Wordle

Jesus Was A Nutter

A few days ago I was handed a leaflet by a couple of young men wearing ties. I thanked them and explained that they had ten seconds to get the fuck off my porch before the Cats Of Hell were unleashed. They both obeyed without question or apparent comprehension. A skill they presumably developed in church.

The leaflet, it turns out, is an insurance policy. "God wants you to be 100% certain that when you die you will go to Heaven." How kind.

In a series of numbered clauses, the leaflet goes on to explain what must be done in order for the reader to go to Heaven and avoid the less attractive option of eternal damnation in Hell.

I confess I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about God ever since I blew the cover off the whole Santa Claus scam. Having been lied to about the existence of one old geezer with a silly beard I worked by analogy and dismissed the existence of the other. Later in life this skepticism extended to Jerry Garcia, thereby saving me from The Grateful Dead. However, a quick inspection of the leaflet revealed that the "naughty or nice" test employed by Santa Claus is pretty small beer compared to the one God uses. And more interestingly, God's criteria exhibit clear signs of profound mental illness. Not only is God working in mysterious ways, it appears he may be wearing a tinfoil hat.

One of the areas that most puzzles me about the Christian God is his parenting skills. We are told repeatedly that he loves his children and has infinite mercy, yet he has a lot of funny rules and regulations about getting in to Heaven. The fundamental problem is that we have all sinned (more accurately our distant relatives did during an incident involving some fruit), and as sinners we cannot go to Heaven. But it's not just that the Pearly Gates are locked to us and we have to hang around outside looking sheepish. It's rather worse. The only way we can pay for our sins is to spend eternity in Hell.

If we step back from this, squint, and assume that the original message must have got mangled in the translation, the God it portrays might be generously regarded as an overzealous disciplinarian. Something like the Headmaster of an all-boys school who is a little too keen on using the cane on teenage backsides. But reading a bit deeper we uncover something far more sinister.

It turns out that there is nothing we can do in terms of living righteously and selflessly and devoting ourselves to helping others that will get us into Heaven. The only way to avoid eternal torment in the fires of hell whilst being poked with sharp sticks like an unfortunate cocktail sausage blah blah... the only way to avoid all that is to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

But it gets far worse. This "saving" concept implies that someone who spends their life disemboweling children for kicks can say: "Oops! Sorry Jesus! Messed up a bit there, but you're the bee's knees, let me in please," and the aforementioned Pearly Gates will swing open with a swishy-swish.

This is the nature of the Insurance Policy described in the leaflet I received from the young men. JC is the Get Out Of Hell Free Card.

Clearly the goal of the pamphlet is to frighten people into a church. And yet I cannot imagine how such a plan would work. Because if I believed even a fraction of this I would be absolutely furious. Perhaps that's what the crazies with the wild hair and plastic bags are screaming about. Maybe they suspect some of this is true.

Basically there is no "naughty or nice" test at all when it comes to determining eternal salvation versus eternal damnation. It all comes down to bending the knee to this Jesus bloke.

And that is what got me thinking. While it's true that this basic bizarre message is dotted over different parts of the New Testament, a lot of the information provided about salvation comes from Jesus himself. Pretty suspicious. I imagine that if I were trying to get a new cult off the ground and had absolutely no ethical or moral compass I might conjure up a doctrine in which a belief in Me as the Son of God was the only way people could avoid eternal torture. The advantage of this scenario is that it does not require that God is a sadistic lunatic. God is merely guilty of allowing his PR department to employ someone like Jesus.

But even here I can not simply dismiss Jesus as an unscrupulous, self-promoting flim-flam man. Perhaps it's my Anglican upbringing, but I remember being quite impressed as a kid with some of what Jesus said. The whole love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, judge not lest you be judged stuff. Can this really be the same guy who threatened those who chose not to follow him with Hell?

It's this contrast between the hippie-flowers-and-fishes-be-excellent-to-one-another Jesus and the one who sounds considerably more pissed off than Lucifer that I find so baffling. In fact Hell is the central problem to the whole story. It is quite clear from the Bible that Jesus believed in Hell. Indeed, in one of those bits of the Bible that got cut out by an editorial committee (it has a fancy Latin name that sounds like a soft cheese), the reason Jesus was AWOL for three days between being stuck in the tomb and amazing everyone is that he had to pop down to Hell to rescue Moses and the other patriarchs. He may even have rescued some women. The problem being that Moses et al couldn't have been saved by accepting Jesus as Savior on the simple grounds that they died before Jesus was born.

One might argue that if Jesus and/or God (no doubt the Holy Ghost would have a say as well) ran strict to principle they would say "too bad ancient prophets, but these are the rules, you're going to have to stay down there with Old Nick." I suspect the reason an exception was made was to avoid awkward questions when newbies arriving in Heaven asked if they could have a quick chat with Abraham and Isaac and were informed they were permanently unavailable.

So how can all this be reconciled? If we adopt the working hypothesis that Jesus existed and that he is accurately quoted in the Bible, he expresses timeless principles of goodness. But turn a few pages and he is either preaching narcissistic intolerance or he is really letting his hair down and transferring demons from a person into a herd of pigs who then go and drown themselves in the Sea of Galilee.

I don't care who his Dad was. This is not the behavior of a sane man.

Stay Low

Stay low today
Stay underground and undercover
Hey hey
I just could not believe it man

You've lost your way
Pulled underwater by the siren song
Hey
I just could not believe it man

He sits alone
And stares at the walls
Nobody phones
Nobody calls
But don't worry hon
The cat's never died before

The shadows move
Make the woman cower
She's shaking like milk
This whole town's turned sour
Such a sweet guy
Till she's thrown from the tower

I just could not believe it man

Why Not Be...

You could be married
You could be carried
Down to the alter for reasons you don’t comprehend
So why not be a cat?
You could be working
Selling your time
Until you’re sixty-five and then you die
So why not be a cat?

You could sleep all day
Be handed food
In a bowl marked ‘kitty kitty kitty kitty’
You could wash your coat
Look super cool
We all love kitty kitty kitty kitty

You could be drawn in
Green eyes, you’re falling
Marry a woman that you never even loved
So why not be a cat?
You could be carried
Down to your graveside
By people who never even heard your songs
So why not be a cat?

You could sleep all day
Be handed food
In a bowl marked ‘kitty kitty kitty kitty’
You could wash your coat
Look super cool
We all love kitty kitty kitty kitty

Kitty kitty kitty kitty
Ooh
Kitty kitty kitty kitty
Ooh

Bubblehead

Funny little bubble-headed thing that I picked up at the store
Couldn't find directions nobody would tell me what you were for
Looking for the batteries
The vanities
The flatteries
Wonder what the matter is
Show me to the door...

Once more

I could take you to China
But that's a dangerous rhyme
Even in three-four time
It's a sauna in three-four time


Funny little futurama mama looking up at the sky
Couldn't find a thermostat to bring you down from permanent high
Looking for the schemers
And the hippy dippy dreamers
Trying to believe her
Instead I wonder why...

Why oh why?

I could take you to China
But that's a dangerous rhyme
Even in three-four time
Drakkar Sauna in three-four time

One two three four

Spending my time
Staring at clouds
Wondering why
Your emotions wear a shroud

Follow the line
Shrouds are the things
Usually used
For keeping warm dead human beings

I never claimed to be
A flatterer
I never blamed you for
Your swinging moods
Your many flaws
Your frozen days
One two three four


Spending my time
Washing my paws
Wondering why
Your heart's kept behind closed doors

Follow the line
Doors are the things
Usually used
For keeping out live human beings

I never claimed to love
Your character
I never blamed you for
My open wounds
My weeping sores
My broken limbs
One two three four


I never claimed to be
A janitor
I never blamed you for
Your swinging moods
Your many flaws
Your frozen days
Famine and wars
My open wounds
My weeping sores
My broken limbs
One two three four

I can haz... DO NOT WANT!!!1!

Despite the adage that you cannot teach an old Kat new tricks, I recently discovered that I had a previously unknown talent. I am good at producing amusing captions for photographs of cats. Rather predictably, this skill figures to earn me $0, but it seems a shame to waste it. Consequently I spend quite a bit of time at I Can Has Cheezburger. Indeed it was the success of my efforts at the site that revealed my ability in this area.

My only previous experience in this general field occurred in grade school when I was compelled to write a report about Kenya. Rather than go to the library to research the topic, I decided it was easier to write to the Kenyan embassy and have them send me anything they felt would be useful. If anyone knew what constituted useful information about Kenya I felt it would be them. Much to my delight I received several brochures by return of post.

Since the teacher who assigned the project was the type of bearded, right-on, let's build a tee-pee tree-hugger that blighted much of the UK education system in the 1970s, it occurred to me that cutting-and-pasting [1] images from the brochures into my report would add the kind of "making-it-my-own touch" that the smelly hippy was always going on about. However, something in my wiring prompted me to change the captions of the photographs I included in my report. This started off fairly innocuously. A photograph showing the Agriculture Minister addressing farmers, for example, was re-captioned "Sports Minister congratulates swimming team on first Olympic medal." However, I soon tired of merely lying and decided to push the envelope. Thus a photograph showing Kenyan business leaders sitting around a large conference table received the legend "Pink Floyd Fan Club discusses fund-raising possibilities in order to buy Syd Barret a new brain." As I suspected, my teacher was so busy making his pupils "feel good about themselves" he apparently had insufficient time to read the report in any detail. [3]

[1] Note for younger readers: Cutting-and-pasting used to involve scissors and paste [2].

[2] An adhesive.

[3] I later discovered that most reports are only skimmed if read at all. I used this fact to my advantage when working for NASA, thereby freeing up a lot of time for flirting with grad students at Johns Hopkins University.


My most successful "lolcat" to date involves a picture of kittens in classic "I'm much bigger than I at first appeared" defense posture with the caption "Justin Bieber visits Humane Society." (As an aside, I should mention that I have no idea who Justin Bieber is. I saw his name in several other lolz and cut-and-paste it.) It's a rather obvious and one-dimensional joke, but it was well-received by my fellow lolologists. Indeed it was the remarkable acclaim that this lolcat received that prompted this blog entry. As of this writing, 4,654 people have taken the trouble to "vote" for this lolcat (it has received an average vote of 4.5 cheezburgers on a 0-to-5 scale) and 1,149 people have added it to their favorites list. The image has also been shared on social networking sites, including 1,877 instances at FaceBook.

Part of me is alarmed by these numbers. It's the part that still gives a crap about sociological issues that don't have a direct impact on me and is easily suppressed. The part of me that views everything in the light of how I might profit from it is more sanguine. As a result of this and my other lolcats I now have 4,005 fans at the site. Statistically this implies a reasonable pool of single women in my target age-range. Further, they have been pre-screened to enjoy my sense of humor and, more importantly, to like cats. That's the sort of critical filtering that you simply don't get with eHarmony.com. And since I am currently single and never leave The Kattery, what better chance to meet potential partners?

I was thinking along these lines and developing a plan of attack when I stumbled across what may be a fatal flaw. The chain of logic requires some additional information about lolology convention. Most captions involve misspellings and incorrect grammar. Thus "I am good at captioning" becomes "Iz gud at capshunning." One of my own lolcats employing this device is shown. The problem is that many site regulars insist on using this mode of speech at all times. There are long chat threads that follow many of the most popular lolcats that show the kind of fanatical adherence to dogma more commonly associated with Spanish Inquisitors and fans of Manchester United Football Club. For example, the chat thread beneath my "Bieber" lolcat begins as follows.

Skaerz awl teh kittehz!

*whispers* hoo awn erf iz justin beiber?

Ai haz heered uv justin tiem….

Whispas: Himz a teenaged teenage pop singa !!

And he’s teh suck.

Taht maekz mi fiel beddur, annipuss, knoen dat Ize nawt teh oanlyist wun aleib didun knoez hu in teh whirrld iz dis beiber pursen!

*yoinks torty adn wite kitteh cummin owt of borx* oooh teh cyootnesses, tehy iz ORL gorjus

Ohai GC !! Yoo goanna hab yor hans ful, aifinkso !!* PB purrfurz teh awlder kittehz wivvowt the kitten sharp clorz * Wotz gnu in Souf Arfrika ??* BTW, yor bloo linkee duznut werk proppa. Nede a noo fawmat *


If you understood all of the above it is possible that the remainder of this blog will confuse and/or insult you.

Here is my problem in the context of using my lol-fans as a potential dating pool. It strikes me as quite possible that, based on the above quoted thread, many of its members are at best annoying and at worst in desperate need of in-patient treatment at a mental health facility.

Imagine the scene. It is my first date with emo_sk8r_chik. (She's older than her name might suggest. Honest.) We are seated for dinner, she picks up the menu and says "I can haz cheezburger?" Given where we "met" I would only wince slightly. Her next words are "Dey not hav mowse? Dese hoomins weerd." We're getting into the realm of "only amusing occasionally." Roughly once every five years or so.

However the real problem would not arise until after dinner in my bedroom. Imagine, if you dare, the young lady slinking through the bedroom door wearing nothing but Halloween cat ears and eye-liner whiskers. She bats here eyelashes seductively and purrs "I can haz oral?"

My ordinary enthusiasm for the project would... Wilt.