Another one about evolution, this time really stretching every far-fetched, contrived argument well beyond any point of credibility. If I ever discover there was a single person in the world who was convinced by any of the ludicrous arguments put forth in this Tract, I… well… I’m not sure what I’ll do. I think I’ll spend the rest of my life crying.

He’s really outdone himself this time. This one… it’s… it’s just the worst.

The art isn’t terrible, but the message certainly is. This is going to be a ranty/lengthy Dissection, but hey — I haven’t done one in a while.

Oh, come on, Jack. You can’t just take the exact catch-all expression Christians use and substitute “science” in place of “God” as though the two were similar in any way. Wherever did you get the impression that science was an omniscient entity that was beyond the mental grasp of humans, and that it somehow “knows” things that people don’t?

See, God can “know” things that people can’t, so it’s easy for you to fill in all the blanks with the excuse “only God knows” or “God works in mysterious ways”. We, however, do not have that luxury. We can’t attribute all the unknowables to some all-knowing mythological entity that’s keeping tabs on everything we don’t know.

Here’s the thing, and I’ll try to write slowly, here, for any fundamentalists reading: Science… is a set of methods (ways of doing things)… for gathering and comparing information (data, gathered from the world around us)… in order to draw conclusions about that information. If the information isn’t there to gather, then any conclusions drawn are simply not science. (Which is why Intelligent Design isn’t science — because it draws conclusions without observable (seeable, measurable, detectable) information.)

And since when is “science” a “they”, anyway?

Perhaps a better question this kid could be asking his mother would be “Hey, mom, what’s with this mutant overgrown hand of mine?”

It’s hard to see with all the shitty artwork, but the magazine she’s reading is called “TRUTH”. Hardy har. See, it’s only truth when Christians use the word to arbitrarily label a piece of information “factual”. Either Jack has an inability to grasp irony, or he’s a fucking MASTER at it.

It’s less “goo” and more “a mixture of chemicals that even today compose our fundamental components”. We’re still not entirely sure on the precise fucking origins of humanity, life on Earth, or the Earth itself, let alone the universe. There’s a difference between scientific theories and scientific principles or laws. There is no “law of primordial soup”, nor is there a “big bang law”.

Scientists don’t “know” how these things happened, and they don’t claim to if they’re worth a shit. They theorize, and they test, and if they can prove, then they theorize and test again and compare it, and others do the same, and if the results are reproducible enough that there’s a demonstrable statistical significance, then we can get a tiny bit more confident that this is the way things work, or that this was possibly the way things happened.

Anyway, this is another clear example that Jack has no clue about any other perspective but his own. Perhaps if he took a more scientific approach to the way other people think — actually observing them in order to develop a greater understanding — then he wouldn’t sound like he was so absolutely packed to overflowing with parched coils of sun-baked bullshit.

Anyway, moving on. Up.

So, uh, arguing against blind faith, then, huh Jack? *munch munch chomp glomp* MMM, THIS IRONY SURE IS FUCKIN’ DELICIOUS, HUH?

Finding it a little difficult to see how Jack can dismiss evolution while including characters who have undergone such extensive and horrific genetic deformities that we’re basically dealing with a race of rat-people here.

Yep, kid, bunch of humans wading around in a huge pool of goo for no reason. They see the land over there, but they’re all “nah, fuck it, I’m fine here up to my neck in slime. Might be easier to sort of slosh over there where it’s more solid and I could actually stand up, but… you know… fuck it.”

They really need to empty their ashtray.

Of course this all sounds ridiculous when it’s explained by a total fuckhead.

Polywogs! With faces! That could experience glee! Yes, that’s right, single-celled organisms mutated and became giant fucking sperm with smiling faces.

Fun fact: Fish’s mouths were perfectly suitable for fish blowjobs before they grew legs and became walking, smiling fish.

Yeah, this is exactly how it happened. Might as well have gone with the Mr. Garrison interpretation about a fish fucking a squirrel and making fish-squirrels and etc.

Hey, guys, here’s what Christianity is: Every Sunday, Christians get together and spit into cheesecloths for an hour. They sing to get their phlegm going. When they’re finished, they go down into the basement of the church in order to bury the cheesecloths. This is called the Holy Sacrament! During the Feast of All Saints, they dig up the cheesecloths and lay them out on the altar to feed the saints. Jesus was a man with a magical beard. He’d use it to tickle the sick, and their laughter would make them better. (This is the origin of the phrase “laughter is the best medicine.”) The pope keeps Jesus’s beard under his tall hat, and that’s what gives him control of the church. (Now print this out a thousand times and give this to all your friends so that they can know the TRUTH about Christianity!)

The seemingly-sarcastic emphasis on “only” here seems really funny coming from a guy who thinks the universe is 6,000 years old. I think part of the problem fundies have with evolution is that their minds simply can’t grasp the concept of a universe millions or billions of years old.

It’s way too big a number, and I think many of them have this fear that if they stop and realize that the Bible was written back when the primary counting system for most people was “fingers” and (for the advanced mathematicians) “toes”, and the idea of “millions” was completely unfathomable a concept since “thousands” seemed itself practically infinite, or if they even approach questioning their Holy Doctrine at all, they’ll go to hell. Because, you know, God has this immense hatred of people thinking about math. Or anything, for that matter. Can’t even imagine something or he’ll have demons knife-rape your genitals for the rest of time.

Wait… why do they worship that sadistic bag of shit again? If you lived with someone who’d beat the piss out of you for the rest of time if you so much as questioned the age of the universe, wouldn’t you consider that… oh, I don’t know… an abusive relationship? Do all these people have Stockholm Syndrome or something? Seriously, how… how… how do they rationalize this? How? HOW!? And how does anyone find this “comforting”? That’s always the excuse, isn’t it? “Oh, it brings them comfort. Let them have their comfort.” NO. Their “comfort” involves the idea of some immense pervert sitting on a cloud, forever searing people’s flesh off for masturbating or thinking about masturbating. Or for just existing without thinking the magical “I accept Jesus” phrase before their blood stops circulating. This is DANGEROUS thinking, and it has NO PLACE AT ALL in sane civilization. FUCK.

*pant, sigh, sob, pant, fall into profound depression*

Ooh, hey, look, we got our blowjob mouths back! Lot of happy frogs, I tell you what. Both guys and girls — frogs’ tongues are really something, too.

Okay, here’s my explanation of the Theory of Evolution to fundamentalists. Regular readers may have heard this before, but I think it bears repeating (with a little elaboration and detailed explanation for fundies reading):

There’s an island in Micronesia called Pingelap. Years ago, there was a man there who had a rare form of what’s called “achromatopsia”. What that means is, unlike colorblindness, people with achromatopsia are incapable of perceiving a particular color. Anyway, a typhoon wiped out a large portion of the island’s inhabitants, and this man was one of a handful of survivors. This man went on to replenish the island’s population, resulting in an abnormally high percentage of the island’s current inhabitants being afflicted with this normally rare disease.

In other words, an extremely rare trait became relatively common as the result of a population bottleneck a number of generations ago.

The Aceves family in Mexico has another rare disorder — hypertrichosis. What this means is that they grow excessive hair on parts of the body the rest of us do not, including their eyelids. In extreme cases, dense hair covers their entire faces, giving them the appearance of wolf-men. Now, if the man on Pingelap had had hypertrichosis instead of achromatopsia, there would be an island with a large population of extremely hairy people.

In other words, population bottlenecks can make any genetic defects and changes commonplace.

Now, if you extrapolate (expand in application) this trend over millions of years, taking into account the relatively tiny population of humans (and other animals) and our inability at the time to deal well with severe natural disasters and even everyday problems (accidents, disease, problematic births, etc), it’s easy to see how these mutations could propagate and snowball. If hypertrichosis emerges and combines with an emerged dwarfism, or Down Syndrome, or webbed toes/fingers, or any number of other things, after a while, what you have doesn’t come close to resembling what you started with.

If there was a snake that grew legs and reproduced with other snakes and managed to pass on the mutation, and then the snakes with legs were better able to find food and shelter and other necessities because of this advantage, then snakes with legs would excel. It doesn’t mean that snakes without legs would die off just because they weren’t as fit, but we’d now have this new creature with legs that isn’t quite a snake and isn’t just a one-off fluke.

That isn’t to say that any genetic deviation at all results in a completely new species, but substantial enough changes do indeed warrant reclassification. Otherwise, every feathered animal that flies would just be considered the exact same thing (a hummingbird is a duck is a parrot is a northern shoveler), which is wholly inaccurate. It also doesn’t mean that every beneficial mutation that could possibly take place will actually happen, or that it will eventually develop in every genetic line of a species. The answer to “if we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?” is “if some humans have Down Syndrome, how come not ALL humans have Down Syndrome?” One mutation — even a relatively common one — is not guaranteed to take place within an entire species.

And that’s a quick rundown of evolution for fundamentalists. I know I’m wasting my breath… or, well, keystrokes… because these words will splash off their minds like oil from a wet rock since they have a defense mechanism against even THINKING about or CONSIDERING anything they’ve been brainwashed into believing would be contrary to their beliefs, but I figured I’d get this out there. Maybe it will help someone, somewhere, somehow, but probably not.

Anyway, no, Jack, the concept doesn’t work the way you think it does.

Oh, wait, I see, it’s a magic trick. Nothing in the hand… BOOM — a picture of a man fighting a dinosaur with the words “evolution” and “Darwin” on it. Nice show, lady. Bravo.

What’s amusing is that it’s Christians who are constantly claiming that dinosaurs and man co-existed, so I have no clue why such an image would be on a piece of literature about evolution.

Gah, no. There are so many things wrong with this. There’s a profound lack of understanding of what “fittest” actually means. That is, it’s not necessarily the “strongest” or the most powerful, but whatever’s best suited to its environment. But beyond that, the “fittest” is simply “what lives”. Certain adaptations make a particular offshoot of a species better suited to a particular environment, or able to survive in a different environment or on a larger scale. It does NOT mean that the rest of the species that doesn’t share this mutation will somehow immediately and instantly die off.

But even beyond that, there’s this really childish conception of “fit” among humans, and a real ignorance of the fact that humans have augmented their evolutionary standing through technology, and through our absolutely immense population.

Yeah, Jack, only tattoo-covered anthropomorphic pork roasts are fit.

FUCK. Just… NO. You’re an IDIOT, Jack. You can get all your followers to believe you, and a bunch of stupid and confused people who happen across your literature and have no will of their own, but that’s only because you all share the same complete lack of understanding that makes these lunatic ramblings seem like profound revelations.

Oh, lord, we’re not taking the…

So, how did this kid arrive at the conclusion that his fitness was somehow superior to the fitness of others? And, what, black people are all just, I dunno, ghosts or something? People with brown eyes are zombies? This is the absolute most forced and baseless conclusion anyone could ever possibly make, here.

It’s like if a parent told their child, “rock music is the best”, and the kid jumped to the conclusion that Van Halen was the best band that ever existed and that every other band needed to be wiped off the face of the Earth. What? How did that… I… I don’t… what?

I’ve heard other misguided race-based arguments against evolution, like “if we all came from Africa, then Africans are an ‘earlier’ step in human evolution”, but this has to be without a doubt the absolute fucking dumbest and most baseless racial anti-evolution argument I’ve ever heard. Just GYAH.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think we would have gotten very far as a species if there was an ethnic cleansing of all babies.

Kid with brown eyes has something else really wrong with him as well. His pupil is just going to get larger and larger until pretty soon it consumes all things.

Christianity’s final solution See? I can do it, too! I can draw arbitrary and inaccurate parallels to Hitler!

Who says this kind of shit? Seriously. I have the strongest of doubts that there has ever been a single person in the history of mankind who has ever uttered the phrase “evolution does away with morals” and meant it.

And if there’s no such thing as God… what in fuck would lead this kid to say “hey, I can become God!” How… why… would he draw that conclusion? This is the most painfully fucking stupid Tract I’ve read thus far. What’s to keep you from becoming a God? The fact that God doesn’t exist.

There’s Fang again, but you know what? Fuck it. I don’t care. This one’s so remarkably bad that I can’t even enjoy the one thing that doesn’t suck in Chick Tracts.

It’s possible for there to be room for both science and God in a person’s life, as long as one doesn’t allow God to interfere in their science. The second you use God to explain things, you’re no longer dealing in science. That doesn’t mean you can’t believe in God — it means you can’t use him as the answer to every unknown. But I guess that’s a problem if you’re some kind of psychopath who needs this “all or nothing” kind of belief where it’s either “EVERYTHING IS GOD’S DIRECT INTERVENTION” or it isn’t. And if you’re that kind of person, go find somewhere private and fuck yourself. Thanks in advance.

Apparently, this is how this kid’s thought processes work: “What’s that? Survival of the fittest? SUDDENLY I THINK BEING A NAZI IS AN AWESOME IDEA. God doesn’t exist, because we don’t believe such an entity could exist? THEN I SHALL BECOME GOD. There’s no ethereal authoritarian moral dictate? THEN I WILL KILL WHOEVER I WANT, WHENEVER I WANT TO.” Obviously, there’s a little more wrong here than Jack may be letting on.

See, I don’t believe in God and I think evolution is a well-supported explanation for the development of all creatures on Earth, but I don’t consider myself superior in some weird Aryan way and I’m not about to go kill a bunch of people just because God never told me not to. So how do you explain that?

Yet another of the myriad misconceptions of fundamentalists is that moral relativism is all about the person doing the acting, when the truth of the matter is, it’s all about the person being acted upon. If you want to know what’s right and wrong, ASK. This is why it’s problematic when you try making all-encompassing laws that address all individuals based on the will of the majority.

Maybe someone wants to have their testicles tied off and swatted with a ping-pong paddle. If we outlaw this, we’re violating the consent of the individuals who enjoy the activity. If we make a law that everyone has to have their testicles tied off and swatted, then we’re violating the consent of the individuals who don’t enjoy it, or wouldn’t enjoy it at that particular moment. There are, in fact, moral absolutes, but they’re not authoritarian dictates of God, majority or king — they vary from individual to individual.

And that’s what Chick and his creepy ilk don’t quite understand: We don’t need God’s dictate to know how to treat other people, because we’re actually capable of empathy and respect and of understanding what it’s like to be a human, and don’t need fear of eternal pain to be good to other people.

Here’s an absolute: Jack Chick is a fucking lunatic who doesn’t understand what “relative” means.

It’s not that science has proven heaven doesn’t exist, it’s that without observable evidence, we just don’t give a shit, and assume that it doesn’t until we uncover evidence indicating otherwise. It’s not that scientists have this agenda against God or Intelligent Design or whatever else, it’s just that there’s no evidence for any of it, so nobody’s about to go incorporating heaven into scientific theory because it’s not science. What point would there be in including it, anyway? So that scientists can put forward theories that rain is God crying? Thunder is bowling angels?

Why humor her? Why not just kill her? Hey, you said anything goes, right, kid? Strangle her and bury her out in the woods. Or has this kid’s character development thus far as a completely insane and hateful individual who needs to be scared by God into being good just been a bunch of bullshit?

Don’t, kid! Run! It’s a trap! She’s about to use the Vulcan Nerve Pinch on your shoulder!

“Jesus!? Who is He?? Tell me, Cathy… look into the hypno-eyes! Tell the hypno-eyes everything you know! OoooOoOoOooooo… hypno-eyes…”

The expressions on the kid’s and demon’s faces lead me to think the demon might also be unexpectedly plugging up another of the kid’s orifices as well.

“Politically incorrect” pfft. She’s just being condescending and aggressively retarded is all.

And seriously, why isn’t he just beating the hell out of her and leaving her for dead? Come on, he’s supposed to have no morals, remember?

What a bummer? What a bunch of bullshit is more like it. Okay, so God leaves this tree in the middle of the garden, right out in the open. He creates two people who are basically retarded in that they apparently have no conception of good or evil or basically anything. Then, when these retards fail to follow his instructions because they can’t possibly fathom the implications of right or wrong, God throws a huge fit and blames THEM, when they were the LEAST culpable in the entire scenario.

All right, if I brought a retarded child into my house who’d never been instructed on good or bad or right or wrong, and I left a cookie on the table and said “don’t eat that — it’s bad”, and then I went off for a stroll for a while, and then while I was out, someone came in and told the kid “hey, that cookie looks really tasty, you should eat it, come on”, who should I blame when I come back and find that the kid ate it? And what would you think of me if I beat the shit out of the kid, then waited for him to grow up and have children of his own, and then I beat the shit out of those kids, and then waited for THEM to have kids and beat the shit out of all of THEM? Wouldn’t I be… oh, I don’t know… a complete and total asshole?

I don’t really get what made Adam and Eve react the way they did, anyway. I know what good and bad are, what right and wrong are, and I’m totally comfortable sitting around naked in my apartment. I’d be perfectly comfortable if Janet and I both just sat around nude all the time. So I don’t get why “oh shit, I can identify bad now” made them feel they had to put on a bunch of clothes when they were the only two people in the entire fucking world. Why is nudity “bad”? I really don’t understand that.

And come on, you stupid little shit, you didn’t get that from God, you got that from his followers. It’s like if you saw some dude walking home from some They Might Be Giants cover band’s concert and he was singing The Alphabet of Nations and was drunk and got most of the words wrong and you went around telling everyone you saw a They Might Be Giants concert. Only worse, because it’d have to be that nobody could prove the actual They Might Be Giants actually existed, and they were unobservable, and they never released a CD, and all the music attributed to them came exclusively from cover bands, and yeah this analogy is completely falling apart, but that’s even more testament to how fucking ridiculous the entire idea is.

Yeah, really, how come? How come God didn’t just say “you’re all forgiven. Sorry. That really was kinda my fault, the whole apple and tree thing. My bad. I won’t be torturing any of you after all. Sorry for the misunderstanding! Hope we can still be friends.” The whole “Jesus was the only solution” thing makes absolutely no sense, “mysterious ways” or not. It seems like these guys were all writing this big story about God and commandments and miracles and parting seas and all this other crap, and then one of them had the idea for Jesus as a character, and nagged and nagged until they figured out a way to crowbar him into the story.

I mean, sure, to an omnipotent being, all actions are equal, so it’s just as “easy” for God to snap his fingers and forgive us than for him to come up with some contrived and bizarre needless roundabout to accomplish the same thing, but why go with the complicated arbitrariness? And why that particular thing? Why not come up with some dance that people have to do while wearing feathers on their heads, and make it so that the planets switch orbits with magically no ill effects, and the dance can only be done when the Earth is in an even position around the sun, and udders appear in midair at the right time that we have to milk and drink from during the dance in order to achieve salvation?

Hey, look! I’ll bet that bull is about to squeeze out another fine Chick Tract!

So, if I choose to die for all of humanity, what happens? Do people have to buy into my message? What happens to people who selflessly die for total strangers? Firefighters, rescue workers, etc? Are they just like Jesus? Or does God still send to hell the ones who didn’t believe in him in just the right way, even though they’re perhaps more generous than Jesus in that they’re not part God but they still sacrificed their lives?

Jesus taught us to love one another! Therefore, we have to abide by a particular set of beliefs, many of which are completely disconnected from the message of Jesus, in order to get into heaven! It all makes such perfect sense!

What. The. Fuck. Newsflash, Jack: THIS IS NOT HOW SECULAR PEOPLE TALK, NOR IS IT WHAT WE BELIEVE OR HOW WE FEEL. Nobody would ever use “we came from monkeys, you sicko” as an argument against some religious sentiment or another. None of us use evolution as an argument against God — it’s YOU who attach such a significance to the study. I’m not religious, but I give more credit to God than you do by considering that an omnipotent being would be capable of creating a system as complex and intelligent as evolution. Further, it’s YOU who try to use God as an argument against evolution. You are hostile against yourselves and against others, yet you constantly accuse THEM of persecuting YOU. Shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down, and stop acting like you’re the fucking authority on anything. Thanks in advance.

Gah, I’m not even going to bother with this one since it’s so obviously stupid and misguided it needs no detailed commentary. Or, well, other than to point out that for a kid who isn’t supposed to believe in mythological or spiritual things, he sure is buying into his weird “I’m a God just like Jesus” theology pretty thoroughly.

Wow, he’s kind of obsessive, isn’t he? Yeah, going to spend every day of the rest of my life laughing at this stupid little religious girl I met briefly when I was a kid. Hoo boo!

So where does the Grim Reaper fit into Christian theology? He one of God’s buddies? Where does he rank in relation to the other deities and saints and things?

If you believe that all things are made up of atoms, you’re going to hell!
If you believe that the Earth goes around the sun and not the other way around, you’re going to hell!
If you believe that DNA is responsible for the traits of living, carbon-based creatures, you’re going to hell!
If you believe that you can’t make conclusions about the way the world works without examining and comparing observable evidence, you’re going to hell!
If you believe that pie crust is made with flour, you’re going to hell!

*sigh*

I guess I have a bit of explaining to do. You probably remember that I said I’d start doing more Dissections when I was finished writing my book, and I haven’t really been making good on that. In fact, Dissections have become somewhat of a rarity. Truth is, I’ve gotten a bit burned out. Not so much on Chick specifically, but on fundamentalists and oppressive theocratic nutjobs of any flavor. It’s not that I don’t enjoy mocking their laughably ridiculous belief structures and ideas, but, well, it depresses me.

These people — the ones who so proudly champion their moral superiority — aren’t moral at all. In fact, they’re some of the least moral people, regardless of however many charities they might support or fundraisers they might organize. They aren’t motivated by genuine goodness — if they were, they wouldn’t need fear of God and hell. They’re driven by obedience, by the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell. So often, they speak of “temptation”, as though it’s an urge or desire they routinely experience to be a terrible person and the only way they manage to resist is by praying to God. That scares me, a lot.

They don’t care about people, only about their own personal salvation. Yeah, sure, they might “convert” other people, but it’s all ultimately because they believe that if they don’t, they will themselves go to hell. They have to try to domineer everyone else’s lives because it’s the only way THEY will make it to heaven, it’s part of their “personal relationship with Jesus”. And that’s still all mostly about souls than about people themselves anyway.

It would be dangerous to remove their belief system, because then we’d have a bunch of thoroughly dangerous people walking around without their artificial boogeyman consciences to scare them away from raping babies and such, but it would be really fucking nice if they’d stop acting like they could speak from a position of moral authority. I’m more moral than they are by epic magnitudes, and they have no place telling me what I can and cannot do. It’s like a schizophrenic on half a dose of their medication telling someone without schizophrenia that they have to take the same pills in order to ignore the voices in the toaster.

They never once stop to take a good critical look at the Bible and analyze it from the perspective of real morality. A moral God wouldn’t hand out infinite punishments. A moral God wouldn’t condemn people to such infinite punishments simply by virtue of being born a human. A moral God wouldn’t arbitrarily restrict the minds of the first two people he creates so that they aren’t aware of good and bad, and then become infuriated with them when they disobey him and become no longer retarded. A moral God wouldn’t ask a man to kill his son for no reason, and then stop him at the last minute “as a test”. A moral God wouldn’t completely destroy a man’s life and family just to prove a point to Satan. In fact, I can’t think of a single instance in which God demonstrates that he’s actually good. At least, without being a total asshole shortly afterward. It seems to me the real villain of the Bible… is God.

That’s right — fundamentalists worship the devil. If you’re going to buy into this whole “good/evil” deity mythology story, well, it’s easy to spot evil when you see it, and the angry, wrathful God depicted in the Bible is clearly the mother of all terrible nightmare monsters. Nothing else we’ve ever managed to come up with — the Holocaust, war, biological warfare, terrorism, Freddy Krueger, murder, rape, corpsefucking, every villain in every work of fiction ever — is as sinister and cruel as an omnipotent being that will guiltlessly condemn innocent people to an eternity of the most unimaginable pain.

I’m not by any means a religious person. I try to act on others according to what they individually find find good and bad, without any consideration to any kind of belief system or authoritarian dictate. That’s true morality: Treating individuals as they want to be treated, and ensuring that nobody violates anyone’s consent. It’s difficult because it varies from person to person, but that’s how it works: If you want to know what’s right and what’s wrong, ASK. (There’s more to this subject, but I’m writing another full post about it.) You shouldn’t be good or bad to other people because of eternal repercussions, you should be good to other people because, well, they’re people with thoughts and feelings and emotions, and because you’re a person with thoughts and feelings and emotions.

But if I had to take religion seriously, and buy into some kind of theology, I’d say that the Biblical God is the same as the Biblical devil, and that the Bible itself is a tool used to imprison anyone who believes in either. What it calls “Original Sin” is more like a gift that binds us and allows us to reject this entire system, to see it for what it really is, to identify evil when we see it. Maybe that’s why the Biblical God was so upset with Adam and Eve — because they could call him out for what he really was. The Tree of Knowledge is the real Jesus: A savior to provide us a means from escaping a cruel God by choosing not to subscribe to anything in his book of lies. Heaven, Hell and Earth have all struck me as particularly prison-like anyway.

What’s funny is, whether I’m secular or not, this theology can still apply without any alteration to my lifestyle. The best way to believe in God is to not believe in God, because if there is truly some loving and caring omnipotent entity out there, he’s going to love us whether we kiss his ass or not, and is going to respect us more if we were good people without needing to constantly cower in fear worrying about the conditions of our afterlives. A genuinely loving God would be proud of me for living a secular life, and for showing consideration for other people without needing fear as a motivator. A genuinely loving God is infinitely better than the monster depicted in the Bible, but I still don’t believe in him anyway.