God is Innocent.. say the atheists..

After every horrifying disaster the so-called - and self-appointed -  religious leaders dash from their pulpits and thrust themselves before the media's cameras to explain things to us. And to no one's great surprise we always get some fire-breathing nut blaming God for massacring thousands. 

From the late Jerry Falwell telling us God struck the World Trade Towers because we were too soft on homosexuality, to Pat Robertson telling Haitians that God brought down a quake killing 200,000 because they had gotten uppity 200 years ago and rebelled against the French(!)

And this time Billy Graham's dead-eyed zombie of a son, Franklin hints that Japan is just the harbinger of a riled God's righteous displeasure.

The only group of people who never ever blame God for sadistic murderous behavior are atheists. Atheists know He is undeserving of such slanderous accusations.

Has It Ever Been Said More Poetically?

The wonderfully insightful, ceaselessly creative and great friend to all, Russ Buchan (..who also resembles a sane F.N.) has graciously offered his thoughts on this whole religion business.

Arise, arise, you pious; get off your bended knees,
For even heathen atheists know gods don't come in threes.

"A Mighty Fortress is Our God", a song the Christians sing,
But once you're through those hallowed gates, you will not find a thing.

For Christendom's a hollow mock; there's nothing really there,
Time spent at the horse track is more exceeding fair.

Though gambling's nearly useless as a way to gaining riches,
It beats the writhing whining of those Holy Roller bitches.

Your Jews, your chanting Arabs, your fucking useless Copts,
When comes the time for begging, they pull out all the stops.

"It's God's work that we're doing", they testily reply,
But who held up the ladder when their God hung up the sky?

Any mortal clad in flesh can lay his faults 'neath Jesus,
Then amble off and drunkenly engage in that which pleases.

Cosmologic happenings to atheists seem random,
The more religious folks, however, think a Planner planned 'em.

A man who lies with other men (Leviticus' blackguard),
Surely shall be put to death (unless his name's Ted Swaggert).

A wondrous shrub that burnt, yet spake, a parted Sea, a talking snake,
A fishy-sounding Virgin Birth; these silly myths yet walk the Earth.

The Pope's own credibility has been severely tested,
But it falls short when he protects the Priests who have molested.

At standing sexual intercourse, your Baptist looks askance,
Lest voyeuristic lookers-on mistake the act for dance.

When Mormons meet, the clothes they wear are anything but civvies,
For underneath their garments they're sporting magic skivvies.

While we regard as quaint beliefs in transubstantiation,
The Papists eat and drink their Lord with shows of degustation.

The Afterlife sure looks a bore, with moping prigs and such,
Considering alternatives, you're better off born Dutch.

Your basic Hindu cops a stance that he regards as holy,
Eschewing animals as food, which leaves just guacamole.

Your Buddhists, too, aspire to Zen, a state that borders Oneness,
But stick a fork in that, me lad, and check it out for Doneness.

Your Muslims have a touchy side, and be they Shia or Sunni,
They think the Prophet's cartooned mug is anything but funny.

It's atheists, yes, atheists, who really know the score,
So read your Richard Dawkins before knocking on that 'door'.

Yes! Off with all your finery! Give your garments to the poor!
And realize, you silly cunts, Religion is a whore.

(editor's note: Freddy also pointed out that "..a casual stroll through any lunatic asylum proves that faith means nothing."

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