ONLY GOD CAN MAKE A RAINBOW!

[I know the proper saying is "...tree." The reason I modified it will become clear.]

I was sent an e-mail that had a bunch of cool pictures of rock formations that looked like animals. After the pictures was this plea: to take ONE MINUTE to say the lord's prayer, to not be ashamed of your love for god, and to show it by passing the chain e-mail along.

My response to the sender:

[The creation of every formation is] explicable by natural phenomena. Cool though.

I take this e-mail as an attempt to illustrate that god is the creator of all things, and only god could make the rocks, etc look the way they do. And that its creation is beautiful.

The flip side being: If god is the creator of all things we must also give ONE MINUTE to god for the Holocaust.

We can't just give god credit for the beautiful things; it has to be given credit for everything. Otherwise it is not god because it is not all-powerful.

One can make an argument that god is unknowable, and all the evil that is done is done for a purpose only god can understand; the beauty must be taken with the horror. And one cannot lay blame for evil on free will -- on people choosing to do evil -- because mankind was created in god's image and likeness.

Further, just as people are capable of wrong, so is god. A reading of the Old Testament (Torah, Hebrew Bible) shows that god is capable of error -- it admits to erring on a few occasions (oops! Hundreds of thousands dead!). Ergo, he is not all-knowing. God endorses wholesale slaughter of entire cities and the men, women and children within them. It endorses slavery. On and on.

God made a rainbow, and rainbows are beautiful things. Before it made that, though, it wiped out almost every single living thing on earth, without remorse. The people drowned to death -- one of the worst ways to go.

The foundation of my life is, irrefutably, my parents, and I give thanks to them for my life. I don't have god's genes.

And you'll excuse me for being ashamed of a mass-murderer. I'm ashamed of Ted Bundy, and he killed far fewer people than god ever did.

You can choose to divorce the Old Testament (Torah, Hebrew Bible) from the New Testament, but then you are not following the god of Jesus, the Jew, who gathered followers through his superior understanding and (strict) interpretation of the Torah.

Either god has done it all or he has done nothing. We can't pick and choose.

To quickly sum things up and give you the short version of the argument against the existence of the Christian god:

1. If evil exists and God is omniscient, then God knows about it.
2. If God knows about evil and is omnibenevolent, then he wants to prevent it.
3. If God wants to prevent evil and is omnipotent, then he can prevent it.
4. Therefore, if God is omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent, then evil should not exist.

The Christian god is defined as being omniscient, omnibenevolent and omnipotent. He is everywhere, he is all-good, he is all-powerful. But he cannot be all these things if evil exists, which it does.

But if "evil" is really "good" -- a necessary part of god's giving mankind free will, etc -- then there is no point in worshiping such an entity, for why kneel to something that allows us to suffer? That makes us suffer?

And if the devil causes evil, then god is not omnipotent, for he cannot defeat the devil. If god chooses not to defeat the devil, then he is not omnibenevolent. If god is unaware of the devil, then he is not omniscient.

Sorry to belabor the subject. I added this last piece because I needed to address specifically Christian conceptions of god, and not just the god of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible/Torah, who was undoubtedly evil (commanding the rape of 32,000 women from one city, for just one example).

Still, to not-love the god of the Old Testament is to not-love the god of Jesus, the Jew.

And to love the god of the Old Testament is to love a dictator/fascist who commanded the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, the rape of hundreds of thousands, the enslavement of hundreds of thousands, to love a being that did not frown upon the incest committed by Abraham's (the patriarch of Judeo-Christianity) daughters, and on and on.

Personally, I'm incredibly relieved that such a god does not exist.

Mixx it!

EVERY DAY IS LIKE SUNDAY!

http://www.morrisseymusic.com/

All ow ow ow ow ow goddam it, ow!s today in every category (including sleaziness, if you've been playing along at home). And all I can, or will, do -- and feel awful for... But hey, why should I feel bad for desiring a little Old Testament-style justice! --

I should just start that over... I realize my parenthetical and other tangents make it hard to follow along. Joseph Heller was the master of these... I need to read more of his books.

OK, so I am an awful enough person (but hey, the Judeo-Christian god likely would sanction it, so 75 percent of you pretty much have to believe in its fairness... Fuck, another parenthetical... I'm trying to set up this awful thing I want in a way that makes it hard for people to challenge and easy for people to understand it... Unfortunately, I just brought up the Bible and pissed off about 75 percent of you... Oh well, today's churchgoing people tend to substitute church for the Bible... And to paste over, horribly, the fact that God's an asshole. Look it up. And I'm an asshole too, made in his image)--

OK, so I wish my doctor's and shrink's children get fibro that is as bad as mine. I think only then will they understand that sometimes you follow the goddam motherfucking protocol and give someone who doesn't respond to ANY other therapies fucking opioids! My head is going to explode and my body feels like the tin man's.

If only I didn't have a brain...

Last night I dreamed of getting electroshock therapy... My insane asshole doctors would prefer this to putting me on opioids, I'm sure... Give the man anything but one of the pillars of modern medicine!

Then again, chances are 80 percent, I think (I just don't feel up to looking it up. Seriously. ...But I feel up to typing this... The world is a many-splendored thing), that a person will get cancer. If anyone in my doc or shrink's family (or -- please please!) themselves has to get surgery for it, let them be offered strong drink and maybe ether.

Let's hope no one needs an organ removed!

Shit. The things pain turns you into. I don't wish the above... Except maybe for the first couple hours after I wake up. The images get me out of bed...

And how sick is that?

Mixx it!