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God’s brother Mikey
by Noah Lugeons
Not many people know the story of Mikey. The less ambitious of the two brothers, Mikey was gifted with the same omnipotence as Jehovah but found himself less inclined to direct it in any meaningful way.
On the first day, Mikey was playing a video game. His omniscience had already seen all the video game consoles that the future had to offer and despite the vastly superior graphics of later systems, he still preferred the old school gameplay of the Nintendo Entertainment System. At the time that God interrupted, he was playing Ghosts and Goblins, a game that required omnipotence to beat.
“What the fuck is that?!” Mikey asked, shielding his eyes as the door swung open.
“I call it light,” Jehovah said excitedly, “I’ve got a whole plan… heavens, seas, animals… it’s gonna be crazy.”
Mikey reluctantly paused his game and followed his brother outside. A pair of sunglasses (the first pair, to be exact) phenomenized in his hands and he donned them as he glanced up at God’s creation. “Whatever,” he said dismissively, “I’m going to bed.”
On the following morning, Mikey awoke violently as water splashed onto his face. “Now what?!” he grumbled as he stormed outside through knee-deep liquid. “What the fuck are you doing?” he called out as he swung open the door.
“I call it water. Don’t worry,” God said with a passive wave, “I’m going to create solid ground next.”
“Well can you hurry the hell up? It’s kinda hard to sleep with all this churning and rolling.”
“Yeah, I should be done with the ground tomorrow sometime.”
“Tomorrow! Why tomorrow?”
God waved his arms in a sweeping gesture, as though to convey the enormity of the project at hand. “I promise… I’ll get to it as soon as I can. I’m still separating all these seas.”
Mikey rolled his eyes and a canoe (the first canoe, to be exact) phenomenized before him as he made his way back to his bed. He tried creating a stable platform on which to sleep, but it churned with the waters and he was ripped back to consciousness each time a splash of the cold liquid splattered onto his skin. He tried a few more constructs before eventually settling on a large enclosed space that would roll comfortably amongst the new waves.
He slept through the day and awoke on the following morning with his enclosed structure blissfully beached on steady ground. He stretched and a cup of coffee appeared in his throat. He considered seeing how Jehovah was doing, but he almost feared whatever monstrosity might await him outside so he remained inside his boat and played a few games of Mario Kart. Later he phenomenized a pizza and a bong and before he knew it, he was asleep again.
On the fourth day he finally came forth from his protective encapsulation. He stepped on to the upper deck of his refuge and glanced down. “Yo, Joey!” he said, calling to his brother.
“My name’s Jehovah,” he muttered.
“Digging that big orange ball of flame… it’s nice. I’d have put it a little higher up, but hey, that’s just me.”
“It actually rises and falls back over on that side. It moves kind of slow. I’m trying to get it to exactly 24 hours but it’s a pain in the ass.”
“How close are you?”
“I’m within a minute.”
Mikey shrugged. “Close enough.”
That was often Mikey’s solution to a conundrum, but God decided that in this instance he was probably right. “I like your ark,” he remarked as he took in his brother’s improvised shelter. “I’ll have to keep that in mind.”
“Loving what you did with the sky, little bro,” he said as he climbed down from his perch. By the time he reached the sandy shores a beer had appeared in his hand. “Little white patches floating by… nice touch.”
“Clouds, I call ’em. You should see it at night. I did stars and everything.”
“Nice,” he said as he cracked open the beer. “So what are you planning with this whole thing?”
God smiled and Mikey could tell by his expression that his brother had been dying to lay the plan out since this whole thing started. It had taken a few days for Mikey to take the bait and he could tell immediately he was in for a long story. He phenomenized a chair and sat back as he drank.
“Well… I still gotta finish the moon, but then the next couple days I’m working on animals.”
“What the fuck are animals?”
“Little living, sentient things that’ll eat each other and compete for limited resources. It’ll be fun to watch.”
Mikey wrinkled his nose. “Sounds like a pain in the ass. Are you gonna take care of all those things? You know… take ’em for walks and stuff?”
“Nope. They’re on their own in a cruel world, bro. But hold on, I haven’t told you the…”
“Wait… a cruel world? Why would you create a cruel world?”
“Cruelty will act as a lesson about the vastness of my power. I’ll creating suffering so that they can enjoy bounty in its absence.”
“That doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
“No… it does. See, you can’t have good without evil.”
“Yes you can,” Mikey said, finishing the last swallow from his beer, “You’re omnipotent, remember? You can have anything you want.”
“Anyway, don’t worry about it. That’s not even the best part. I haven’t told you about ‘man’ yet.”
Mikey caused his sunglasses to reappear just so that he could slide them down his nose and glance skeptically from behind them. “What are mans?”
“Men.”
“Okay, what are mens?”
“No, man, but when you pluralize it, you say ‘men’.”
“See, that doesn’t make any sense either.”
“I work in mysterious ways, Mikey.”
“Whatever… fine. So what are ‘men’?” he asked, forcing an overly sarcastic emphasis onto the word.
“Okay… this is so cool… They’ll be like little versions of us. My own image and everything. And I’ll give them free will and I’ll stick them in a garden paradise…”
“Well that’s nice of you…” Mikey started, but Jehovah wasn’t finished and simply spoke over him.
“… but I’ll put a tree in there with really delicious fruit on it and I’ll tell them not to eat it and when they do… and you know they will… anyway, when they do, I’ll curse them for all of eternity.”
Mikey offered only a glacial blink.
“And then I’ll fuck with ’em for a few centuries and totally remove myself from their world. And if they don’t believe I exist after that, I’ll condemn them to spend eternity burning in a fiery pit.”
“What’s a fiery pit?”
“It’s something I’m going to create just to be a miserable ass place to spend eternity in.”
A long moment passed as Mikey tried to absorb all this information. Several times he started to speak and then realized he lacked sufficient words to express his disbelief. He looked into his brother’s eyes and saw the hint of madness he’d always suspected was there.
Finally, he responded with a single syllable, the only syllable that seemed remotely appropriate under the circumstances: “Why?”
“Because I want them to see how awesome I am,” he answered with a straight face. “They’ll love me or they’ll burn in hell in an unending orgy of tragic pain for all of time. It’ll be great!”
“Dude… you’ve lost your fucking mind. I’m sorry to just lay it out there like that, but you’re fucking crazy. That’s the weirdest shit I’ve ever heard. Seriously… I should create mental asylums just so I could lock you in one.”
“Go ahead. See if you ever figure out how the tides work, dick.”
God turned his back on his brother and Mikey retreated to his ark to play some more video games. It would be centuries before he came out again and by then, his brother had so irrevocably fucked up his experiment that he’d simply given up on it and moved on to a new project.
Mikey shrugged and went back inside to play some Gears of War.
Thus ends the gospel of Mikey.
90% of Americans Believe in Space Fairies
by Noah Lugeons
In surveying the national tenor, one could be forgiven for believing that the atheists are gaining ground. While it might seem in some areas that reason is outweighing superstition and secularism is encroaching on stupidity, the numbers would like to respectfully disagree.
In a recent Gallup Poll, more than 90% of Americans still believe in god despite the fact that in the same survey, 100% of them had no evidence upon which to base this asinine assumption. What’s worse is that among the remaining 9% or so, only about a third were willing to go as far as to say they were “convinced that god did not exist”. 4% of the total took the fence-riding position of an agnostic atheist (“I don’t believe in god but I don’t have the guts to own it”) and 2 % actually said they had “no opinion” on the existence of god.
Gallup has been running these religion surveys for upwards of 70 years now and the total number of non-believers has been remarkably flat in that time. It looked for a time like atheists were gaining ground, but in truth this was a surveying error. When Gallup recently amended their survey to include a question about belief in a “universal spirit”, a solid eighth of all Americans are willing to sign on to that option.
So is this good news or bad news?
Well, the trend lines are a bit tricky but one thing is certain: organized religion is losing ground. The number of people who express an actual “belief in god” has been in steady decline for more than a decade. But not all of these gains are going to the atheist camp. Many choose to reject bullshit specifically but not in general. This growth of the “spiritual” movement has been rapid enough to all but wipe out any gains atheists might have seen in the past 50 years. In fact, as recently as 2008, Gallup’s research showed a reversing trend line. The number of professed atheists actually dropped by almost a full percent which, perhaps coincidentally, was almost exactly the same percent gained by the more Unitarian belief.
The saddest finding is under a category where Gallup asks respondents about the certitude with which they accept god. They allow for 5 potential answers:
- Convinced that god exists
- God probably exists, but I have some doubt
- God probably exists, but I have a lot of doubt
- God probably doesn’t exist, but I’m not sure
- Convinced God doesn’t exist.
In the results of this question we find that as many as three-quarters of Americans are unwilling to even entertain doubt that god exists. Officially, 73% were counted in that 1st category with only 3% selecting the correct answer offered at the bottom.
Of course, our perception of this is often colored by where in the country we live. Those in the West (where atheism and “spiritualism” are at their highest) might be tempted to dismiss the findings altogether while those in the South are likely shocked to find so much rationality in the country.
The issue, of course, is a lack of devangelism. Atheists are too damn nice and too willing to pretend to be “agnostic” about the existence of god. Hell, 2% of respondents were so on the fence that they couldn’t even call themselves agnostic and instead chose “no opinion”. It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone more sentient than a potato could have no opinion on the existence of god, but nobody ever went broke overestimating the vacuousness of Americans.
…But I’m Not That Crazy…
by Noah Lugeons
It never fails to amaze me the way one religious person can look at the beliefs of an alternate faith and say, “well, that’s just silly” without realizing that the same is true of their own sacred cow.
I’m reminded of my freshman anthropology class. The professor was talking about the early signs of religion in human history and he spoke at length about the tribal magic of ancient cultures. A girl who was in the process of learning that college was for smart people looked puzzled and asked, “how could they believe in magic if it didn’t work?”
I glanced back at the crucifix hanging around her neck and then back to the prof to see how he would handle the question. I could see him biting the words “why do you pray?” back as they tried to escape. He was nicer than me. So I said it.
“People still believe in prayer and that doesn’t work,” I offered, much to the disgust of the inquisitor.
But somehow people can switch to a different set of eyes when they are looking at what is considered holy by the other guy. They can see how untenable and silly any religion is but their own. Even within their faith they can point to one belief of another and say, “well, I don’t believe in that, but I believe in this”. They offer it up as though clearly believing that a talking snake is silly, but a man sacrificing himself to himself to appease himself is quite defensible.
Poor Mitt Romney is finding this out the hard way. As he desperately seeks the republican presidential nomination he finds himself constantly butting up against the common prejudice that Christians have against other Christians. Of course, his liberal history as Massachusetts governor isn’t helping him either, but a number of reports overlook his support of jesus-ish policies like universal healthcare and go straight for his faith.
He’s a Mormon, of course, and those people are just weird. They believe that a magical space man came to America to teach people the ways of heaven. Of course, all the thinking folks understand that magical space men only go to the Middle East to reveal such things. Mormons think that God lives on some planet out in space when all the critical minds know that he lives in a different dimension paved in streets of gold. Mormons believe that special underwear can protect them from harm when smart people know that it takes water blessed by an ancient incantation to truly keep you safe.
It always strikes me odd that we atheists are often the only defense that small religions have against big ones. The general rule is that everyone is in favor of separation of church and state except the nation’s largest church. When the “ground zero mosque” was in the news it was largely the secular institutions (and, at the very least the secular community) that stood up and said, “hey, their stupidity is no more stupid than your stupidity.”
Evangelical journalist and general fucktard Warren Cole Smith was recently quoted as saying:
“You can’t say that his religious beliefs don’t matter but his ‘values’ do. If beliefs are false, then behavior will eventually–but inevitably–be warped.”
Smith, of course, would not tolerate this type of blatant and inexcusable bigotry if it was directed at his sacred cow. Interestingly enough, he accidentally pinpoints the source of his hypocrisy within that brief statements. His beliefs are false and his behavior is warped.
The Scathing Atheist 
The Bots Cometh
by Noah Lugeons
WordPress has a pretty solid spam filter for comments. They pretty much catch all the mass commenting and tuck it away in a spam folder that I never have to look at if I don’t want to.
So the spammers had to get a little more clever. See, if I want, I can go into the spam folder and check out these comments to see if they are, indeed, spam. Knowing this, the bots are programmed to have these really generic messages that might fool somebody into saying “hey, what’s this doing in with the spam?”
Usually they’re extremely complimentary so they’re attacking the ego first. You’ll see a lot of comments like “You are a very talented writer. I am interested in your subject and have been looking for a quality blog like this for some time.” And of course, I’m supposed to be overcome with flattery and say, “well with an honest and accurate assessment like that, this must be a real human… and one with discriminating tastes in blog quality no less.”
Of course, some of the bots are more clever and toss in a generic piece of advice to make things a little more realistic so you’ll get something like “your blog is very good but it could be better.” This is what we call “second level trickery”. For those people too clever to be taken in by the effusive reviews. “Ah, this person couldn’t be a bot since it has clearly offered a specific criticism,” I’m supposed to respond, “surely I should approve the comment of this vaguely critical human being.”
But the best ones are the ones that have gotten a little love from Google-Translate. The only reason I’m checking the spam folder at all is in hopes of finding gems like this one:
(Keep in mind that this blog came into existence about a week ago):