Crap-To-Wishes Height Ratios
Religion, 5 May 2008
Memo to some of the people who believe in God, including Rocky Twyman: YOU ARE DUMB.
One of the great things about Tell Someone About You Are Dumb day is that it puts half a dozen columns in front of a bunch of people for the first time. And if they're not paying that much attention, they can come away from You Are Dumb with what is perhaps a simplified picture of my worldview. For example, while not naming names, on one small rest stop off of the Information Superhighway, I was accused of "discount[ing] the intelligence of people that believe in God."
Now, if by "discount" he means "reduce by five to ten percent", like at Best Buy, then that's actually pretty close to correct. But I'm pretty sure he meant the more colloquial version, which is that I think people who believe in God are stupid. And that's not true. I think people who believe in God are wrong, which is an entirely different matter. It's possible to be wrong in a way that's completely irrelevant to me, and that's the category vast swaths of the world's faithful fall into.
But it's also possible to believe in God in a way that IS relevant to me, and that is the point at which I start calling you stupid. Like Rocky Twyman. Rocky Twyman is stupid, Rocky Twyman believes in God, and Rocky Twyman may very well be stupid because he believes in God. Because if he DIDN'T believe in God, he wouldn't have organized a pray-in in San Francisco, and a church service in Oakland, to ask his God to please lower gas prices. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!
"God is the only one we can turn to at this point. Our leaders don't seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring." - Rocky Twyman.
See? That's fucking stupid. On a wide variety of levels. And saying so doesn't make me a bad person just because Twyman's belief is sincere and his prayers are earnest. First of all, our leaders HAVE been able to do things. They've spent the last eight years doing things to make sure oil prices and gas prices keep soaring and soaring, because when that happens, the profits of all their friends in the oil industry keep soaring and soaring. Sure, they had help - a rapidly-industrializing world and what sure as hell looks like the beginnings of running out of oil - but the idea, as expressed by Twyman, that Bush and Cheney and the Republican and all-but-Republican Congresses have been trying, in vain, to keep gas prices low this whole time? That is some crazy stupid shit.
Oh, and it's also deeply and fundamentally un-American, by the way. When your leaders fail, you don't drop to your knees and hope Jesus hears the cry of your wallet as you fill up your Hummer H3. You pick some new fucking leaders and go Prius-shopping. Maybe the new leaders won't be able to help, but they've got better odds than God does.
What's God gonna do? Refill the oil fields? Turn the CEO of Exxon-Mobil into a socialist? Twyman, unsurprisingly, was not specific. And when pressed, acknowledged that people should carpool more, too. But he did emphasize the importance of prayer. "I've seen him work miracles in my life. We told us that all we need to do is ask and believe. He can do it, and he will do it, but we have to ask him to do it."
Maybe he already did it, dipshit. I'm no theologian, but I seem to recall something I read when extremely bored in a hotel room once. God, I'm led to believe, created the heavens and the earth. Last time I checked, those heavens happened to include a giant fucking fusion reactor that, without us even asking it to, dumps oodles of energy onto the planet every day. So maybe God wants you to get off your knees, look up, notice the fucking sun he put up there for you, and stop rolling around in a giant hunk of metal full of dead dinosaurs already.
One of the big reasons believing in God can be stupid is that people forget the "God helps those who help themselves" rule the people who made up God thought up to keep people from spending less time praying and more time building churches. If you're smart, and you believe in God, you also believe that in his infinite wisdom, he put all the answers here for you so that he wouldn't have to waste time with all that messy direct intervention*. And if they're really smart, they're hedging their bets on the off-chance that they're wrong, I'm right, and all praying for oil is going to do is hasten the day when you need to strap on your spiky shoulder pads and barrel across the desert protecting a tanker.
*Although to hear the faithful bitching about it, you'd think God would start manifesting just to put Richard Dawkins in his place.