descension, I’m offering Christians the following, unsolicited, blanket
absolution of their sins against reason:
Dear Sister or Brother in Christ:
I am secretly reserving in your name a scintilla of the benefit of the doubt, and
accepting that somewhere in the nethermost recesses of your reptile brain one
neuron is saying to another, “I know that there is no God.” (Nurture the synapse
that links those neurons! It is all that stands between you and total insanity, that is,
the inability to recognize and respond rationally to the world around you, to tell the
imaginary from the actual.) You go ahead and talk about how there’s this big old
omnipotent god and he’s your pal. I’m going to give you a little credit in spite of
yourself. I choose to believe that you really don’t believe. And I’m rooting for that
synapse. You are welcome.
Love,
Brother Sam
absolution of their sins against reason:
Dear Sister or Brother in Christ:
I am secretly reserving in your name a scintilla of the benefit of the doubt, and
accepting that somewhere in the nethermost recesses of your reptile brain one
neuron is saying to another, “I know that there is no God.” (Nurture the synapse
that links those neurons! It is all that stands between you and total insanity, that is,
the inability to recognize and respond rationally to the world around you, to tell the
imaginary from the actual.) You go ahead and talk about how there’s this big old
omnipotent god and he’s your pal. I’m going to give you a little credit in spite of
yourself. I choose to believe that you really don’t believe. And I’m rooting for that
synapse. You are welcome.
Love,
Brother Sam
| Annotated by God, through Sam Singleton Atheist Evangelist |
| The Little Things |
| Sunday, September 14, 2008 |
I’ve been on the nice folks at Dogberry, Bottom and Sly, who look after the
business end of Sam Singleton Atheistic Evangelism Worldwide, to fix Brother
Sam up with one of them slick-ass custom MySpace pages like the regular show
biz types all have. Then I went and actually looked at MySpace so as to create the
impression that I knew what I was talking about. And right there, down in the
lower left corner of Brother Sam’s generic MySpace home page, stuck in beneath
ads reading “Hey Pimp My Profile” and “Do You Believe in God?” was one that
went, “Are you a real atheist or are you just pretending? Test if you have the God
gene.”
After fleetingly considering the irony of such ads appearing on my site in the
first place, I ignored the first one and clicked on the second. It was a handy online
salvation site, so I went ahead and poked the right buttons and committed my life
to Jesus and signed up for some future counseling and the newsletter.
But I’m still so het up over that bottom ad that I could just spit. “Are you a
real atheist or are you just pretending? Test if you have the God gene.” I realize
that the mountebanks that put that ad there were just deliberately trying to finagle
the stupid into opening the site and taking the test so’s they could fuck them out of
their money at some point, but the way they phrased it seems to gotten way up
under my hide and has gone to poking at me till I can’t sit still. Now, I’m gonna go
on ahead and call them goddamn idiots right up front here, so’s there’s no doubt
where old Brother Sam’s going with this thing, but their phraseology has got to be
parsed. And Brother Sam is a man to do it. By god.
And for all my wailing and gnashing of teeth, it comes down to something as
simple as: If you’re stupid enough to believe that having the so-called god gene
means you have to believe in god, you are stupid enough to actually believe in god.
Maybe there ought to be a blood test. God-gene positive? No elective office for
you. In fact, if the entire congress was screened, and all those with the gene were
removed from office on the basis of their inability to distinguish fantasy from
reality, the entire senate and all but one representative (Pete Stark, Democrat from
California) would be out of work, or at least back to lurking around schoolyards
and rest-stop men’s rooms.
business end of Sam Singleton Atheistic Evangelism Worldwide, to fix Brother
Sam up with one of them slick-ass custom MySpace pages like the regular show
biz types all have. Then I went and actually looked at MySpace so as to create the
impression that I knew what I was talking about. And right there, down in the
lower left corner of Brother Sam’s generic MySpace home page, stuck in beneath
ads reading “Hey Pimp My Profile” and “Do You Believe in God?” was one that
went, “Are you a real atheist or are you just pretending? Test if you have the God
gene.”
After fleetingly considering the irony of such ads appearing on my site in the
first place, I ignored the first one and clicked on the second. It was a handy online
salvation site, so I went ahead and poked the right buttons and committed my life
to Jesus and signed up for some future counseling and the newsletter.
But I’m still so het up over that bottom ad that I could just spit. “Are you a
real atheist or are you just pretending? Test if you have the God gene.” I realize
that the mountebanks that put that ad there were just deliberately trying to finagle
the stupid into opening the site and taking the test so’s they could fuck them out of
their money at some point, but the way they phrased it seems to gotten way up
under my hide and has gone to poking at me till I can’t sit still. Now, I’m gonna go
on ahead and call them goddamn idiots right up front here, so’s there’s no doubt
where old Brother Sam’s going with this thing, but their phraseology has got to be
parsed. And Brother Sam is a man to do it. By god.
And for all my wailing and gnashing of teeth, it comes down to something as
simple as: If you’re stupid enough to believe that having the so-called god gene
means you have to believe in god, you are stupid enough to actually believe in god.
Maybe there ought to be a blood test. God-gene positive? No elective office for
you. In fact, if the entire congress was screened, and all those with the gene were
removed from office on the basis of their inability to distinguish fantasy from
reality, the entire senate and all but one representative (Pete Stark, Democrat from
California) would be out of work, or at least back to lurking around schoolyards
and rest-stop men’s rooms.
| Ad Insults Intelligence of Those Without Intelligence |
| Can a Real Atheist Have the God Gene? |
| Sunday, September 28, 2008 |