This is a response to Scarletmoth’s blog…I picked hers BECAUSE I have immense respect for her analysis and insights. I am arguing against an idea, and most definitely not against the person. She is rational and respectful, as I will be in return.

“Personally, I have at times subscribed to the idea that people want to believe in religions because they want to believe in life after death, etc.    What I have to say to this is that undoubtedly, some people DO use religion as a crutch, or for a multitude of other wrong reasons.    But to me, this seems to agree with the general idea of God: that he and religion and everything else, if it exists, is too complicated and vast for the human mind to comprehend.”

The idea that God exists as a crutch is not a societal reason for Christianity, but more an answer to the question of why most every human culture has invented some form of religion. It reveals that human beings may simply have a weakness; that as intelligent beings, we have a problem with facing up to our apparent lack of significance and mortality.

With the whole thing about God being “too complicated”….I am going to lose my mind if I hear this anymore. If a person reads the Bible, and I would chalk this up as likely its number one weakness, you find a book that appears to be all too human. The creator of the entire universe has feelings like jealousy and anger, decides that a single group of people in some corner of the world is somehow special, has rules and prejudices…these are human feelings, not what one would expect from a supreme being. On top of this, there is not a single sentence in there that could not have been written by someone in the 1^st century. The moral codes of the Bronze Age fill the pages, along with terribly incorrect science, no mention of anyone outside of a tiny area, and obvious allusions to leaders of the time. (the 666 mark of the beast was a numerological symbol of Nero, a tyrannical Roman leader that the people reading the Bible at the time would have instantly recognized)

“Another thing I have to wonder about is the argument that God does not make sense, therefore he does not exist.   Does God have to make sense?   Does one person's interpretation of God necessarily represent what God IS?   No, and no…”

Another thing that must be realized are these two facts:

1. The idea that there is an intelligent being, which created everything and intervenes in the lives of human beings, IS A SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESIS. It is not a matter of faith or interpretation. If a person dies in a car crash, it is either because they weren’t paying attention, OR because God has long ago selected them for their death. An intelligent being either hears your own thoughts as you pray, or there is no such being. These are facts, no different from atomic theory or physics.

“I don't really see a situation in which anything in nature or science or life or anything can negate God, if God made it all”

2. The idea that we could not have all of this without an intelligent designer asks the question of organized complexity. If the idea that evolution cannot be true, due to this fact, raises a very simple question: Ok, so where did God come from? “God was always there” is not an answer, it is a vague metaphysical copout. If the idea that life arose from a lesser means requires an answer, so must the question of where a God came from.

“One point he made (st augustine) is that we should rely on our God given logic to guide us to the right answers.   If everything in science and untold amounts of evidence negate what we have thought to be true, it is dishonoring the gift God has given us (our logic) to continue to believe in the obviously incorrect truths.”

The church threw people in jail for their “god given logic”. The idea that ideas like evolution are compatible with religious ideas is a patently made-up one, as is the idea that stories like Genesis or Exodus are “allegorical”. That is pathetically weak as an argument. A person would be labeled a blasphemer 200 years ago to make a statement like that. It is only in modern times, as overwhelming evidence has mounted, that cafeteria Christians has arisen in order to not look like backward thinking fools.

“But I think overall, a good point is that really, in the vast scheme of things, it really doesn't matter if the world was created in 7 days, or in 7 billion.    However, by continuing and dragging out such arguments and getting into stupid fights over it, countless people end up being led AWAY from religion because of it.”

I could not possible disagree with something more. I cannot think of a single question more important than that…it is one thing that likely is worth arguing about. I am confident that in a few hundred years, people then will look back at our modern religious ideas the way we read some of the things written about blacks a few hundred years ago. (It was considered a scientific fact that blacks were less intelligent) The pattern on this is simple: As time has gone on, the ideas that were put in place by Christianity have been slowly erased. At least in some people…I quote the father of Pat Robertson, only a few years ago, “I would like to help the negroes, but the Bible says that I can’t”

Don’t like that? Based on what? What verse from your moral code that God wrote? If it is book of morality, on what basis is that disagreeable to you? He is only expressing the book that he lived by…at least he is being consistently backward and stupid.

Women’s rights, civil rights, slavery, these were all defended by the pages of the Bible. (I know this sounds strong, but go and read some of the defenses of slavery by people like Jefferson Davis, or against the women’s suffrage opponents) The western world used a Bronze Age morality manual as a compass, and over time its barbarism and lack of insight into the true affairs of the world have cost it its credibility. At the Council of Trent, books had to be trimmed and edited. In the Medieval Period, people were burned for their misdeeds in its interpretation.

Much later, people began to go directly against its teachings, through the abolishment of slavery and others…Nowadays, the common ideas; that it is not literal, that Jesus changed the laws of the Old Testament (uhh…have you read the 15 places where Jesus himself advocated HEAVIER enforcement of the barbarism of the old book? No? Didn’t think so) these ideas would have gotten you thrown in jail or exiled not all that long ago…

Now there is a new paradigm for the Bible.

For the love of God, don’t actually read it.

This is a jacked up poem and I know it, but a friend of mine that gets to read this jabber told me it's her favorite. I'm not telling you what this one's about...I think you'll figure it out :)

Blood and Terpentine

All I want to do

Is make people listen by force

All I want to do

Is make people know when it’s better

To shut the fuck up

Sit like it’s a pew because for once

It might do you some good

All I want to do is

Make idiots sit and listen from the middle of a

Burning building

Standing in the left lane of the

I-95

Falling from the top of the

Empire State Building

They call it a literary world

But we’ve all agreed

That it’s not worth a shit

We know it

I’ll be honest and you can be shocked

I’d rather be Morrison in the tub

Than Nicholas Sparks

I’d rather captain a rocketship through hell

Than sweat in the back seat of a Volvo

To Disney Land

I’d rather

Sell arms to the Martians

Than wait with a dumb frown for a

Letter from some diseased clown with a

Three-piece mind

Telling me that I’ve won a

Bullet-proof pair of rose-colored glasses

For my poem “Autumn in the Spring”

I want to be

Hated

By everyone that teaches for a living

I want people to hear it and

Get migraines

I want to people to mull it all over and

Vomit

I want people to hear it all and

Weep like orphans, scream, disappear, bleed from their eye sockets

Eat their television sets, beat each other to death with

Sawed-off Louisville Sluggers and

Go out and get riotously drunk on

Someone else’s money

Ohh this ain’t no party

This ain’t no disco

This ain’t no fooling around

Grab-bag of

My little clever wordplay and sensitive thoughts and

Gracious theories about

How many ambiguities can dance on the head of a

Chinese machine gun

Because we all know it really

This ain’t actually some genteel evening over

Cappuccino and bouncing voices

This ain’t no life affirming

Our days have meaning

As we watch the flowers breath through our souls and

Fall desperately in love

Take your plastic pages and shove them

Down your throat until maybe

The acid spills your lie into truth

This ain’t no letter press, hand me down

Wimp ass beatnik festival of bitching about

The broken rainbow

It is just the whisper of a room full of people

That actually might fucking listen

Because someone might get hurt

But it won’t be me

It is terror written down and beauty that tells me to go fuck myself

Walking hand in hand down a bombed-out road

As missiles scream while a

Sky the color of arterial blood

Blinks on and off

Like the lights on Broadway

After their last junkie’s died of AIDS

I actually speak for once because no will listen anyway

to blow the words up

Not to dawdle them on my knee

Like a retarded child

But he has such beautiful eyes

Maybe then I can

Throw it off a pier into

A December sea and

See if the motherfucker can

Swim for it’s life like Jack on the cordwood

Because they tell me love is an excellent thing

Surely we must need it

But my friends….

There is so much to boil on you these days

That hatred just seems like love with a chip on its shoulder

A chip like a cauterizing iron

And heavier than

All the bills I’ll never pay

Because they’re after us

They’re selling radioactive charm bracelets

And breakfast cereals that

Lower your IQ by 50 points per serving

They have poetry books full of singy-song dipshits

That write words the way

Mormons sing Wu Tang

Like some girl at the bar thinks

Her cell phone makes her sexy

And we have politicians who think

Starting World War III

Would really bring up their poll numbers

We got beautiful women

With eyes like wet lilies

Peering out from the top of

A drink I just totally overpoured on

Promising that they’ll

Screw us till we shoot blood and turpentine

Take what I say or join the drove

I only know

We’re a tad outnumbered