I didn’t think yesterday was going to be epic, oh, but it was.

I went to work and plotted some points, and managed to leave work such that the rain started right when I opened the door to my building, and made dinner such that I was done right when the tornadoes started. After that, I read some journals, and washed the dishes, and read more journals. And then, right around midnight, Mike Brownstein left a post on my Facebook. A link to a one-line news article that said that “Touchdown Jesus” off of I-75, was on fire.

Then, like that, I grabbed the ol’ SuperFunAdventureCodex, and crossed one more item off my list.

A transcript of the list is given below.  (The items are listed in order of importance.)

Things I’d Like to See:

• Christopher Walken performing a spoken-word version of David Bowie’s “Heroes”
• Ally Sheedy naked
• Jesus Christ on fire
• solid room-temperature superconductors
• Nuclear power renaissance
• identity of “Deep Throat” revealed
• functioning and economical EUV lithography system
• destruction of the Roman Catholic Church
• a cure for diabetes
• Labyrinth II
• electric cars gaining widespread popularity
• the Kurzweilian Singularity
• the domestication of the Komodo Dragon
• old-school breakdancing making a comeback
• the identity of who killed Laura Palmer
• Sarah Palin running for office again, so we can continue to make fun of her.
• Dolph Lundgren fighting Jet Li
• Reliable jetpacks
• Gene Hackman in drag
• Concise, coherent, and preferably closed-form solution to the Problem of Evil
• Collapse of the Kim Family Regime
• Passage of the ERA
• Passage of a amendment to legalize same-sex marriage
• Men everywhere wearing fedoras and flat caps at all times, like they did in the 1920’s
• Freddy Kruger fighting Jason Voorhees
• all my friends living happy and fulfilling lives
• repeal of fireworks laws
• to see BP go under

For those of who have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, a little backstory.

Shortly after I moved to Ohio to start grad school, right around the time the neo-cons and Christo-fascists went mad with power, the Solid Rock Church spent $500,000 to build “King of Kings,” a 62 foot bust of Jesus Christ facing I-75. The statue was ostensibly to help people by serving as “a beacon of hope and salvation,” but in practice, the colossal eyesore merely served as a navigational marker to lead people to the flea market. Within minutes of its dedication, the people of the greater Cincinnati area rechristened the statue “Touchdown Jesus,” for obvious reasons.

Well, last night, Touchdown Jesus was struck by lightning by the same thunderstorm that not-killed me with tornadoes, cloud-to-ground lightning, and baseball-sized hail, proving once again that Yahweh is some linear combination of retarded, incompetent, and/or drunk.

Also, their was apparently the Hustler Hollywood sign for the adult store across the street was completely undamaged, signifying that Larry Flynt is truly favored by the Lord.

Also, apparently statues can catch fire.

That kinda threw me for a loop, for we tried to set literally everything in the universe on fire back in Boy Scouts. Then I found out Touchdown Jesus was made of styrofoam, and everything made sense. It was a giant metal frame, next to pond, covered in styrofoam with a fiberglass skin. Apparently it had a lightning rod, but it didn’t work. I’d like to take this time to point out that lightning rods are a proven technology and have no moving parts.

The comments for that YouTube video are priceless, by the way. I could say more about this, but I’m going to let Percy Shelley take over from here:

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

You may ask: “Wasn’t Boobquake was like a week ago, isn’t this a little late?”

Yeah, it is. But I wanted to keep tabs on New Madrid before I spoke up.

See, I’m more qualified to report on this than some of the proper media outlets, because I actually know what was going on, because I’m friends with Jennifer McCreight. I joined her Non-Theist Society about three years back, and in that time she lead me on some wacky adventures, which really helped me grow as a person. I also learned a lot about her that isn’t reported elsewhere, such as her inability to ride a bicycle.

Jen only ever invited 50 people, whom I was one of. I didn’t invite people, because I can’t go around asking chicks to show me their cleavage without looking like I was Creepy O’Creeperson or something. In the meantime, the intertubes caught fire and all hell broke loose. By the time the day in question came about, about a million people were invited. As in 10^6. Granted, [at the time of writing] only 213,918 participated, and an unknown (but presumably significant) portion of which were dudes, but that’s still larger than all but 94 cities in the US.

I did go to the meeting by the bell tower, which Jen setup after several media requests to have something film-able. Girls in low-cut tops milled about as geology majors set up seismographs to monitor the Boobquake epicenter. Fun was had by all. Still, before going out, I used my Facebook status to inform my friends of my final wishes, in the event of death by misadventure, as that shifty Yahweh has been after me for some time.

For the record, if I were to die:

1) All of my worldly goods are to be sold on eBay, with the revenue generated to be used to commission Jan Hammer to compose a requiem for me — so that I may live forever wherever synthesizers and moderately-priced causal dining meet; and

2) I don’t want to be buried in a Pet Sematary; I don’t want to live my life again. Oh no. Oooooooh noooo…..

The Purdue Exponent managed to succinctly capture the zeitgeist of the moment in a single headline. Jen managed to summarize it even better at the bar a week later:

“The media is retarded. I knew this before, but this only reinforces the belief.”

No seriously, look at this shit:

The problem with twenty-four hour news channels is that news doesn’t really doesn’t happen twenty-four hours a day. There’s maybe twenty-four hours of news in a week. Granted, that’s how Jen & Co. managed to get on, but Jeanne Moos interviewed Jen for two hours, and the finished product consisted of random annoying people on YouTube, YouTube footage of the event itself, a camera being held up to a monitor that had YouTube clips playing on it, and part of a Skype interview. Even TV realizes there’s nothing good on TV, and plays on the computer instead.

I refuse to comment on Jeanne Moos’ Chroma Key boobs, because I wish to maintain my willing suspension of disbelief, and pretend that shit never happened.

Also, old media camera guys are dicks. Did you know that? Yeah. They just walk up to chicks and say: “Show us your cleavage. C’mon, show us your cleavage.”

Hey now! I happen to know those cleavages, as well as they women they’re attached too — and that’s no way to treat women. Hell, the camera guys didn’t even give them beads, like in those Girls Gone Wild videos. Hell, they didn’t even politely goad them for twenty minutes, like in those shitty knock-off Girls Going Crazy videos.

In the end though, Boobquake was a good thing. In the Soviet Union, the intelligentsia enjoyed broad creative freedoms that the remainder of society did not. The reason is that the intelligentsia posed no threat. Churches and countries come and go, but many of them can endure the most profound of philosophical treatises, but the legitimacy of any regime is easily eroded by a joke that catches on. For this reason, atheists, agnostics, pastafarians, et.al. everywhere can only profit from making fun of people.

“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions…” -Thomas Jefferson; excerpted from a letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, July 30, 1816

I went over to a Super Bowl party tonight. I’d tell you my thoughts on the game, but apparently re-broadcasting, or any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game, without the express written consent of the National Football League, is strictly prohibited.

My friend Brian made chili seriously amazing chili. I couldn’t stop eating it. Now I feel like something’s going to burst out of my chest like in Alien. So, I’m going to take a break from studying for the quals to curl up with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol until this all blows over. Still, there is the very real chance, given my genetic make-up and family history, that I am currently having a heart attack.

So, with what may or may not be my dying breaths, I want to tell the world that I hate Christianity, because they keep doing shit like this:

That cost $3.01 million. That guy in there was Tim Tebow, who’s made something of  a name for himself by being pretty and using makeup, effectively making him the Taylor Hanson of collegiate football. The ad was paid for by Focus on the Family, a non-profit, tax-exempt hate group which runs the gambit of all the common causes with which Christians poison our society. They are devoted to the suppression of individual liberties through a staunch anti-choice agenda, compounded with a decided anti-science philosophy via their alliance with the Discovery Institute.

Most heinous of all, Focus on the Family opposes the rights of people of all orientations to marry the ones they love. Read that again. They oppose people being in love, and anyone who opposes love is the enemy of Yellow Hat Man.

Focus on the Family begged for change to scare up $3.01 million, to tell people that abortion is bad. I beg to differ, case and point:

I wondered how many people starved tonight, because the Religious Right was neither: opting to keep Haitian food banks empty to keep the cable networks laden with their precious propaganda. I made a few calculations to see what exactly $3,010,000 can buy in this day in age:

At this point, August has already sent an angry letter out to be proofread before sending it to me. This is about when other Christians approach me and say: “You complain about how these ‘Christians’ act…but that’s not the ‘real Christianity’…” Everyone claims to have the real Christianity. Well, I offer a challenge to the “real Christians”. If you really love your neighbor, you’ll find a way to stop these people. Have your God use his magic if you need too. I thought I was a real Christian for a while. Then I remember that Jesus was a long-haired construction worker who shot his mouth off at every opportunity. If Christ were here today, he’d walk into your churches, break all your shit, and somehow weasel out of doing any jail time. He did it before, and allegedly, he’ll do it again.

Don’t try to save me. Save yourselves from yourselves.

I’m doing the Christians a favor by going to Hell. By going to Hell first, I’ll have the keg tapped by the time they all get there, so I’ll have worked out those first few cups of foam.

Earlier today, Ray “Bananaman” Comfort and Kirk “College Kids are to Young to Remember When I was Famous” Cameron, went viral with their remix version of Charlie Darwin’s smash hit, On the Origin of Species.

Their version intentionally omits a few chapters, and includes a fifty page reductio ad Hitlerum introduction, which Comfort wrote/plagiarized.

These doctored copies were then distributed around the country to be handed out to random-ass people on the campuses of top universities yesterday. That makes sense, because when I think of a fundamentalist Christian jihad, I immediately think of MIT and Caltech. They came to Purdue a day later, since I guess we were a second-round draft pick.

I’d review the introduction in detail for all of you, since they were being handed out here, but I didn’t get one, which sucks. I knew I should’ve taken the long way home today.

However, since turnabout is fair play, I have come out with my own version of the Holy Bible. The SuperFunAdventureBible clears up and confusing or flowery passages and allows the reader to concentrate on the real crux of the Christian faith:

Christians should be thanking me, as I carefully removed (with a utility knife) all of the times the Bible urges people to participate in:

• murder (Ezekiel 9:5-6)
• genocide (Deuteronomy 20:16-17; Exodus 17:13-16)
• incest (Exodus 6:20; Genesis 19:30-38)
• abortion (Hosea 13:16)
• cannibalism (Jeremiah 19:9)
• materialism (Proverbs 14:20)
• domestic violence (Proverbs 20:30)
• shit-eating (Ezekiel 4:12-15),
• genital mutilation (Genesis 17:9-13)
• …and Communist party membership (Acts 4:32-35)

Thanks to me, the Christian apologetics have less to apologize over. Now, Christians can concentrate on the central themes of intimidation and greed without the requisite cognitive dissonance.

Yesterday, in a stunning blow to freedom and justice, gay marriage has been re-illegalized in Maine. This anti-civil rights campaign was received large amounts of funding from a number of notorious hate groups, such as Focus on the Family and the Catholic Church, in another example of the Religious Right being neither.

Sure we read in Leviticus 18:22 (and Leviticus 20:13) that “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination,” but that doesn’t say anything about girl-on-girl. And why would it? Yahweh is said to be male, and therefore, by definition, is a big fan of lesbian porn.

Leviticus 11:12 tells us to avoid Maine lobster, and Leviticus 19:27 bans shaving and haircuts, but we ignore those. Why? It all comes from a little thing theologians like to call “exegesis.”

Exegesis is the process of sticking one’s hand up God’s ass, in order to make him talk. Since the Bible is the compiled mythology of wandering Bronze-age goat headers, it cannot be made applicable to modern day without creative interpretation. Say I wanted to convince people of something, like that I had the power to fight off a pack of crazed unicorns (Pslams 22:21), or to go about rationalizing the destruction of an entire race of people, like those fucking Hittites two doors down from me (Exodus 34:11-14). Well, the Bible is a pretty thick book with a large number of whacky statements, so I just need to leaf through it and cherry-pick out some lines, and then pepper them in to my next hate speech/homily to make my personal agenda sound like it’s God’s agenda, much like how I’m about to do.

See, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus explicitly states that homosexuals should be able to legally marry in the State of Maine.

No, seriously. I just leafed through the one of those little green Gideon’s Bibles which tend to pile up in my office, and I saw it there plain as day:

Sure, your bible may be a different edition, and that line may have a different wording, or not be presented in my large, effeminate, cursive script, but it’s just as true as anything else the Bible has to say. God divinely inspired the hand of [this] man to write [in] the Bible. So although it was written by [this] human[‘s] hands, it is is none the less the inerrant word of God. This is true, and I know it’s true… for the Bible tells me so.

A few weeks ago, a bunch of the Non-Theist Society and I packed up the ol’ SuperFunAdventureBus with magic and good times and trekked through the pre-apocalyptic wastelands to Bloomington, IN, to the see the famed evolutionary biologist, popular author, and rabble-rouser Richard Dawkins speak as part of his international book-signing and lecture tour. During the question-and-answer session which followed, My friend Jen, the BlagHag, asked Prof. Dawkins:

“I had the misfortune of visiting the Creation Museum this summer. While there were many scary things there, the scariest was how it was full of children. When you see kids like this or those who are home schooled or going to religious school, they’re effectively being brainwashed. Is there anything we can do to teach them science, or are they a lost cause?”

This sent Dawkins into a stirring diatribe, but he never explicitly answered Jen’s question. He’s human, and he doesn’t have all the answers, and I’m sure if he knew how to reach those …well, lost souls, he’d already be doing that. It’s hard for us, because we have no default person or think to consult with our problems, we have to be crafty enough to solve each problem as it arises and to have the strength to look within ourselves to find the answers. Fortunately, I have both and have taken the liberty of solving this problem.

To reach the deceived youngsters, Richard Dawkins must undergo either DNA splicing, the Fusion Dance, or the unholy powers of the Necronomicon to combine all of his powers and abilities with those of 80’s metal legend Don Dokken, to form Richard Dokkens, who must then go on tour. The mind-bending awesome that would ensue would permeate through every strata of society, exposing everyone to the Gospel of…well, no one really. For those who doubt the feasibility of this plan, I present, in evidence, the last half of Dokken’s “Dream Warriors”:

Now, take that, and multiply it by an integer greater than one. That is the power that Richard Dokkens would command. The only fault in this cunning plan is that the human mind would not be able to process awesome of this magnitude, so we may have to delay this until after the Kurzweilian Singularity. I’m doing my part with that, so to all the genetic engineers, ascended Sayians, and Kandarian translators out there: the ball is in your court.

One day back in undergrad, I was peacefully watching Adult Swim in the dorm lounge, working on some electronics homework, when Stevie entered and declared me to be one of the Indigo Children.

I closed my book, to give my undivided attention to stopping the rape of reason that was to follow.

I’ll go into details later, but she’d read in a book that there were these people, “the Indigo Children,” who were “rebellious, purposeful, highly intelligent; creative, intuitive, frustrated with authorities and bureaucracy; and psychically powerful” people with “big “wise” eyes.”

I don’t see how my eyes are “wise” though; all they do is record the light reflected from objects and give cool squinty-action hero stares to scare off popped-collars at bars, while WD40-ing women’s nether-regions.

Stevie argued that since I met all criterion for being an Indigo, I had to be one. I explained to her that I had no psychic superpowers, and that I was “…just a man and his will to survive.”

Her eyes lit up.

“See? You’re rebelling against the labels that people give you! That’s such an Indigo thing!”

She was spared my wrath only because she was a friend, and I wanted to commit egregious acts of carnality upon her person.

I was no stranger to this argument. As a youth I was enthralled by NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries, and tales of UFO’s, Area 51, and the like. The conspiracy theorists were notorious for creating logic traps. They would use loaded statements as the basis for an argument, so that the outcome would be what they wanted to hear, guaranteed. For the sake of argument, let us ask if the US government has covered up the fact it’s hiding a crashed UFO in Area 51. If the government admits there is a UFO, then we know it exists. If the government denies the UFO, then they acknowledge the cover up, and the fact the UFO exits. This argument is and was the core of UFO documentaries, and is a textbook logical fallacy.

This is bifurcation, commonly known as the black-and-white fallacy, the either/or fallacy, or the false dilemma fallacy. Assume that we are given three things, p, q, and r. We must choose between p, or q. Now if p is also r, and q is also r, we would then select r regardless of our choice of p or q. I have illustrated this point in Table 1. This is all a fancy-pants way of saying that “I want you to be something, therefore, you are.”

Stephen Colbert would later go on to make this a running gag that he used on damn near everyone. The use of loaded questions is a tried-and-true method for generating responses which, though meaningless, can appear convincing as long as the audience doesn’t think about what is being said.

I explained to her why she was wrong, even drawing the truth table, but this was only further proof by her reasoning. Undaunted, Stevie referred me to a website, which I read. I knew she was too good to be true.

I knew what had to be done.

I, for one, am constantly sickened by hucksters and their feel-good bullshit, demanding all of your time, money, and only receive doublethink in return. Besides, I was Christian at the time, so I already chock-full of doublethink. I couldn’t possibly take on any more.

That is why, I, Ryan Coons, as part of my never-ending crusade of justice, and as part of my required duties as the Purveyor of Truth, will expose, torment, and mock the people behind the Indigo Cult. I just want them to feel bad about themselves, and make their world a darker, bleaker, place, until they collectively acknowledge that they have done this to me, and make amends. I am fully aware that this will not happen. This is similar to the Planck problem, that:

“An important scientific innovation rarely makes it ways by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning.” — Max Planck, from The Philosophy of Physics (1936).

Though I cannot cure Indigoism, I can hopefully contain it and prevent it from spreading. Those currently infected with this thinking will eventually die off naturally, and their hopes and dreams will go with them.

Hey, it seems to be working on the Shakers.

_____________________________________

Not Awesome: an Indigo/Crystal/Rainbow Child

Awesome: a Wild Child

My earliest thoughts on religion were always confusion. I attribute this to my dad, who taught me faith and doubt simultaneously in the same lesson. I was about four, and standing in our kitchen when my dad taught me to pray.

“Before we pray, we always make the sign of the cross, like this…” he tells me, and demonstrates, and then adds “…unless you live in the Brave New World, then you make the sign of the T, like this…” which he also demonstrates.

“The brave, new world?” I ask. “What’s that?”

My dad then explained every aspect of that book to me, in lurid detail. I was four. Because of this, I can’t remember the entire ensuing diatribe, just a few points that stuck with me.

“It was a book written by an Englishman…” said my dad.

“Like Jack the Giant-Killer?” I said.

“Yes! Exactly! Except his name was Aldous Huxley. In his book, people didn’t worship God, they worshiped Henry Ford, and the measured years in A.F. — After Ford, and not A.D., like we do.”

“Why did they worship Henry Ford?” I asked. “Who’s Henry Ford?”

“Why, he invented the assembly line! He’s the reason that we have all the things that we do!” Realizing that I was only four, he explained to me how consumer goods used to be individually manufactured in toto in a slow and inefficient process by skilled craftsman, and Ford came up with the notion of having legions of unskilled laborers working specializing on one small task of a larger project, lowering the cost of production, and therefore the cost of the overall product such that they could be afforded by all. I was four.

“Henry Ford came up with this idea to build cars. That’s why they make Ford cars, like your uncle has. The Model T was the first car to be built this way, so they make the sign of the T,” said my dad.

There was a minute of pure silence.

“So why don’t we do that?” I ask.

“Because, it was just a book, and we don’t follow that,” said my dad.

“What do we follow?” I ask.

“We follow a different book, called The Bible.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because,” said my dad. “We’re Catholics.”

Fast-forward twenty-three years. My dad has passed on, and I’m a grown man who decided to lift his ten-year moratorium on literature to research dystopias for my book. I checked Brave New World from the library, and as I read it, I thought to myself: “This all seems eerily familiar.”

Then, from the deep recesses of my brain, this story emerged, and I laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

One of my friends from Purdue, Jen over at Blag Hag, was sent a free copy of The Professor and the Dominatrix, which is apparently an erotic atheist crime thriller book. She then proceeded to tear it to pieces.

Hilarity ensued. Apparently, she’s received some 10,000 hits from this. At this hour, 12:50 AM May 4, 2009, hilarity is still ensuing and brewing, with more to follow. Please watch for updates.

UPDATE: 5/4/09 11:16 PM.  It’s turning into an epic flamewar. No, seriously, check it out. It’s hours of fun.