Occasionally, my head just explodes.
Even the people who like me think I’m an asshole. Perhaps not all the time and perhaps not irredeemably, but the people close to me tend to think I’m too negative and vicious from time to time, leaving the impression that I either like being miserable or enjoy viewing everything in life through a needlessly dark lens. This couldn’t be further from the truth though. In fact, I always state that I’m not a pessimist, I’m just a realist. I’d like the world to be happier and more charitable. I’d like to really believe in someone else and think, “Yeah, this guy we just elected is going to bring change and he’s going to be different than all the other polished turds in government.” I really would like all of us to “just get along.”
Make no mistake though, I’m still a realist. We don’t get along. There are serious irreconcilable differences in the world that no amount of kumbaya is going to solve. The people in power didn’t get there by being kind, understanding or good. They got there by immersing themselves in the dirtiest of games and came out on top. Some wear that distinction proudly and others—like our current president elect—have an image so potent it actually distorts the reality around them.
Optimism is fine, just so long as it doesn’t get in the way seeing things as they are. And no Pollyanna, reality is not matter of perspective and looking on the bright side does not make the abyss that is life any brighter. It may change how we deal with things, but it doesn’t change things. Looking too hard for the best in something often blinds us to the worst and that’s dangerous. There’s a reason it’s generally the kindest and the most optimistic that make the easiest targets for people who like to take advantage of others.
I digress though. I could have summed up the point I wanted to get across in the last three paragraphs by saying, “Contrary to popular belief, just because the world is a bitter place, doesn’t mean I delight in that.”* With that said, let’s move on to my current grievances.
I’m sure I’m not the only person who has seen those stupid “COEXIST” bumper stickers written in various gender and religious symbols on VWs, Volvos and whatever other cars left leaning hippie jackasses prefer these days. (Humorously, these stickers come from peacemonger.org**, a place that seems to go out of its way to be a stereotype. I had no idea peace was so partisan.)
Okay, I have to digress again. Yes, I’m using cheap and obvious stereotypes. However, when I stoop to such childish levels, I like to carpet bomb a given area to at least imply I look for hypocrisy and stupidity everywhere and not just with any single social archetype. The religious right leaning jackasses are not spared my wrath. Every time I see “In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned.” I reach for my tire iron. “Real men love Jesus”? That may be true, but no real man worth his salt would say so by slapping that bumper sticker on his minivan. Also, fuck you people with your Darwin fish or your idolatrous versions of Calvin praying to a cross—bonus points to someone putting both of those on the same car though. Oh yeah, speaking of Calvin, fuck you people that have him peeing on various car brands or your ex-wife or whatever. And people, stop with the stick figure families on your rear window. All you’re doing is giving people like me a point total if we decide to snap one day and start shooting. You know, it’s possible I just hate bumper stickers.
Where was I? The COEXIST stickers. Right. These are patently stupid. I shouldn’t have to say so, but enough people brandish them that it appears at least a few people didn’t get that memo. Let me sum this all up for everyone: The Jews claimed the title of “Chosen People” a long time ago and acted accordingly by stealing land from other people and slaughtering them wholesale. The Holocaust seems to made us forget in recent history that their religion is just as bloody as the next guy’s. The Jews and their pagan Roman cohorts murdered Christianity’s founder. That tends to annoy people. The Christians were hunted and murdered by Jews and pagans alike before they rose to power and began slaughtering pagans and Jews as well as turning on one another in a bloodbath to the top for who was the most moral of them all. A few centuries later we get the Muslims who provide the world with a brief and fleeting golden age of art, science and comparative tolerance before feeling left out and joining the fray to bicker and argue about who killed who.
To be short, men and women will never resolve their differences. If women weren’t insane at every level and men weren’t irresponsible on every level, maybe it would be possible. However, we’re being realists today, remember?
Did I leave anyone represented by this sticker out? The hippies represent themselves with the peace sign, which has no place with religious symbols of any kind. The Yin and Yang is also present, showing this bumper sticker’s ridiculous favoritism for the western world by only representing the east with the most generic of symbols. Where’s the love for Hinduism? What about Taoism? Or do you new age wackos think the east is somehow free of the religious bloodbaths and persecution we’ve enjoyed in the west for as long as man has walked upright? Why not just say, “What does it matter? Asians all look the same anyway.” Note to hippies: eastern culture—to use an overly simplistic generalization—has more to offer than tofu and, quite frankly, you wouldn’t know what Zen was if it bit you in the ass. Real Buddhists do not choose their religion as a social fad. By the way, the east and west have about as much chance at real understanding as men and women.
So, aside from the inherent stupidity of it all, what’s my point? Where am I going with this? This sticker sums up everything I hate about the feel good leftist crowd: snarky, cutesy and supposedly clever statements that pretend to be intellectual without being insulting that fail on all levels. On top of that, it treats some very serious realities and problems that have plagued us for multiple millennia as if they could be solved by some guy with a lot of facial hair and bloodshot eyes telling everyone, “just be groovy people.”
I don’t have any actual figures, but anecdotal evidence suggests most of these jerk-offs aren’t specifically religious or, worse, they’re spiritual. (Which, is a “clever” way of saying you’re religious without saying you’re religious.) They either flat out don’t understand religion or its practitioners, or they were raised religious and because of some bad experience aren’t anymore and have now branded religion as a whole as the root of all evil.
Let me give you an example of where this thinking goes. Have you ever been at a bar or a party or some other “fun place” and some joker who just took Philosophy 101 strikes up a totally inappropriate serious conversation? (See, it’s not just the door to door religious types the interrupt my dinner with their philosophy, it’s also the genius with the black-dyed hair, the pierced eyebrow and the “Recovering Christian” t-shirt.) Invariably the tired and overused statement, “More blood has been shed in the name of god than for any other reason,” will rear its ugly head and because I suffer from some form of OCD, I’ll drop my eating, jovial conversation (yes, I am capable of such things) or gaming to invite myself into this conversation.
Look I get it. Your priest molested you or your mom doesn’t talk to you anymore because you’re gay or whatever. Someone who was religious has ruined your life and, instead of blaming that person for being a douche, you’ve decided to blame the whole of an organization that they were a part of. Fine. You’re a fucking idiot. But that aside, let me ask you this, smart guy, besides the crusades can you name a single war whose basis was primarily religious that’s been fought in the last thousand years?
I know there are some. I would say, for instance, the Six Day War counts and if I felt like hitting up the Wikipedia or using the magic of Google I could find dozens more. However, without any research at all I can think of lots of wars that aren’t strictly religious and they read like a Time Life music compilation CD: World Wars I and II, The Civil War, The October Revolution, The War of the Roses, The French and Indian War, The Russo-Japanese War and many, many more. But wait, that’s not all, you also get: The War of 1812, The American Revolution, The French Revolution, The Napoleonic Wars and The Great Northern War. If you act now we’ll include a bonus set of 20th century non-deistic blood-letting that occurred without war: Mao Zedong’s Cleanse China Tour, Joseph Stalin’s Food for Munitions Bake Sale, Hitler’s Holocaust Hoedown and Pol Pot’s Cambodian BBQ.
In other words, people have been murdering people since before we even qualified as people. It doesn’t take religion to turn a man into thoughtless paranoid beast willing to lash out violently toward others who aren’t part of his clique. Religion doesn’t make monsters of men. What we as a species seem to have forgotten, at least since The Renaissance, is that men are monsters. It’s our nature—religious, irreligious, man, woman, eastern, western, Hindu, Muslim or Christian. It’s the one thing all of us really do have in common. Although, good luck turning that into a feel good bumper sticker.
So don’t get me wrong, I don’t condone or make any attempt to justify the steaming pile of religious bullshit, persecution, indoctrination, theft and murder that’s gone on as long as we superstitious apes have looked for reasons to hate beyond our simple evolutionary drive to have our genetics pass on and survive. However, good old-fashioned theft, rape, murder, war and genocide rarely need an ethereal reason or purpose. The people that have brought atrocity to the doorstep of their fellow human beings are as diverse as the beautiful children born around the world. In fact, many of those children will grow up to further crimes against humanity.
When you stop to think about what all of us really do have in common, maybe our differences aren’t such a bad thing after all.
Religion has become a scapegoat for so-called “liberals” to blindly label their opposition just as it has blindly labeled them in return. “It’s not our shitty spending policies, our failed social programs or our complete ignorance of reality, it’s the fact that those religious fanatics won’t let us talk about condoms in schools that’s causing the problems in society!” Whoop-dee-fucking-doo. Likewise, we can apply it to the right too, “Forget our blind xenophobic hatred of outsiders, our do as I say and not as I do stance on practically everything or our complete ignorance of reality, it’s the fact that those godless communists want to let the homos get married that’s causing problems in society.”
The thing that pisses me off about blaming religion for the ills of the world is that it takes the blame away from those who rightfully deserve it, people who consistently and willfully make rotten, horrible, greedy and downright evil decisions and choose to hurt other people. However, our friend with the pierced eyebrow that’s messed up our party is also the kind of person who doesn’t want to really blame anyone for anything. We’re all victims of circumstance and our environment, right? Wrong.
Let’s give credit where credit is due. How did Christianity transform from faith, hope and charity into a blood sport? Have you ever seen those stupid commercials about adding “the human element” (Hu)? Well, there’s your answer. Constantine is a prime example of a person who is branded as “religious” when, what he really is, is a person willing to exploit the faith of others and use religion as a vehicle for destruction. Just because Constantine called himself a Christian, didn’t mean he was. He was your run of the mill politician looking for leverage against his opposition. How meek and humble is a guy who names “the greatest city on earth” (Constantinople) after himself? Although Jesus didn’t say it specifically, I’m sure that violates the original Christian premise in a big way.
So there. I’ve blown a gasket and vented my unhealthy frustration at some kind of generic straw man—the guy with the eyebrow ring. Before I conclude though, there is another blight that unhinges my nerves every time I see it as I’m driving down the road: pointless religious billboards.
Here are a few of my favorites:
1. A black billboard that just says “GOD” in huge, white letters. What hell does that even mean? What is the message this is supposed to convey? Is some atheist or some searcher going to see this billboard and have an epiphany? “By George! That’s it! That’s the answer I have been looking for. And to think, it’s been here on this billboard all along! God has given me a… sign.”
2. A black billboard with “I AM” written in some kind of white and gold Ye Olde English looking font. Having a Christian background, at least I know what it means but if I didn’t, that’s even more vague than the previous one. “I AM.” Thanks. You’re what exactly?
3. A black billboard (why are they always black?) that says: “God, Allah, El Shaddai, Theos.” This is practically another version of COEXIST. “We all worship the same God, so can’t we all just get along?” No, we can’t and a billboard isn’t going to change that.
4. A black billboard (there it is again) with one of the ten commandments posted on it. My particular favorite is, “Thou shalt make unto thee no graven image.” Thank you assholes for your public service announcement.
5. Finally, a black billboard (surprise, surprise) with “god” saying something like, “Keep using My name in vain and I’ll make rush hour longer.” I wasn’t aware that god was such a petty prick. Apparently, ruling the universe and beyond isn’t time consuming enough, so this all powerful deity occupies his free time by acting like a vengeful high school freshman. Brilliant.
Like the bumper sticker, these billboards aren’t just annoying because of their idiotic content, they’re annoying because their very existence betrays the shallow nature of their proponents. A billboard of that nature says, “I’m so holy and righteous that I have taken it upon myself to remind all you heathens and heretics how wicked and sacrilegious you are. Did I mention that I’m holy and righteous?”
Here’s an idea you asshats, why not take the money you wasted informing all the frustrated commuters stuck in 5:00pm traffic that “I AM,” and spend it on something useful? Why not donate that money to get the undersized highway improved? That’d make people happy. Or, I don’t know, there’s some book somewhere that mentions things like feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. I wonder how many dinners and pairs of clean socks “I AM” could pay for.
There’s no great way to conclude this and I’m already terribly verbose as it is. The dead horse has been beaten. People are fucking morons and I’m a cantankerous drudge who can’t help but blog about it.
* I have to be honest, there is some bitterness I delight in. I’m a college football fan and have been since high school. Although I enjoy when my teams win, I love it more when a team I despise—and there are many—loses. This is made specifically sweet when said team is at home and heavily favored. I actually giggle as the camera pans over the shocked and humbled faces of the fans, painted and dressed in the home team’s colors. Seeing grown men sit on the sideline and cry after a humiliating thrashing brings warmth to my heart.
** I can’t help it, this site is so full of stupid shit I have to comment on a few more:
Are you breathing? Thank a tree! Fuck you. Thank phytoplankton.
The Original Insurgency: Perpetrating Democracy since 1776. Apparently you illiterate cocksuckers don’t know a fucking thing about the Founding Fathers or their stance on Democracy. You might want to read Federalist Paper #10. Be warned though, Madison does use multi-syllable words.
CAUTION! I don’t brake for right wing nut jobs. So, the lesson here? We only need to COEXIST with people who aren’t right wing nut jobs or people in red states.
Fuck the left. (And fuck the right too.)
December 30th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
This was as awesome as a Maddox post.