Thus Blogged Zarathustra

I love watching God TV. It angers and amuses me in equal measure. Very few comedians are capable of conceiving anything so sublimely ridiculous. Especially good are the made-for-TV movies the channel shows. Truly awful. The acting, direction, writing and production values. They really wouldn't see the light of day if they didn't have a bizarre storyline, where the power of prayer affects a miraculous turnaround in someone's otherwise luckless life. The preachers who talk such utter rubbish as: 'God's always transmitting, it's us as the receiver who is broken'. What the E*G? If God made us, then it's his shoddy handywork with which we're not picking up his signals. All the products that these cowboys sell cost such a ridiculous amount. Books, CD's, DVD's. If they're that helpful, you'd think the almighty would help subsidise the cost. Then there are the embarrassing attempts to 'speak to the kids' with MTV style 'Christian Rock' shows. Why is it that every single Christian Rock song is about Jesus? All of them. I'm a staunch Darwinist, but a whole album about Natural Selection would just be weird.

It would be easy from the vantage-point of 21st Century England to believe that such nonsense is on the way out. We're supposed to believe that 'God', having created the universe, earth and life on this planet then spent the proceeding 4000 years meddling in mankind's affairs (well those in the Middle East anyway). From Noah to Abraham to Moses. He then sends his 'son' along and has a massive change in personality, going from 'an eye for an eye' to 'turn the other cheek', before going AWOL for the last 2000 years. Not a peep from him in so much as 2 millenia. Where did he go? Maybe he finally got round to talking to the Aborigines, or the Aztecs, or maybe the Polynesians? No chance. However, the craziest thing is, this nonsense is not yet in it's last throes. Globally it is expanding and getting everywhere, like sand. It's even trying to infiltrate science with the complete and utter nonsense that is 'Intelligent Design'.

I remember at work a few years back, someone who had called me tried to convert me, in a rather over-aggressive manner - he also prayed to God that my cold (which he called 'the devil') would clear up. It didn't, the E*Ging thing turned out to be flu. During this it occurred to me, why oxygen? Why lungs? If God created us, and our spirit/soul defines us, why did he need to bother with over 100 elements. Why did he need to make us dependent on oxygen and construct such elaborate things as lungs for us to breathe with? Totally pointless. I also recall a Jehovah's Witness who came calling once. When I asked why God created the animals, she responded that the animals were created to serve humanity. So I asked about the dinosaurs. Why on earth were they created? She thought for a second with a look of slight puzzlement on her face, before answering 'to plough the land for our arrival'. What? 65 million years before we got here? Rather than use his own infinite power to do it himself, he creates and then destroys thousands of species of dinosaur to 'plough the land'! Even the tiny ones? Even Pterodactyls? The woman's fellow 'witness' (they always hunt in packs) even burst out laughing at that one.

I'll leave the last word to Friedrich Nietzsche...to find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.