Puppy Dogs, Fluffy Kittens, Happy Smiles, and Pretty Rainbows

Daily Afffirmations: Courtesy of Beckett, Shakespeare, Camus, Faulkner, the Greeks, Monty Python, Koheleth, and yours truly...

Birth was the death of him.
--Samuel Beckett

Do I believe in God? But of course. The undeniable evidence of his insanity, his apathy, his impotence, his malevolence, and his non-existence surround and overwhelm me entirely.
--E. Platypus Unum

If Jesus was alive today, he would be rolling over in his grave.  --Salvatore Fibonacci 

It's all fun and games after someone loses an eye.  --Jacqueline Sprat

When a plane filled with pedophiles and murderers crashes and no one survives, fundamentalists will say, "God has punished them for their sins." When a plane filled with law-abiding, pious, God-fearing, church-goers crashes and no one survives, fundamentalists will say, "God loved his children so very much, and he wanted them in heaven with him. God has every right to test the faith of his flock." When a planed filled with atheistic homosexual porn stars crashes and everyone survives, fundamentalists will say, "Who are we to question the Almighty?   He works in mysterious ways."
--Bartholomew Ignacio

Call no man fortunate that is not dead. The dead are free from pain.
--Sophocles

I don't object to dying.  I am quite prepared to leave this sublime sinkhole anytime death greets me.  If there is a hell in my future, I will enjoy the company and the ambience.  So much better than heaven.  What bothers me is the anti-climax and lack of resolution.  If only we could all have some kind of answer just at the very end, right before we cease to exist.  If only God could appear before us briefly and say, "Ha, I fooled you suckers.  I don't exist.  There is no heaven, there is no hell.  You have wasted your life worshiping me and praying to me and wondering if I really exist.  Well, I don't!  So there."  How nice it would be to think of all those miserable believers facing such a revelation right before they fall into oblivion.  That will take those arrogant bastards down a peg or two.  Yes, I admit it.  I value my schadenfreude more than my life. --Octavio Cinzano

Man dies, and he is unhappy. --Albert Camus

Life sucks, and then you die. --Joe College

My name is Bacchus, and I am trying to become an alcoholic.  This is my thrid attempt.  It's not easy drinking every day, all day.  You have to really commit.  I have no patience with sobriety, and no desire to accept reality.  My wife, my children, my career, my many responsibilities must now play second third fourth and fifth fiddle to my new mistress Alcohol.  I was sober for the first eighteen years of my life, and I never want to endure that hell again.  AA is no answer, even if I hoped to end my enslavement to the goddess of drunken oblivion.  I do not believe in any kind of higher power.  I certainly don't imagine that my higher power, factual or fictional, really cares whether I flush my entire life down the toilet.  I did attend one AA meeting, in a rather silly attempt to see if I could get a sober girl into the sack.  After an hour in her company, my desire to have sex with her was overwhelmed entirely by the urge to stuff an eight ball of cocaine up her self-important nostrils.  If only these people had the wisdom, serenity, and courage to shut the fuck up already.  It is traditional for a repentant drunk to apologize to anyone he has hurt while under the influence of the demon liquor.  But I maintain that all of my sins against humanity, my legion of abusive cruelties, have been committed when I was stone cold sober.  For the life of me, I can't remember being anything but pleasant when I was three sheets to the wind.  All of my friends tell me I am obnoxious and neurotic before I begin to drink.  To all of these friends, I hereby promise never to afflict them with my sobriety ever again.  Do I drink out of boredom?  Of course.  Do I drink alone?  Absolutely.  Have I ever woken up face down in my own vomit?  Right now, typing this blog, I have yet to wipe this morning's vomit off my stinking face.  I have a problem.  I admit it freely.  Make this one a double, barkeep. --Tipsy McDipso

I may be secular, but I am certainly not humanist.  Sure, human beings have accomplished some great things in science, art, and culture.  But for every step  taken forward by the geniuses, the dullards and the madmen take us two steps back.  99.999% of all the homo sapiens who have come and gone on this planet in the last 100,000 years have lived completely unremarkable, forgettable, and ultimately pointless lives.  The world would be a finer place if we could systematically eliminate all of the bores, all of the fanatics, all of the nincompoops.  We are surrounded by that most insidious of combinations: ignorance and arrogance.  It's the worst human affliction, and it has haunted us since one primitive tribe decided to eliminate its nearest neighboring tribe for no apparent reason.  People who think they know everything who actually know nothing.  Is there anything more dangerous?  We have world leaders consulting astrologers before they make global decisions.  We have world leaders claiming to speak to God, and claiming that God speaks back to them, and using these alleged dialogues to justify war.  We Americans march into places like Vietnam and Iraq knowing nothing about their history, their religion, or their culture.  We pat ourselves on our own backs with our self-proclaimed moral superiority and we force our own deranged version of democracy down the throats of people who simply want to be left alone.  We are a great and terrible nation, in a world packed to the brim with abundance and horror.  In spite of war and disease and death, the world is now overgrown beyond imagination with boors, savages, and scoundrels.  It's winnowing time, long past due.  And I am no ubermensch, just in case my words give you this impression.  I would barely make it past the first selection.  Truly, it's a shame the Nazis gave such a bad name to genocide. --Adolph Glickstein

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport. --William Shakespeare

Freedom is overrated.  The founding fathers were way too optimistic.  An overwhelming majority of Americans do not deserve and cannot handle freedom.  They yearn to be brainwashed, indoctrinated, and controlled.  Freedom of religion and thought mean that any fool can believe any fool notion that flatters his immense ego.  Freedom of  speech means any moron with spell check can spout unadulterated nonsense and find a group of fanatics who will believe every word he writes.  We live in a society where diversity of thought has actually become scandalous.  "I have the right to my own opinion" has become this year's moronic mating call.  When we lost dogmatic Truth with a capital T, that was a blessing.  Now we have a thousand little "truths" all vying for attention like crying babies in an over-crowded day care center.  Integrity is a lost art.  The liars are winning. --Anne Onimus

The Jews didn't kill Christ. Neither did the Romans. Judas didn't do anything wrong. God didn't order the death of his own son. Jesus didn't volunteer for a suicide mission. Nobody killed Jesus, for Christ's sake! You can't kill a myth, you can't destroy an illusion. Fictional characters last forever, just like plastic toys at the city dump.
--Abdullah Aloysius Finklestein

Every once in a while I get intellectually lazy and emotionally complacent.  Things go my way, and luck seems to be on my side for a change.  A blissfully oblivious serenity drifts through me.  In these times, it is morally imperative for me to catch myself up and face the music.  So I turn on the news, and I hear about Darfur or some horrific local story concerning child abuse, or I head to the nearest library and find a book about Rwanda, Nazi Germany, or the Inquisition.  My delusional happiness fades quickly, as I realize once more what a deliciously delightful shithole we live in.  Humanity is so much excrement.  There's something vaguely comforting about that thought, too. --Patricia Roper-Jones

Your average Christian is neither humble, nor meek, nor mild. He is, in point of fact, just like the rest of us sorry folk, profoundly frightened, incorrigibly egomaniacal. The believer doesn't have the luxury we do. He has to pretend that his life is significant. He has to pretend to believe in an afterlife. Death stares us in the face the moment we emerge from the womb. Personal extinction hovers over us every minute, making a mockery of our every word, thought, deed, feeling, and accomplishment. And what is worse, the oblivious world goes on and on without us, after we are long gone and long forgotten. So we are all praying hopelessly for the apocalypse. Even your average agnostic quietly and secretly prays for the end of the world to come, so he doesn't have to die alone. Hell is, after all, a far better destination than complete nothingness. Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot deserve our sympathy. Look how sweet, fragile, and utterly human they were, desperately trying to avoid dying alone.
--Sammy Pseudonym

Call no man happy till he is dead.
--Aeschylus

He who dies with the most toys is still dead.
--Hortense Magruder

Abortion isn't murder.  It's mercy killing. --Zachary Zilch

Why on earth do we hold our political and religious leaders to a higher moral standard?  They represent us, don't they?  If anything, they should be more obnoxious, more licentious, and more hypocritical than the average joe.  Is there anything more poisonously annoying than a man who actually practices what he preaches? --Wilfred Termagant

Faith and free will. The two biggest lies humankind ever invented. Faith is the limp reed a drowning man clings to when logic and reason and truth have deserted him. We do have free will, of course, but it wasn't a gift from God. Free will is just a lame and ineffectual justification for the fact that evil prospers, crime pays, no good deed goes unpunished, God isn't watching, and no one gives a flying fuck.
--Jacob Zaleschitz

When all else fails, they bring out the old bromide: "Praying makes me feel better; my faith gives me comfort."  Is that why you are so smug and so self-righteous?  Is that why you are so angry and insecure and miserable?  Is that why you won't enjoy one moment of serenity until everyone on the planet worships the same God in exactly the same way?  If you have the face of a happy man, if your actions represent inner peace and divine love, give me a homicidal fanatic any day of the week. --John Q. Public

I feel truly sorry for the vengeful self-righteous witnesses at an execution. They have absolutely no idea that they're next.
--Layta Saymwa 

If only my mother had been pro-choice.
--Cynthia Slotnick

It would have been far better for that man if he had never been born.
--Euripides

My face is my chastity belt. I have to give myself a large dose of the date rape drug just to masturbate without complete revulsion. I would try auto-asphyxiation, but I am far too cowardly to take my own life.
--Trevor Fitzwilliam

Consider this hypothetical: the atheists are dead right, and they always have been. No god, no gods, no demons, no fairies, no angels, no spirits, no heaven, no hell, no afterlife, no resurrection, no reincarnation. This life, and nothing else. Whatever time you have is all you will ever get. What are the implications? For thousands of years, an overwhelming majority of human beings have devoted their lives to foolish lies, absurd myth, morbid fantasy. Which begs the question, what else have we gotten wrong? What other nonsense do we hold dear? How much of our lives is nothing more than pathetic delusion, and the hopeless denial of tragic emptiness?
--Sue Donimus

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle. Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
--William Shakespeare

There are a bunch of pseudo-clever and pseudo-confrontational fanatics roaming the streets and asking random strangers the following question: "if you die today, will you go to heaven or hell?"  To these ignorant and arrogant souls, who pretend to know that they are going to heaven, when in fact they know nothing at all, I will answer in the following manner: there is a 97% chance that I, like every other creature that once lived on this planet, will be stone dead when I die.  I won't be in heaven or hell, since the former is the invention of foolish children, and the latter is the invention of sadistic adults.  There is a 1% chance that God actually exists, in which case I will be sent directly to hell for being born Jewish, for not being baptised, for being a blasphemer, for never accepting Christ as my personal savior, for rejecting both the Unholy Bible and the Koran as the inerrant words of God, for living life as a questioning agnostic, for ending up a confirmed, bitter, intolerant, and angry atheist and anti-theist, and let's face it, for being, in essence, a total meanie. There is a 1% chance that an understanding, compassionate, and merciful God will forgive my many sins against Himself and His children, and I will be placed in a quiet section of heaven where I can spend eternity chatting with Carl Sagan and Robert Ingersoll.  And there is a 1% chance that there will be a bureaucratic oversight, and God will accidentally place me in heaven with a bunch of arrogant loud-mouthed judgmental self-righteous morons.  In this event, I will tap St. Peter on the shoulder, alert him to the error, and ask him to reassign me to everlasting torment in hell, a far preferable destination.  --Sasha Mcswane

We can ask that naughtiest of naughty questions: does God exist?  People have been asking this question for 3,000 years.  For a time, most people cautiously tended to keep such heresies under wraps.  Now we can blaspheme loudly, passionately, and obnoxiously.  In the 21st century, in most democratic countries, blasphemy has become a victimless crime.  Some people still maintain that we humans are too small, too stupid, or too evil to understand the "mystery" of God.  And yet our religions are so specific and detailed in terms of beliefs and rules and regulations.  When a question can't be answered, God is once more lamely consigned to the realm of mystery and intangibility.  I prefer the idea of a blatantly obvious deity who cannot be denied, or questioned, or disobeyed.  I don't need to hold God in my hands, but I want to feel Him holding me.  All the time.  I am theologically co-dependent, a clingy needy possessive kind of worshiper.  If God isn't willing to make a full time commitmemt to me, I will whore after other gods.  There are a small number of men who call themselves scientists and claim to be Christians as well.  They are disingenuous, deceitful, and capable of the most ludicrous compartmentalization.  They know that evolution is true, they know that evolution fundamentally contradicts what we would like to believe about a personal God, so they fight all the harder to disprove it.  They know that it is scientifically absurd and meaningless to suggest that "God created the universe," or "God conceived the idea of evolution and extinction."  But they write "scientific" books anyway, knowing that their target audience won't realize their tired old arguments don't hold water.  If you are  trained in medicine, you cannot be a real Christian, unless you also believe that God is whimsical, cruel, unfair, and contemptuous of the body.  Yes, you can be a real scientist, and you can be "spiritual" in the most abstract sense of that word.  But that's about it.  Once you begin to question the party line, more and more questions spill out inevitably, and doubt prevails.  The fact that we can question God's existence proves that God doesn't exist. --Hugh Jass

Of course there is intelligent life in the universe. None here on earth. Somewhere else. The aliens know we're here, too, but they've never visited us, and they have no plans to visit anytime soon. They have studied humans from afar, and they find us boring, limited, shallow, unsophisticated, trivial, and unattractive. As long as we stay within this solar system, the aliens will leave us alone, and allow us to self-destruct on our own. If we attempt to contact them, they will not answer. The aliens despise us for our religion, they feel nothing but contempt for our trivial priorities, they laugh at us for our pathetic bellicosity. More than anything, they fear us for our obsession with anal probing.
--Gnome De Ploom

If it's not broken, break it. --Skyler Forque

Some people try to discriminate between cults and religions.  I don't.  I am not at all impressed by how many millions of people claim to believe in a certain "major religion", and I am equally unimpressed by the sheer number of centuries that deluded generations have maintained the idea that their incomprehensible fictions are actually sacred texts.  To our western eyes, Mormons seem more ridiculous than mainstream Christians, and scientologists seem positively foolish compared to radical Muslims.  I don't see any reason to create a sliding scale for insanity and bull-headedness.  If there are no gods, than Hinduism is no different from Greek mythology.  If reincarnation is an illusion created to alleviate our fear of death and help people believe in second chances, than Buddhism is simply a philosophy of life, kind of like being on valium all day long.  (I see nothing wrong with this kind of existence, by the way.)  If no personal God created the universe, than Judaism is a lie.  If Jesus never actually existed, than the Gospels are a sad and cruel fiction.  If death is our inevitable and final end, it doesn't much mattter if we are extremely ridiculously absurdly and monumentally in the wrong.  Being just plain wrong is enough. --Millicent Fenwick

Everything doesn't happen for a reason.  Some things happen for no reason at all.  Many clouds do not have a silver lining.  It is not a good thing that so many people went to church to seek comfort on the day after 9/11.  It is ironic.  It is grotesque.  When you can discriminate between reasonable events and irrational pointless madness, you have attained some wisdom. --William Franklin Reeves

This is it.  This is all the life you ever get, your only chance to prosper or fail.  If your mother aborted you when you were just a fetus, that's tough titty for you.  If you die of lung cancer when you are 10 years old, suck it up, loser.  If you pass away peacefully in your sleep at the age of 95 after a long happy life, and you truly have no regrets, consider yourself a lucky stiff.  The prospect of death is most horrifying to those who know nothing about life.  Embrace death, you sorry soul.  It may be the best thing that ever happens to you. --Jasmine Centauri

Oh, you don't "believe" in evolution?  What else don't you believe in?  Gravity, the sky, the ground beneath your feet?  Perhaps you are not awake and alert right now and not actually reading my words.  Perhaps this moment and all other moments in your entire existence are merely hallucinations.  It's all an illusion.  How very Hindu of you to think so.  Evolution is not a religion or a faith or a belief system you can chose to believe in.  It is scientific fact, proven conclusively by 150 years of overwhelming evidence, however unflattering to your precious fragile ego.  No, you are not special, you were not consciously created by a deity who cares about every hair on your head.  You are an animal, a mammal in human form.  Try going without a shower for a few days, and you will get in touch with your inner mule.  Yes, two million years ago you were a short hairy black African, 65 million years ago you were a little shrew digging for grubs and hiding from T-Rex, and 500 million years ago you were a trilobite.  And here's another reality check for you: evolution doesn't give a flying fuck if you believe in it or not.  Evolution made you who you are today, evolution was here long before you were a twinkle in your mother's eye, and evolution will be here long after you and your humanoid ilk are long gone.  Deal with it, loser. --Mike Hunt

Rest in peace?  What a monumentally insulting and hilarious lie.  Dead people don't rest, and they don't feel peace.  They're just plain dead.  On the bright side, they don't burn in hell either. --Sophia Landau