Email I sent to a friend

The following email reply was a inspired by my friend Beth and her excellent brains:

It is with great restraint that I send this to only those people who I know, Michelle and ******, and not everyone on the sent list, because I don’t know them, but I have to reply to this insane forward in some way. Chalk it up to me being a jerk or what not, but I am in awe that this is from one of my friends who I respect and I need to comment.

>>This morning when the Lord opened a window to Heaven, He saw me, and He asked: "My child, what is your greatest wish for today?" I responded: "Lord please, take care of the person who is reading this message, their family and their special friends. They deserve it and I love them very much. "The love of God is like the ocean, you can see its beginning, but not its end.

>>This message works on the day you receive it. Let us see if it is true. ANGELS EXIST but some times, since they don't all have wings, we call them FRIENDS. Pass this on to your true friends. Something good will happen to you at 11:11 in the evening; something that you have been waiting to hear.

>>Do not break this prayer; send it to a minimum of 5 people. Thanks and have a wonderful day.

What kind of holier than bullshit is this? How much personal satisfaction might one reasonably gain from wishing random readers the oh so special love of god? Do we need the separate step? Don’t most people by nature have an ingrained, almost instinctive need to take care of one another uniquely human level? And the small portion of the human population who don’t, well, that’s fine too.

Let's say for a minute that Christianity is NOT the fraudulent culmination of myths and stories based on much older pagan rituals and practices, and let's pretend that the bible WASN’T written by men over hundreds of years and altered over and over to suit the whims of kings and monarchs in control, and let's say there IS a man in the sky with superpowers who wants you to follow TEN simple rules and if you don't you'll burn in eternal hellfire but HE LOVES YOU, and although he is creator of all things, omnipotent and beyond all fallacy, he needs you to worship him on a daily basis and give money to his priests so they can keep up with the sexy boy recruitment program that seems to be working so well. Ok, let's say this is all substantiated concretely. We’ve gotten photographic proof of Jesus and had a tour of his personal spaceship.

Do we really need to continually look so far outside ourselves, to sentimental nonsense that somehow validates what we don't understand or simply cannot accept about the realities of life? Surely if you think about it just a little bit, you might naturally come to the conclusion that need to believe in something so delusional is completely about individual comfort. How is being devoutly "Christian" and believing in Angels any different than being an alcoholic? It is desperation in search of solace, which is not inherently bad. It just tends to lead to hating women and starting wars.

If someone says, hey my buddy Jim can fly and heal ugly people, your natural gut reaction is skepticism. Same thing if you hear about a UFO sighting on the news, you go “that’s absurd.” Yet when people talk about this superstitious bullshit about Heaven and Angels, their brains just shut down and they go, “Oh yeah, totally, Angels, right on.” What the fuck? Because it’s nice, it makes me feel nice, I’d like to think someone is watching over me, you can’t understand my pain, etc. Alright, that’s fine. Now let me fasten that last buckle on that pretty white, long-armed jacket. If you subscribe to this stuff, then, I dunno, maybe you subconsciously believe you are unique, special, and chosen, and that society functions through the frivolous predestined actions of some club run by some figurehead and his sinless sheep. I guess I never understood how anyone could possibly learn anything about life, or about people, history, intentions, love, hate, how things work, when they ACTIVELY PRETEND and believe there is a path to “moral salvation” through the gibberish of some old book that we wrote. It’s a petty rant, I just can’t stop asking myself “IS EVERYONE INSANE OR JUST STUPID?”

Mike

P.S. Special thanks to George Carlin and David Cross, you are the wind betwixt my nethers.