinful) might make us want to postpone exterminating religion; however, that’s like saying that just because Saint John got drunk and pistol-whipped the Apostle Paul, we should not pass a universal prohibition on alcohol. Or because Jesus the Winebibber countenanced publican prostitutes, we should now allow all former U.S. presidents to exhale their cannabis.
P.S.
I just checked the weather report for Apple Valley. (That’s where I rot for the next three days.) Right now it’s 71 degrees Fahrenheit. The ideal temp for a human cadaver. But they predict that it’ll get up to 87 later. That’s a good year for rap but a bad temp for biking. So now that I’ve killed the morningtime, I’ll go ride to the park. Please pray to my deity, REASON, that I don’t suffer too much when all the trucks hit me. (I ask you to pray because my god always ignores me.)
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