God Needs Killin’

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I am a huge fan of the PREACHER comic books as created by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. Pitch me, homie. A preacher coming from a nightmare childhood plays host to a primordial force and decides God has frakked up creation and goes on a quest to bring God to justice. Sidekicks are his hitgirl girlfriend and drunk, ne’er-do-well Irish vampire. And what happens when Reverend Jesse Custer finds God?

Quit readin’ now if you don’t wanna know. This here blog post is chock full of spoilers. Ye have been warned.

And if you are easily offended, yeah, there are better and more interesting things out there on the internet to suck away your time.

Back to the PREACHER. In the end, after tales of dysfunctional families, sodomy, torture, true love, serial killers, castration, and meat packin’, the preacher hires the Saint of Killers to murder God. Which the Saint is happy to do so he can get vengeance on God for killin’ the Saint’s wife and daughter. Hang ‘Em High meets Albert Camus. Or The Outlaw Josey Sartre.

Now, more spoilers, but ye gods, where have you been livin’? Under a rock? In the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, God is also killed. To me, all of this points to the conclusion that God, as some understand him, needs to die.

In the PREACHER comics, God is a love addict. He sets up creation, creates man, then makes life unendurable so people have to turn to God. Which, in some mainstream Christian thought, is exactly how it all works. If you are sorrowful and hurting, turn to God, love him. But if God planned your life for you to miserable, that makes Him a manipulator, or a monster. See my Holocaust reference below.

Garth Ennis was bright enough and brave enough to document this theology in a violent, graphic, R-Rated comic book. God love him.
But see, this type of needy, diabolical God needs to die. The idea that God has any sort of human characteristics is just Greek mythology re-done. No, God needs to be bigger. In fact, God needs to be so big, He envelopes nothing. God is nothing. God does not exist. God is nowhere, nothing, nix, nihil, empty set. A void in the abyss. A unuttered whisper.

From Karen Armstrong’s brilliant, A Case for God, these are the apophatic aspects of God. Unknowable. Holy. Holy. Holy.

Holy is translated as divine, or sacred, but originally it meant simply other. Holy, holy, holy, God. Other. Other. Other. Unknowable. The Jesuits told me that trying to intellectualize God is like trying to pour the ocean into a thimble. Sit back and ponder that bit of prose, pardner.

If God created the universe, and God is anything like us, that would mean God planned the Holocaust. Which makes God a monster. No, the new God didn’t plan all of that. God’s job is not planner.

I deleted my paragraph on free will here. Free will is the escape hatch for all talk of God, and I don’t want to go out that way.
I maintain that God’s primary job is as a sustainer. Human beings are in an impossible situation and we don’t need some judge in Heaven, we don’t need a monster creator, and we don’t need a love addict. We need a sustainer, someone to help us through, something beyond, that we can hang our hopes and dreams upon, that won’t let us down because no matter how bad it gets, there is always hope. Roll away the stone. The tomb is empty. There is a God. Tim Tebow lead the Broncos in a victory over the Pittsburg Steelers. After something like 22 drives without a touchdown. A resurrection.

God’s job isn’t to stop our tears. It is to cry with us and be with us, in us, speak through us, sustain us.

Any other God that cannot or will not provide love and comfort needs a 45. Caliber Colt Killer bullet, right between the eyes.

I reckon.

Ayn Rand is Your Friend But She Won’t Kiss You No Matter How Much You Beg

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Fundamentally, I agree with Ayn Rand. I take care of me, and you take care of you, and we can come together as equals. I’m not a caretaker kind of guy. No, seriously. My wife was sick this one time, and she had passed out trying to get to the hospital, and I stepped over her inert body to get to work. Well, it wasn’t that bad, but almost.

I had breakfast with an Ayn Rand fan, and he had a VERY interesting take on our girl, Ayn. Yes, she believes in selfishness, but it’s a selfishness that allows us to exist in the world. I take care of me, you take care of you, and we come together as equals. Yeah, I already said that. Feel like your reading Atlas Shrugged? It’s all in the archetypes and the repetition.

The Ayn Rand Fan, or ARF from here on out, made it clear that charity, like taking care of the mentally ill or those who simply can’t take care of themselves is common sense. What is the wickedest form of evil, according to the ARF, is when you coerce a capable human being into charity and take away their right to struggle and achieve. When you give charity to people who don’t need it for the sake of power. It’s like parenting.

If my daughter can make herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and I make it for her, I’m robbing her of her independence. And as my children get older, I need to let them work things out for themselves because Lord knows I am not going to be around forever, and this whole boomerang thing? Boomerang generation, as in your children go away, and then come back to live with the parents. Let me tell you, once my kids are in college, I’ll be somewhere in the Micronesia Archipelago, and if they can afford the plane tickets, they can visit. If not, good luck.

I loved Atlas Shrugged because it was a critique of mediocrity, and you know, most people want everyone to be mediocre. If we’re all mediocre and dull, then we won’t feel bad about ourselves. Like with eating. If you eat well around people who aren’t, it makes them feel bad. Ayn Rand is all about eating fruits and vegetables, to be the best, to give our best with passion.

I won’t get into the whole free market capitalism, less government, blah, blah, blah stuff. I don’t understand enough to have an opinion. But I will say this. Americans do better with less government. We really are by nature anti-government. Get out of our way and let us pursue our happiness, dammit. And those evil corporations have fed us for a century. If you love to farm, well, let’s get rid of the evil corporations. Better yet, create your own evil corporation and make millions and be that wicked 1 percent. Mwa, ha, ha.

Bottom line is this. After talking to the ARF, I felt hopeful, I felt impassioned, I felt good. I felt like the world was good and we can make a difference and things will work out. I felt empowered. And that is why I think people are drawn to Ayn Rand, because there is an optimism and an energy in the work. That we can make millions and fly planes and create new ideas and be powerful in the world.

Okay, this is my last blog post on Ayn Rand. You know why? Because I’ll be too busy starting up my own business selling my books and making millions of dollars and touching the lives of billions. And flying my own plane. Because in the end, I wanna be Dagny Taggert.

Kisses.

Hope for Us Losers – Tim Tebow, Advent, and Bitches, Man, Bitches

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At the heart of Christianity is not our souls, hell, heaven, the odd theology about when exactly the bread and wine become the body and blood. And Christianity has nothing to do with cannibalism. You haters.

At the heart of Christianity is the resurrection, a rebirth, life from death. I was dead, and I am reborn. I was blind, but now I see. That is the bottom line, but we humans have to muddy the water with questions like, “Did Jesus really come back to life?” We have been trained to seek scientific proof in realms where science is not the tool to use.

Oh, you bitches, I’m gonna kill you all with blogging about this stuff. You’ll be praying for me to go back to Ayn Rand. Which I have one more post to do. I won’t go into my full Karen Armstrong, A Case For God now, but all of this ties into that wonderful, life-changing book.

Remember in Dead Poet’s Society, where the textbook gives instructions on how to graph a poem? Using science on religion is exactly that. Stupid. So, did Jesus come back to life? It doesn’t matter. What matters is in the truth behind the facts. There is always hope, always good, always God in the world.

Which brings us to our newest messiah, Tim Tebow. Tebow changed the story of the Broncos this year, changed the narrative. We started the season with Kyle Orton, and it was just re-runs of last year. Yeah, this is the Happy Days where Richie nearly gets beaten up, but the Fonz saves him. Yeah, we’ve seen this before. Only as far as the Broncos went, this was where the bullies beat the hell out of Richie. Richie Cunnnigham. Of the Milwaukee Cunningham’s.

Our season was dead. We couldn’t win a game. We were cold with death. Death was everywhere. There were flies on the windscreen.

But lo, a voice is crying in the wilderness. Let despair not into your heart. There is hope. There is life. Roll away the stone. And Tim Tebow changed the story, and the Broncos started to win. And the narrative played itself out in game after game. We were losing. No way we could win. Down by ten points with two minutes to go? It’s impossible. We are dead. Turn off the T.V.

And yet, Tebow played out the resurrection and we won. In prol’ly ten years, we’ll have a T.V. movie about Tebow. Hope On Grass: The Tim Tebow Story. Um, prol’ly not that title, but you get my point.

In this season of Advent, in the Roman Catholic Church, it is a dark time, days are short, it’s cold, and yet, we celebrate the coming of the light, the hope of a new life, change when change seems impossible. In the darkness, in the cold, listen, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.

Which is just another way of saying, we don’t have to be scumbag losers forever. Even normal, troubled people like us can come from behind and win the big game. God bless you Tim Tebow, where ever you are.