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They’re always trying to make it relevant, or hip, or something. As far as I’m concerned, the idea of creation, godhood, underlying meaning of it all should be the bastion of the unhip. It’s painfully embarrassing to watch televangelists/charismatic preachers doing their thing, as if the idea is the kind that has to be sold, branded, or advertised. Part of its greatness is that it is a thing that does not need to be dressed up; it’s a thing that can only be diminished by doing that. People become more worldly, more sophisticated, more cynical with each passing minute and hour living in our world, paying attention to the things society makes us pay attention to.

The beginning idea is the one thing that can’t be touched by that. One should never become blasé or smug about the meaning of existence, like it’s a hula hoop or something. I won’t stand for it. That is why I race past the channels on the television that are passing out the Word. That is why the TV preachers outrage me. Don’t treat the final root idea like it’s a goddamn soft drink whose market share needs to be increased. How unbearably cynical. Don’t fuck with what should be an inviolable refuge against hype and cynicism.

In solidarity with Gillian Gibbons, I’ve decided to name my son’s old teddy bear Muhammad. Also 3 of my lawnchairs, the kitchen table, the old skillet that the teflon’s peeling from, the brown patch in the backyard, and the keys to my truck. These are all henceforth renamed Muhammad.

The stuff that collects under the couch between vacuumings I rename What The Fuck Is Wrong With You People? .

I swear I need some symbolic something to go apeshit over, too. I’m totally lacking in symbolic apeshittery. I feel kind of naked because the only response I have now to somebody else’s godly freak-out is a kind of bemused anxiety, which I’m getting kind of tired of, frankly. Thousands of screaming townsfolk marching on my house with torches and stones in their hands, and all I get is bemused anxiety to fend them off? That rarely works. So that changes now, Jack.

From now on, I consider the act of shaking someone’s right hand an affront. AN AFFRONT TO EVERYTHING I HOLD DEAR. If I see someone, a Right-to-lifer or a Sudanese fringewit Muslim or who-have-you, shaking someone’s hand with his or her right hand, I reserve the right to call for their fucking heads. Because shaking someone’s hand with your right hand…why, you may as well have murdered puppies in my living room. Shat right there in the gumbo. The only way I’ll cancel the fatwa is if I get some serious fucking media play. The world has to realize the magnitude of the blunder before I’ll call it off.

While I’m at it, I also call for the heads of those people who haven’t named their various kitchen appliances or outdoor furnishings Muhammad. These people make my blood boil. And those who haven’t had an abortion or performed an abortion, who are high on my holy shit list? Death to them.

THE WORLD WILL ACKNOWLEDGE MY SYMBOLIC APESHITTERY.

Nobody in the United States is untouchable by the law. Everyone has done something that could have resulted in fines or imprisonment. Everyone. It almost goes without saying, except that I had to say it in order for the next paragraph to make the right kind of sense.

The inculcation of patriotism into every one of us at a young age is identical in form to the inculcation of a sense of religion into church-goers. People have used processes of religion such as this one to set up this thing that behaves like a god: it demands reverence; it demands tithing. It has the power to make your existence miserable, should you incur its wrath.

And, again, everyone has given it cause. There is no one who obeys all the laws or scrupulously calculates his taxes. He does not drive 35 in a 35 mile-per-hour zone, nor does he come to a complete stop. The person who does that would be a saint: The Saint of Traffic By-laws. What kind of crappy saint is that? It’s the crappy saint of a crappy god.

Government and the government are constructs of human imagination and need. They are an attempt to make a real, live, actual god. A drunken, lurching, real, live, actual god, but a real one nonetheless.

Government is not now omnipresent or omnipotent, but we’re trying to improve this god by allowing it to learn how to keep better track of where everybody is, for example, by satellite tracking of our stuff. And if you know where our stuff is, you know where we are. That’s key for a god; You have to know where Your people are. And people are fine with that because they don’t really know what kind of power they’re giving this drunken thing. People aren’t ready (yet) to put computer chips in their bodies, so the chips are going into the cellphones for now.

We can almost pay 10 dollars online to find out where any person is within an error of fifty feet. And I see a day when we can almost pay 5 dollars.

Did the founding fathers know what they were doing? That they were replacing one god by another? I think so; I think the founding fathers knew that they were setting up a substitute god when they separated church from state. That’s practically a smoking gun. And I think they thought of it in just that way: that it was time to change gods. And they knew their new, stupid god would never work if the older gods were allowed to bind to it; without that separation the substitute god would never have taken hold.

And the fathers had reason to do what they did. The old gods hadn’t ever seemed to work out. Why not create a new one? Things couldn’t get much worse.

In reality, things got much better. For a long time. Because the substitute god was consciously made to be crappy, and was meant to stay that way. But now, because engineers–the priests of the crappy god–are able to build things with the potential to allow the government to know where we all are all the time, the god is becoming less stupid. It’s getting smarter, taking on more of the qualities of gods. This is not a good thing. This is not what the founding fathers wanted.

I’m not ready to watch the crappy god evolve and grow; to become less crappy. The reason this god is tolerable to me at all is precisely because it is so stupid. I’m not ready for the government to know where I am all the time. So the more ways I can keep actively bothering the record-keeping function of the government while keeping a low enough profile that I still adhere to the American Compact, the longer I can keep the lurching god off balance and dumb.

That’s the curmudgeon’s goal, even if he doesn’t know it.

The worst crisis since Benedict was elected in April 2005 was sparked by a speech in Germany Tuesday that appeared to endorse a Christian view, contested by most Muslims, that early Muslims spread their religion by violence.  In his speech, the pope quoted 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus who said: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

I’m a little surprised it isn’t raining fatwas yet. Salman Rushdie must be spinning in his grave.

CNN.com - Mystic mushrooms spawn magic event - Jul 11, 2006

Incarnation is improbable, but it happens. Therefore, reincarnation is a possibility. And something like a billion people believe it happens, which means nothing more than that it’s an imagined good thing.

So reincarnation, though improbable, is a possibility, in the way that almost anything is a possibility. Therefore, if it turns out to be a real thing, there must be a specific manner in which it is brought about. It’s possible that it’s a dumb thing, in that it just happens and there is no rhyme or reason for it. On the other hand, it’s possible that there is some higher power that facilitates the process.

If a higher power does act as a facilitator, there is some mechanism by which it is done. My guess is that, whatever it is, it’s a bureaucratic nightmare.

For instance, suppose that the reason one is reincarnated is to fix a specific thing or trait that was broken in the previous life. Say you were a bad father. Your mission in this life is to be a good father. That’s all; in a multitude of previous lives, you have proven that you are brave, or can sing, or can run quickly, so these things aren’t being graded. You have a mission: to be a good father. If you do become a good father, you get to come back and improve something else (maybe humility, or how you swing a baseball bat). If you fuck it up, you will come back as a slug.

In the possible realm that we happen to inhabit, most people have fucked up their previous lives, therefore there are a lot of slugs underfoot.

Reality would be like a job interview, or endlessly filling out a government form. If you don’t use a number 2 pencil, you come back as a slug. If you fill in a circle incompletely—- slug.

In this possible universe—which may or may not be the one we find ourselves in— suddenly the filling out of forms becomes deadly serious practice for the bureaucratic realities of reincarnation. The SAT and the GRE and the MCAT become religious models.

Who knows? Could be.

It may be, because no one really knows, that when one dies, s/he is presented with some kind of puzzle or quiz. How one does on the puzzle or quiz determines whether one spends eternity in heaven or hell.

It’s possible. Many other ludicrous things have really happened; why not this? Pretend that ‘the wheel of fortune’ is a working model of metaphysical reality. If you are wily, and shrewd, and guess correctly, you will be rewarded with life everlasting. If you are an ignoramus, or unlucky enough to get a really hard answer with no common letters in it, you will be everlastingly screwed.

This is what watching ‘wheel of fortune’ can teach us: how to cope with the ultimate gameshow.

There are echos of this from ancient times. For instance, the sphinx and her riddles, where a correct answer meant life, and an incorrect one death.

When someone says “Anything’s possible,” this is the sort of thing he should mean.

What if hamburgers were hot dogs?

What if reincarnation is the way it really is? What if there’s a finite amount of this fluff we call ‘awareness’ lying about, and every so often a particular awareness re-awares? Would that be great or awful?

What if ducks were cows?

What if you could feel wonderful continuously? If moving from one wonderful event to the next were the way of things? Why doesn’t that happen anyway, philosophically speaking? We’ve had thousands of years to work on it.

What if now were a billion years ago? What makes me so special that I’m alive in the present? In fact, I’m far more special than Thomas Jefferson, or Ronald Reagan, or Einstein, or Socrates, because I’m alive, and they’re dead. Should I feel pressured that I’m so special? Those poor dead fuckers!

What if the cow really could jump over the moon? Would that elevate the cow, or denigrate the moon?

What if God came to you tonight? Would your first reaction be one of fear? Subservience? Awe? Ennui? Mine would be a feeling of indescribable panic. I hope I’d get over it quickly.

Now will be a billion years ago, eventually.