There’s no accounting for where tolerance might appear

I didn’t know she read my blog until she happened to mention it today. That’s the problem with giving your blog address to people and then assuming that they don’t read it based upon the fact that they never tell you they read it. You keep on getting more and more direct in the expression of your opinions, and two years later you learn that someone has been reading stuff—by you—that might have sent them up through the roof of their house, down through the roof of your house, and directly onto your skull. In this case, the speaker was a Glen Beck conservative and, since I know she’s also a Christian, I assume that she’s an old school literalist as well. Yet, she said she enjoys my writing. My first thought was that she was just having herself a little fun before pulling out her .45 and blowing me away. Then came gratitude and, after I had thought more about what she had said, a lump in my throat. All else being equal, I value a reader like her over a reader who agrees with me. This is why I sometimes share my blog with people who have given me no inkling that they will enjoy it. I’ve gotten a lot of practice in handling rejection that way.

In the reverse direction, two of you have asked how I put with Rhymes (aka Bob), a devoted reader from Georgia, USA, who is also a devoted Methodist. I could have answered the question by saying, “Put up with him?! I’m crazy about him. There are damn few people whose religion you can criticize unsparingly and them still want to hang out with you, and I’m certainly not going to make it more difficult for him than necessary by taking anything he says personally. So what if he gets exasperated? I get exasperated too sometimes. Given his point of view, I marvel that he doesn’t get more exasperated. If anything, I think he’s ahead of me in this, and it makes me want to show him that I can build just as good a bridge across a chasm as he can. No fundamentalist Christian Republican is going to outdo me for tolerance, no sirree. Tolerance comes from wisdom, and wisdom can jump any religious or political boundary. This is why I’m forever trying to increase my allotment of it. It’s also why I sometimes find it where I least expect it, and sometimes don’t find it where I most expect it.

Rhymes is actually so tenacious in reading my blog that I sometimes wonder if he thinks that God gave me to him as a special project. In this fantasy, he has saved more souls than anyone else in the whole state of Georgia, including John and Charles Wesley. He has, as it were, gone through decades of preparation for me at Trinity University for Laudatory Improvement and Personal Salvation (TULIPS for short) where he has a 4.0 grade average, and I’m his post-post-post doctoral project. So, here he is, grimacing and sweating while pulling my soul from one direction, and here Satan is, grimacing and sweating while pulling from the opposite direction, and here I am doing my best to help Satan kick Rhymes in the teeth so he will let go of my arm. Meanwhile, all the angels are looking down, and they’re cheering Rhymes on; and all the demons are looking up, and they’re cheering me on; and all of you are thinking, “I don’t know how much more of these two I can stand.” 

The artist took such outrageous liberties that the illustration isn’t a good likeness of me, but I couldn’t get him to redo it.

Fools make a mockery of sin, so be sure and invite a few to your next party

I just joined a new atheist group because my old one was too much talk and too little partying. In the new group, people like to get drunk and play Strangulation (that’s what we're doing in the picture). If you win, you get to strangle real puppies and kittens while everyone else laughs so much that they cry and roll around on the floor. Because atheists don’t have God telling us what to do, we’re not uptight all the time, so we can do that kind of stuff and have fun with it. That’s what I love most about being an atheist—that and getting to spend Sunday mornings sleeping off hangovers. 

Here’s what inspired me to write this post. The other day, Peggy wanted to take off from work to go to a picnic. She’s been to this same picnic every year for something like 20 years, but she forgot to put in for time off, and she couldn’t get any of the other nurses to swap with her, so she was all bummed about it. The other nurses and I said, “Well, duh, just call in sick, doofus.” Of course, Little Miss Goody-Goody wouldn’t do that. “My middle name is Integrity,” she purred with a self-congratulatory smile. Just so you’ll know, she really said this, but she probably just said it to me because she wouldn’t have wanted to risk making the other nurses mad by saying it to them, whereas she wouldn’t give a rip if she made me mad. As it turned out, she didn’t make me mad, but she did make me laugh my ass off. Ever since then, she’s had to listen to me call her Ms Integrity in a snide voice a hundred times a day while pointing and snickering, and that’s starting to make her mad—not that I give a rip.

To tell you the truth, I’ve never seen it as a case of her being Ms Goody Two-Shoes and me being Mr. Slug Shit from Hell, although she looks at it that way. When she gets on my case, I say, “Peg, coming home drunk at 4:00 a.m. with a drunk woman on either arm and a trunkful of stolen drugs and money isn’t immoral, it’s alternatively moral—for an atheist, anyway. Hell, what do we care? If you’re just dead when you die, go for the gusto. Rape, kill, and mutilate if that’s what it takes to get your rocks off. Know what I mean?” 

No, Peggy doesn’t know what I mean, yet she doesn’t believe in the supernatural anymore than I do. What’s up with that? Why couldn’t I have married a drunken party-girl/puppy strangler like all my infidel buddies? Why did I have to get stuck with Ms “Integrity is my middle name”? That right there is proof that there’s no justice in the universe and therefore no god in the universe either.

If this weren’t a clean blog, I would say a dirty word about now, but then people might start praying for me again, and I would just hate that. It’s bad enough having Bible verses thrown at me, but at least I can throw them back (they might not get resurrected after three days, but they do start smelling like fish), but I can’t throw a prayer back. Besides, prayers make my head spin in circles while I spew garbage cans full of green vomit onto the walls, and when that happens, I always wake up the next day with a sore neck and a lot of housework. Bible verses don’t do that. They do make me break out in pentagram shaped hives that itch like the devil, but Benadryl clears those hives right up. If not for Benadryl, I would have to get an exorcism, and it would scare me to do that because the preacher might decide to burn me at the stake instead.

Anyway, I just wanted to go ahead and admit that you Christians are right about us atheists not caring what we do to other people as long as it feels good to us. Like right now, I would trade the lives of 27.5 million people for a bowl of ice cream. To you, that might make me seem like a bad person, but I don’t see it that way because I would really enjoy that ice cream. Now, if I were willing to simply give away the lives of all those people without getting any ice cream, that would be bad because it would mean that they died for nothing. So you see, my morality is every bit as good as your morality but in a slightly different way.

Of cats and gods

I thought having a dog was neat. I thought having a woman was cool. Then I got a cat. He ignores me. He treats me like scum. Half the time, he walks away when I try to pet him, only to stop after three feet and lick his ass. Dogs are now nothing to me, and women are even less. I just wish I had forty more cats to treat me like garbage. They would take me back to my childhood when I learned that God loved me despite my utter failure to deserve it and his total unwillingness to show it. No matter how much I needed some proof that he was real, no matter how much I pleaded for faith or reviled him for not granting it, he stayed behind a cloud. 

THAT’S what having a cat is like. I know he loves me because he comes looking for me when he’s hungry, and this can only mean that he acknowledges my existence and has hope that I will give him food, and the fact that he acknowledges my existence and has hope that I will give him food proves his great love for me, if I have faith. Yet, he ignores me the rest of time, and this can only mean that he’s better than I in every conceivable way. This makes him like God! If I had a heart attack and fell to the floor clutching my chest in agony, my cat would remain three feet away licking his ass, and the god of the Bible would remain behind a cloud listening to eternal strains of the Hallelujah Chorus, yet, if I had faith, I would just know that I was loved. 

“Look deep into my eyes… You are getting very, very sleepy… You are getting so sleepy that you can longer think, so you are free, free to believe, believe, believe…in anything you were told was true by the people you grew up among…” 

“...the peace of God, which passeth all understanding...” the Bible

“Religion is the opium of the people.” Marx

In this post, I maligned my cat by presenting him as a stereotype. For that I humbly begged his forgiveness, and he graciously granted it. 

This post was inspired by a reader who quoted the following Bible verse to remind me of the low opinion in which God holds that part of his creation which was made in his own image: “The heart is deceitful...and desperately wicked.”