Election Hangover

Well, I guess I’m glad that my guy won. Do I think that somehow the government will start working? That real compromise will happen? That decisions will be made based on what’s best for most of the people as opposed to what’s best for the party or for the companies that donated millions to the campaign?

I have no thoughts like that. I expect that all Democratic ideas will be deemed messages from Satan while Republican ideas will be seen as the rise of the 3rd Reich. But one thing this election holds off for another 4 years is the freak show that would have been the Republicans re-entering Washington with a parade of the anti-science crowd, the anti-intellectuals, the global warming deniers, the moon landing deniers, flat earthers, evolution deniers, ect. Do you see the common thread here? The Republicans are just so fucking negative. No. NO, NO, NO! They depress me. They offer no hope. No ideas, just denial.  And their faith.

And there’s the thing that I still can’t wrap my head around. How is it that being a ‘person of faith’ puts you a rung up in the good guy club? Hell it puts you in the ‘capable of leading the country’ club. A person of faith believes something is true even though it cannot ever be proved to be true. If it could be proven to be true there would be no need to have faith in it and you’d have to find some other un-provable thing to have faith in or I guess you get kicked out of the good guy club.

So, what if Jesus Fucking Christ* showed up in a three piece suit at Times Square and said, ‘Yep I’m real. I exist and all the stuff about the trinity, the soul, the miracles, and life ever after is completely true. I can even demonstrate that it is true. Watch this. . . .’

And in an instant every TV on the planet switches to his image and him speaking in real time. As he’s talking his dad (he looks like Jerry Garcia) walks onto the scene, puts his arm around his son and also reassures everyone that it’s all demonstrably true. In fact he’s anxious to talk with the physicists at Fermi Lab and CERN as they are very close to discovering an ultimate truth with the Higgs particle the ramifications of which would explain the miracles and the current TV transmission. No laws of physics being broken just some unrevealed laws being optimized and used in clever ways. (Think showing TV to a cave man!). And the father says, "Really no need for all the praying and church going since our existence and power are true anyway so you can just simmer down. We kind of hate the music anyway."

So the supernatural becomes the mundane. You don’t have to believe. It’s true anyway! What would the faithful do? Would they turn away? Would they go back to worshiping the sun? Would they become New Jesus deniers? Go Muslim? Ha! Like when someone lifts the drape behind the magician and ‘ruins it’. A theist’s (wow, you sure need the space between the A and the t there!) little private world where things are true because they wish, hope and ‘have faith’, that they are true would become another part of our external reality.

I guess they want Jesus to be real. . . but not TOO real!

Well, anyway for the coming time I guess it’s best to keep asking tough questions. When someone wants something to be true because it makes them feel better or helps their bottom line you have to politely ask for the data, the research, the REASON. And really, let’s do be polite because if there is one thing the Republican party is not it’s polite. It’s not that hard to be polite. You’re mom and dad taught you this. Use it.

*Wouldn’t it be cool if Jesus’ middle name really was Fucking?