The Worst Song in the History of the World?

Until very recently if someone had asked me what is the worst song ever recorded I might have answered “Honey” by Bobby Goldsborough or “Tie a Yellow ribbon” by Tony Orlando – or “Save Your Kisses For Me.”

Now, however, I have had, or should I more precisely say, my ears have had the great misfortune to stumble across.. if ears can be said to stumble.. a song recorded more than 30 years ago by Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner.

Let me say here that my respect and admiration for Dolly is immense, both for her talent and her determination, as well as for her humanity and for her politics. I’ve always respected her Christian faith, as well.

Until now.

The song in question, “The Party” is perhaps the single greatest amalgamation of maudlin sentiment with hideous religious superstition ever.

Have a gander..

"As we were dressing to go out our little girl and boy
Came in and asked if they could go this time
We told them little girls and boys don't belong at parties
And that they should be in bed asleep by nine
The babysitter came in then and we kissed the kids goodbye
And told them that we'd be home soon and told them not to cry
Then we left for the party like we'd so often done
Thinkin' only of ourselves and not our little ones
The party started out wild and it grew wilder as the night wore on
With drinking laughing teling dirty jokes nobody thinkin' of home
Then the stranger feeling came over me and it chilled me to the bones
And I told my wife that we'd better leave the party
Cause I felt that we were needed at home
As we rode along I got to thinking of how the kids that mornin'
Had asked if we would take them to church the next day
And how I'd put 'em off like I'd so often done
By sayin' we'd probably get home too late
Then my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of sirens
As they cut through the still night air
Then we turned down our street that's when we saw the fire
The rest was like a nightmare
We took their little bodies to church the next day
Though we'd left the party early we still got home too late."

Now what does this song try to tell us – apart from the fact that people ought not to be so cheap that they refrain from hiring a competent baby sitter?!?

It tells us:

1. If you are so sinful as to go to a party where drinking, swearing and possibly lewd behavior is enjoyed, God or Fate, will some how know it..

2. ..and despite the fact that your children had asked you to take them to church the next day, God or Fate will burn them to death to punish their parents – and the babysitter with them!

3. ..although the song does not specifically proclaim it, the implication is, if the parents had instead left their kids at home to deliver baked goods to their Christian congregation, the good Lord would have spared the tykes.

No, no.. some might protest. This song is about horrendous consequences resulting from irresponsible behavior. God doesn’t come into it.

Oh, no? Then why is church repeatedly mentioned in the song?

Perhaps such a song cannot be constructed if it is about numbskull parents who leave their brats to dehydrate and die in locked cars while they mega-shop in Walmart?

As we all too sadly know by now, the “God-Fearing” rural section of America (..and the rest of the world..) enjoy the fact that the All Mighty is a wrathful and punishing deity.

And in the case of the Party, they don’t seem to mind that He is also so nearsighted that he smites innocent children instead of their wicked parents!

Unless of course, the message is, God is so sadistic He will deliberately
murder children to punish their parents!

One final comment on this hideous insult to the dignity of humanity: The song states that the children begged to be taken to church the next day.

Forgive me if I find myself believing that no child in the history of the world – except perhaps for the fictional Rod and Todd Flanders – ever begged to be taken to church.

Have a listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-1hCAIVAOI


The lies of the Believers are not to be believed!

Is God a Commie???

Assuming there is a God – and that “He” in fact created everything, and specifically created the human body to work optimally if not abused by alcohol, tobacco or drug consumption – which socio-economic system would seem to fit in best with “His” plans and intentions?

Recent events in Cuba may give us a clue.

After the fall of communism in Russia in 1990, Russia stopped helping Cuba with money and food subsidies.

The average daily consumption of calories fell in Cuba during the following years from an average of 2800 calories per day to around 1800.

And after a decade of reduced calorie consumption, type 2 diabetes has almost disappeared from the country – and there has been a drop in heart disease by a third.

Correspondingly another fortunate result is that medical costs have also fallen.

America has boycotted the export of food, fuel and medicine to Cuba for 5 decades – but it is only now that results are being seen, as Cuba has lost its replacement subsidies from Russia.

By America and Russia working together to deny Cuba the munificence of capitalism. Cubans are living longer and healthier.

God’s plan? If so, is “He” a commie?

And would it greatly lessen America’s staggering medical costs if we turned food production over to those notoriously incompetent Communists?

Next time you find yourself heading for the fridge, ask yourself, “What would that pinko Jesus do?”

This Says it All..

..about the Catholic Church.

No nun would ever be caught dead photographed with an engorged penis in her hand.. but a semi-automatic rifle?

Death and other Inconveniences

Certainly our ultimate fear has always been the fear of the grave (..although it was Jerry Seinfeld who pointed out that death was actually number two on the list of our greatest fears, with most people listing a fear of public speaking as first. Amazingly this indicates, Jerry noted, that more people would rather be in the box than standing over it giving a eulogy!)

In any case death has always loomed large for us, and any hope for warding off an early death or obtaining some sort of life after death has always been clutched at. Quite naturally nothing can be more desirous to us than eternal life for ourselves and our loved ones, or at least some sort of life beyond the grave.

But in order for a life after death, our resurrection, to be made possible, a super-natural Organizer has to be envisioned who has arranged for such magic and who will administer the system (No dogs, cats or any other pets allowed in, babies to be parked in limbo, bad guys cast into burning pits, good guys given harps, wings and virgins.) In heaven, as on earth, rules are necessary, and exclusivity is preferred. Rewards are stratified with spiritual gold and platinum cards. The hereafter, we claim, is a meritocracy, though we secretly hope there will be favoritism when we show up to be tested.

Death and a hereafter are difficult subjects to get our minds around, and mankind, for good and bad, has always had a hard time distinguishing between what is imagined and what is real. Buddhists seem to fear not death but endless cycles of rebirth usually followed by lives of suffering, and so they long for blessed extinction instead of a hereafter. But the three religions of The Book, however, play a kind of three card monty with their adherents. First after we die we find out our prize, heaven, hell or purgatory. (Purgatory seems the more cruel of the three, like an eternity in a Department of Motor Vehicles or a grungy laundromat.)

Heaven is too absurd to even discuss seriously, especially if, in the hereafter, we are all to be allowed to individually decide what our heavenly reward is to be. For if our desires are to be met, what if my idea of the joyful afterlife is to ride around on a muffler-less Harley, thundering for all eternity? Are my neighbours to be blissfully deaf to my pleasures? Some martyrs dream of 72 virgins. Would it be greedy and gauche to wish for 73? And we are told that in the sweet hereafter we will be reunited with our friends and loved-ones. But do you really want to meet your sweet old Grandma and have to tell her you've basically been doing nothing for the last 25 years? But if, in fact, our friends and family members are waiting for us, will there also be celebrities on display that we can chase and pester? Or do they live in a sort of exclusive gated community, cordoned off from prying eyes?

Well, no, heaven and our desires and pleasures there will in no way resemble life on earth, clergymen feel forced to admit. The ecstatic pleasures of heaven are fundementally different and superior, and we will not miss earthly pleasures in the slightest as the heavenly will be supreme.

Admittedly this idea gives us something to chew on. We will not miss our old pleasures because we will be transformed and will thereby appreciate the superior pleasures to come. But this idea begs the question, who is being rewarded in heaven? Certainly not you or me, for in order to gain admittance we need to be bleached of our old desires before being allowed entrance. And our desires are who we are.

Personally I'm fond of my pleasures, as they are a decent blend of the physical and the intellectual. But one group of the religiously demented strongly suggest that there will be no sensualism in heaven, at least not anything resembling the carnal kind. Another group suggests rich abundences of virgins. It seems to me obvious that trying to satisfy legions of virgins frothing and frustrated after eons of anticipation, seems more like hellish work in the long run.


As most men have learned, providing women, divine or not, with regular orgasms is as strenuous as mining coal - and will wreck your back sooner.

G rumpy O ld D ad

We had been sitting in her living room, chatting about friends and family for only a few minutes, when my friend noticed that her one year-old son had reached up and taken a pair of scissors from a table top and was happily sucking on the sharp point as he toddled around. Quick as a panther, my friend bounded up from her chair and ran to the child, pausing a split second on the way to grab a pacifier. She then skillfully pulled the scissors from the boy’s mouth while substituting the pacifier for the dangerous plaything. The boy hardly noticed the change and happily began sucking on the pacifier as his mother lifted him up.

She turned to me and said, made wise by past experience, “You can never take something away without giving something in return.”

The original idea for my book, Building a Better God, probably occurred to me more than 30 years ago. At the time I was a very young man, working in a high school in Los Angeles. It wasn’t a very demanding job and there was frequently time to chat about anything and everything with the small staff. One middle-aged woman employed there, I learned, was a Jehovah's Witness, and curious about her faith, I began to ask her questions..

(I had always been interested in ideas and philosophies, and had in high school once asked a friend who was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) “What do you believe?”

I’m not sure if he had an accurate knowledge of his faith at that age, but he replied, telling me among other things, “We believe if you are good - I mean really good - that when you die you get your own solar system to be God to.”

I was astonished. “You mean like a MacDonald’s franchise?” I asked, and further angered him by asking, “Are there already people on the planets in the solar system- -or do you have to wait around for billions of years for intelligent life to evolve that you can torment?”)

My questions to the Jehovah's Witness weren’t quite as rude. I was mainly interested to know why they chose to interpret so severely a vague passage from the Bible concerning the mixing of the blood as to let their children die rather than allow blood infusions, as I would have interpreted the passage as simply a warning against intermarrying with non-Jews.

Her reply to me, after some minutes of my questions, shocked me and shut me up. She said, “If I didn’t have my religion I wouldn’t have any reason to live.”

No reason to live! We have the sun and the stars! We have the sound of babies’ laughter. We have butterflies and waterfalls, flowers and rainbows. Do we absolutely have to have strange and illogical explanations for our existence and for the bountiful heavens? And explanations that require us to waste our lives standing on street corners handing out dismal tracts? What kind of cold-hearted God would require such a life from his followers? And perhaps more importantly, would such a God deserve our worship?

But I stopped my questions, for I had nothing to replace her faith if my questions managed to severely shake it. I had no comfortable pacifier with which to replace the sharp scissors.



"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it."

- Bertrand Russell

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

- H. L. Mencken

If the reader has ever tried to talk about or write about God for more than 5 minutes, the reader will have discovered how very hard it is to avoid using “He”. For, when one believes, as I do, that the idea of God having a gender is absurd, one would like to dispense with such inaccurate and primitive pronouns – but Lord, it ain’t easy.

So, as far as (humanly) possible I will try to use “He” only when describing the traditional view of God described in many religions and cultures. That is, God as the father, as the alpha-male.

I’m sure the Pope, the Grand Ayatollah, and some Hindu priests, if cornered, would all admit that-no, God isn’t male, a man, the possessor of a long white beard, much less a penis (..what would he use it for?? Unless the universe is a result of masturbation instead of intercourse!)

But none the less, for the sake of simple understanding, we are always told of His will, His love, His heaven, the other guy’s hell. Yes, the devil, too, is viewed as a masculine force. The female force, on the other hand, is apparently considered too impotent to be either truly godly - or ungodly.

And while so-called more primitive religions, such as Hinduism (so denigrated by us because of their multitude of Gods, both male and female) allow for female empowerment, Christianity and Islam seem to suggest the greatest divinity allowed females is virginity.

Along with the wish to consider a God who would be more moral, logical and thus more useful than the God traditionally described in Judeo-Christian terms, it is the wish of my book to get beyond a gender-based view of The Creator.

But a gender-neutral view of God will not be easy, as we seem to require a God who is in fact not all-forgiving- -and thus seemingly too feminine. Rather we seem to masochistically long for the stern disciplinarian. Someone overtly masculine to keep the other guy in line.
Perhaps our tendency to think of God as the Father, as a masculine force, comes from our concept of nature as something unpredictable and violent instead of nurturing and benign. The masculine propensity for aggression affects the human psyche and makes most of us subconsciously long for the ultimate father figure, a father who is always loving and just. But try as we may it remains almost impossible for us to believe the Ultimate Father does not also contain negative traits such as anger and irritability and the lust for vengeance. At best, God is occasionally a Grumpy Old Dad, at worst a dangerous tyrant, a maniac who demands the sacrifice of sons as a sign of obedience.

If humanity is to get beyond God as the ultimate human male, for good or bad, it is vital to always keep in mind our psychology, our biology and our family relations. And it is equally essential to realize that God, if God exists, does not possess our hopes, our fears, our desires or emotions. If God does possess anything akin to desires and emotions, these “feelings” are unlikely to bear any resemblance to ours. Unsettling as it may be, God may not be interested in love, justice, murder, sin, morality. Perhaps God is not even capable of interest in anything. For if God just is, it may be a fact that God has no consciousness, as Nature has no conscious overview, designs or goals.

Such an unconscious comatose God can be of little use to us, and of practically no prolonged interest. We could in some sense be grateful to such a God for coalescing everything, but we would find it difficult to continue much adoration.

And just as an unconscious God would seem fairly useless to us, an overly superior one would be equally useless. Imagine a race of beings visiting us from another planet, a race so intellectually superior that they were in essence unable to distinguish us and our feeble endeavours from bacteria and their by-products. We could never hope to easily relate to such beings. The vast distance between us would be an impossible chasm, and we should quickly come to hate such superior beings if they should ever deign to show interest or sympathy for us.

No, the distance between ourselves and our God cannot be too great. And in lieu of something better, we will sadly continue to content ourselves with Grumpy Old Dad.

Unless we are provided with a sensible alternative...


I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
- Susan B. Anthony , addressing the National American Woman Suffrage Association meeting in 1896

In all religiousness there lurks the suspicion that we invented the story that God Loves us."

- Sebastian Moore

God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.

- W. H. Auden

If God created us in His image we have certainly returned the compliment.

- Voltaire

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.

- Sir Richard Francis Burton

When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.

- Peter O’Toole

If dogs had a god it would look like a dog.
- unknown

Quotations

The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

- ALBERT EINSTEIN


It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.
- Arthur C. Clark


Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.
- John Burroughs


An honest God is the noblest work of man.
- Robert Green Ingersoll


Is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's blunders?

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
- Friedrich Nietzsche


Praying is like a rocking chair -- it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere.
-- Gypsy Rose Lee


Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?.
-- Douglas Adams


For the religious the holy is truth, for the philosophic the truth is holy
-Feuerbach


People are crazy. They can’t create a fly, but they create gods by the dozen!
-Michel de Montaigne


God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
-Voltaire


If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
-Woody Allen

They say God has existed from the beginning of time and will exist beyond the end of time. Can you imagine trying to sit through his home movies?
- Scott Roeben


God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore.
- Edward Abbey


From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
- Edward Abbey


Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.
- Jean Anouilh

To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom.
-- Susan B. Anthony


Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
- Ambrose Bierce


I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay their hands on everything they can get.
- Napoleon Bonapart

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

- Napoleon Bonapart

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
- Napoleon Bonapart


No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God.
- George Bush sr.


Those who oppose capital punishment and war are moral perverts and degenerates; they have lost the capacity for righteous indignation.
-Rev. R. H. Charles


We recognize the Negro the way God, and God's Book and God's Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him -- our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude.
-Jefferson Davis


The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.

AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.
-Rev. Jerry Fallwell


The difference between the people of Israel and the nations of the world is an essential one. The Jew by his source and in his very essence is entirely good. The goy, by his source and in his very essence is completely evil. This is not simply a matter of religious distinction, but rather of two completely different species.
-Rabbi Saadya Grama


Therefore, I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work.

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.... We need believing people.
-Adolph Hitler


We have enough votes to run the country. And when people say, "We have had enough," we are going to take over.
-Rev. Pat Robertson


The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both philosophically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith.
-The Roman Catholic church in condemnation of Galileo


If I do not return to the pulpit this weekend, millions of people will go to hell.
-Rev. Jimmy Swaggart


I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
-Albert Einstein


Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.
-Richard P. Feynman


I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.
-Benjamin Franklin


Perhaps God chose me to be an atheist?
-Stanislaw J. Lec


Sometimes the devil tempts me to believe in God.
-Stanislaw J. Lec


Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman.-
-H.L. Mencken


Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!.
-George Bernard Shaw


I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.
-Mark Twain

Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in his divine system of creation?
-Joseph Heller


Rightwing Christian (..and Islamic) fundementalists seem to fear and hate sex and the human body.

But God, if she exists, designed our bodies as well as our sexualities.. or not?

Sir Thomas Brown, an 18th century Scottish philosopher complained, “All things considered, you would have thought that our creator, in his wisdom and in his genius, might have found a way of populating and re-populating the world that did not require us to engage in such unbelieveable antics, such preposterous forms of behaviour, such athletic gyrations, that are at once degrading and ludicrous. Why would God have us go through these things as the only way of keeping the world peopled..???”

He had 9 children, so the ludicrousness of the act didn’t seem to inhibit him greatly.

The God You Don’t Want

Some people shop for gods, most others have gods thrust upon them from birth, gods to whom they feel obliged to remain loyal, mainly and sadly due to peer pressure.

But whenever one is reflecting on whether the god one currently worships is the best, the most beneficial, the most deserving of worship – or when considering whether there are, in fact, better alternatives, one can use a kind of check list for surveying the qualities of the god one is currently saddled with – or the god one is considering adopting (..can one adopt a parent figure?)

One suggested check list is humbly supplied below, but it would perhaps be better for each of us to make our own list – or at least come up with supplements or substitutions. (Moses' laws were chiseled in stone – but that was back when stone was cheaper than papyrus.)

1. Ask yourself “Is your current god similar in disposition to someone you know? A rich or powerful uncle or grandfather who is usually generous, humorous, but can turn spiteful or vindictive when he doesn’t get his way? Your own father – or the father you wished you had?”

Logically if you can’t admire your god, who can you admire?

Your god ought to be the most patient, kind and generous imaginable – and not just an affable alpha-male who turns nasty when his children continue to misbehave. Drowning the world for its sins is an act of pique, to say the least! The Bible is full of stories of when God became angry. But how can you get mad unless you are unpleasantly surprised? A perfect all-knowing god surprised and enraged? A logical impossibility. The Bible’s god is Donald Trump, cool and all-knowing, always striving to appear in control, but all too often forced to peevishly punish the disappointing when their shortcomings suddenly appear!

2. Do you require your god to have a face? A nose? A mouth? Two eyes? Would three eyes eliminate a god from consideration? Tentacles instead of arms? Egyptians once happily worshipped ram-headed and crocodile-headed gods. Why can’t we in the West today? Hindus continue to love Ganeesh, not despite, but perhaps because of his trunk! If God can create a creature as strange-looking as an octopus – think of it! Eight arms! Suction cups! Squirts ink! Changes colors! Can slip through a bottle neck! Poisonous! If God can create something so bizarre and alien to us, what shape and appearance would God choose for himself? Surely a w.a.s.p.-like Charleton Heston-type would be dull, insufficient and highly unlikely???

3. Must your god have a gender? Is a beard really necessary? Must your god resemble a patriarchal male in order to hold your respect – or a wise earth mother? What about Elvis sideburns? (When you picture Jesus do you imagine him as far more physically attractive and far less sarcastic and ironic than the average Jewish male?) Does your god just happen to have your skin color?

4. During the English War of the Roses (1455-1487), which side was God on? Which side would you have been rooting for? Does it matter? Is it enough to suppose that God is always on the side of the underdog or at least the side that didn’t start it? Do you require your god to take sides in all wars – or remain neutral? (If God chooses to take an interest in some wars but not others, is it a sign of attention deficit?) Can you live with the notion that there may be a creator who doesn’t care a whit who amongst his creations lives or dies, or how they live or die, and has no interest in punishing or rewarding behavior? A god that is impartial and indifferent, regarding us as no more special or necessary than cockroaches? Can we confused humans in fact be more interested in morality than God is?

5. Do you require your god to have motives and plans that we can not only glimpse and understand, but approve of? For example, would you love and respect a god who created the earth and mankind – and has been patiently waiting for us to reach 20 billion – so that He can then feed us like tasty tidbits to His true favorites on the planet Belso? What if we've been created only to contribute global warming - so that later on His real "in his image" preferences, the lizard people, can evolve and thrive?

6. Do you require your god to perform magic tricks occasionally? Walk on water? Turn water to wine? Raise white tigers and train them to jump through fiery hoops in Las Vegas? Must your god be flamboyant? Ballsy? Donald Rumsfeld or Alan Alda? Martha Stewart or Madonna? The sweetness of Teller combined with the sadism of Penn?

7. Do you want or need a god simply because you can’t wrap your mind around the possibility that the universe is the result of something and not someone? That there has never been a conscious plan for you or for anyone or anything else? Do you require a Man With a Plan?

8. Do you find it impossible to believe that human beings are capable of behaving kindly and decently in a universe without a conscious god who punishes and rewards? He knows when you’ve been sleeping – he knows when you’re awake. Would you really behave much worse than you already do if you began to believe there are no cosmic eyes watching you? Do you really want a god like Judge Judy?

9. Do you require a god to take credit for the good stuff - and a devil to take the blame for the bad? If God created Satan, surely God can uncreate or change his nature? Unless of course God needs a fall guy to take the blame. An enforcer? If you’ve been bad, God “renders” you to hell just as Rumsfeld boxes and ships off the despised to Syria and Bulgaria for waterboarding?

10. If you are a woman, is your perfect god a nearly - but not completely sexless male figure, a Richard Chamberlain? A male figure who never thinks of sex but just wants to cuddle? For 2,000 years millions of frustrated Catholic women have lusted after the parish priest simply because they wish to believe he is incapable of lusting back or any other heinous form of male deceit. Is your god the one-of-a-kind male – the pure and shining ideal - the only man that can be trusted?

11. Do you absolutely require life after death? Heaven or Hell? Disneyland or Auschwitz? Do you imagine that Heaven is some kind of gated community – and do you secretly fear that God may be letting in riff-raff - that He hasn’t had the sense to set up some kind of platinum card system to keep the good-but poor and boring people from trying to mingle with - or stalk the better, richer more interesting, more important residents? And if you do require eternal life, what do you hope to do with your time – when you are unable to find anything interesting to do now on a rainy Sunday afternoon? Aren’t you already sick of repeating your jokes and stories? How much will you be repeating during the next trillion trillion trillion millennium? Especially when there are no more fresh and juicy murders or sins to gossip about?

12. Admittedly we are often told by clergy that the pleasures of Heaven will be different than earthly pleasures, pure pleasures, superior pleasures. But if you have been purified to such a degree that you no longer long for - nor appreciate sex, chili dogs, heavy metal music, muscle cars, Terminator movies – or any other cheap but delicious pleasures – just who is being admitted to Heaven? Certainly not you, as you are the sum of your pleasures. The new purified you will be as different to the present you as a total stranger would be. God may as well as make a robot copy of you without a personality and usher the –yes, soulless – copy through the Pearly gates in your place. If Heaven is to be without familiar pleasures, familiar faces or a familiar feeling of time, then it will be an alien place indeed, built perhaps only for Newtons and Einsteins who could possibly thrive on pure thought – though I imagine that even Einstein appreciated a beer or a good steak once in a while. If God is a foe of earthly pleasures He had better have some mighty interesting substitutes waiting for us. But I suspect that the equivalent of one endless eternal mental orgasm might begin to seem trivial and tiresome after just a few millennia.

The Church of the Cosmic Huh?

The Linux religion?



Throughout the ages religions and philosophies have arisen to fill psychological needs as well as lessen the miseries resulting from social chaos.

Fundamentalist Islam, for example can be hard for some of us to understand, unless we realize that conditions on the Arabian peninsula may well have been fragmented, murderous – in short an ongoing nightmare – until Mohammed devised a belief system that could work as a framework for stability. Tribal feuds and vendettas were banned. Laws were made and rewards and punishments clearly spelled out. Daily life may well have been made easier by the suggestion and then the imposition of commonly binding rules. (Karl Marx and his wayward step-children, Lenin and Stalin attempted something similar.)

In today’s world the vast majority of the Earth’s population either lives lives ruled directly by - or at least guided by the principles and beliefs of the 5 or 6 great world religions. Millions, however, are unhappy with the belief systems they were born into and drop them in practice, while continuing to pay lip service to their community’s norms. Others switch religions or pursue a life-long search for a belief system that can satisfy their needs.

As there are, and always will be, millions who seek solace in some form of spirituality, it would make sense to rationally construct a more beneficial framework for a 21st century spiritual idea - an idea devoid of superstition, dogmas and certainties. Perhaps a spiritual framework meant to evolve much in the same way as the Linux computer operating system lacks certainty and evolves – anyone in or out of this Linux spiritual framework can contribute – and ideas which prove beneficial will survive.

But just as Linux has a basic skeleton, any proposed spiritual system built along these lines would also need a basic set of principles as a skeleton - hopefully far less than 10 Commandments - mainly for simplicity’s sake, but also as a constant emphasis of the fact that the fewer the rules the less the risk of ossified dogma. Cast iron rules ought always provoke skepticism and caution.

Surely our first necessary and fundamental principal is contained in the name, The Church of the Cosmic Huh?

Life is a question, a curiosity, a longing to know more. Danger and degradation arise from certainties. The central tenant to the Church of the Cosmic Huh? is that no one has the answers, no one can tell you you should stop searching, no one can tell you their take on life, death and the cosmos is definitely the correct one. No one can say, “Look no further. Jesus is the answer. Buddha is the answer. Atheism is the answer. All other ideas are false.”

BEWARE OF THE CERTAIN

In the Christian faith the most famous prayer begins with, Our Father who art in Heaven..

Perhaps The Church of the Cosmic Huh?’s repeated credo should be this wondering pondering preamble: I may well be wrong.. but it could it be that…?

But the first question which might spring to mind in the reader now could be, “If you want to construct a spiritual system based on eternal questioning or doubt, what will be the glue that holds it together? What would your community have as an attractive framework to grow upon?

This question, is of course, central. In order to construct a system that can in some ways resemble yet surpass traditional religions, it ought to have built into it techniques and strategies for the nurturing and strengthening of such a new community.

Rituals may be essential. As we all know, rituals bind people together. Gatherings and ceremonies such as baptisms, weddings and funerals unite. Many religions have rites of passage ceremonies, too, for the transition into adulthood and responsibility. Holidays such as Christmas and Easter were newer expropriated versions of older holidays having to do with birth and renewal.

The Church of the Cosmic Huh? must have all these things – although it must always be stressed that these new traditions and rituals must be constantly evolving. That there is no dogma attached to them and no priesthood who can either condone or condemn or declare legitimate or illegitimate.

The central meaning of the Church of the Cosmic Huh is to prevent dogma and certainty, and to constantly remind the world that no one has the answers – certainly not the final answer to any question regarding spirituality. Perhaps not even God – if one exists.

God is, of course, welcome to sit in our church as a guest.

But God’s presence is neither central nor essential. Nor should it be overshadowing or intrusive. The Church of the Cosmic Huh? is about humanity’s search for higher values regardless of whether God exists or not – or what God’s true intentions may be.

The essence, the heart of this idea is that the open-minded and eternal search is what is paramount, moral and inspiring.

To think one has found “the answer” is to lapse into spiritual inertia and forever frozen aspirations.

The Church of the Cosmic Huh? can only grow if it becomes virtual as well as electronic. Spreading the idea on the Internet is essential as a start up and a suppliment. But the Net can never be the sole home or promoter of Huh?’s message. Real gatherings, church services if you will, will have to take place. A physical sense of closeness and community is vital for any real bonding or sharing of ideas.

Huh? indicates humor as well as searching. Spirituality and philosophic musings are often best illuminated when conveyed through humor. One idea which might be very appropriate is that comedy clubs across the world might receive an extra income by holding a weekly Church of the Cosmic Huh? “service”. Comedians would be encouraged to act as temporary preachers, their sermons being serious as well as funny examinations of spirituality, religion, morals, frustrations. As it has been noted before, many comedians like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Roseanne Barr were preachers for a new age who concerned themselves with moral and sexual hypocrisy. Comedians might be the ideal hosts for our services as they would emphasize that mankind’s certainties are absurd. And M.C. – or Master of Ceremonies – might be a far better title than priest for our (temporary) shepards.

As we begin the foundation of the church of the Cosmic Huh? we ask readers to send their thoughts and ideas. This is an inclusive endeavor.

If you have suggestions as to the possible make-up of new rituals – baptism, marriage, burial, holidays – please send them. Let’s inspire each other.

Dex@DexterVanDango.com


Here’s something to chew on: George Carlin’s take on the 10 Commandments.

http://www.georgecarlin.com/mp3/George%20Carlin%20-%20When%20Will%20Jesus%20Bring%20the%20Pork%20Chops%20-%20The%20Ten%20Commandments.mp3