Thunk Tank 3

Oh, it’s you again! I was just sitting here by the fireplace, lounging in this silk bathroom and puffing on this gaudy pipe. Here are a few random thoughts…

--Stacked on the magazine racks are copies of a Time Magazine special edition celebrating Prince George’s—the royal baby's— first birthday. Time Magazines special editions should be reserved for transformative figures like Maya Angelou, and life-changing events like 9/11. But a baby!? A baby makes no conscious decisions. Babies should be relatively boring to everyone but their parents—even royal babies. Babies do not deserve to be covered, or exploited, by Time Magazine. They deserve binkies and clean diapers; that's about it. And what's with the outdated notion of a "royal" family anyway? Can we please mature as a society and starting calling them what they are…those blasted Windsors down the street.


--Right now, somewhere on Earth, one kid is starving to death in a hut made of plywood and particle board, while another kid is programming the rec room DVR to record Man Vs. Food. A 5-year-old is choosing between begging for a handful of rice or stealing stale bread from the corner market, while a grown man is being paid handsomely to do battle against a 3 pound bacon double cheeseburger on a Kaiser roll.

I guess some are blessed while others are lessed.

--The give-a-penny take-a-penny jar is a fine idea on which to base a financial system, in theory. The problem is, somebody needs to give a penny first and expect nothing in return. Otherwise, the jar will be perpetually empty.

--Why do so many conservatives take such issue with progressivism? Do they not realize the United States of America itself is a result of arguably the greatest progressive experiment in the history of mankind, spearheaded by enormously progressive thinkers?

No progressivism=no America=no place to flaunt your handguns in a Denny's.

-On the Dr. Oz program the other day (don't ask) a so-called medium was so-called talking to the so-called dead and relaying the so-called messages to living family members in the audience. If you believe that ghosts are whispering vague details about themselves to the few with the gifted ability to listen, you probably search for The Sixth Sense in the documentary section. Mediums are clearly shysters using age-old tricks. Regardless, they're on network TV at 6:00pm on a Tuesday, manipulating the fragile emotions of desperate widowers and grieving daughters, and whatnot. How can rational networks executives, not to mention Dr. Oz, allow this? The antics perpetrated by mediums are exceedingly cruel, and shouldn't be gloried. Dr. Oz has plenty of reasons to be ashamed, and this is chief among them, unless, of course, he is delusional too. Who made this man a doctor?

--Rush Limbaugh is like a terrorist. If people talk about him, he wins. Shhh.

--The crisis at the border is disturbing, indeed. Those demanding that the children be deported back to war-town drug countries are, by-in-large conservatives, who are, by-in-large, the WWJD contingency. Would Jesus herd fearful 12-year-olds into cargo planes and unceremoniously dump them back into a netherworld in which 1 in 5 will be murdered by the henchman of drug lords. Probably not. But then again, maybe Jesus requires the proper paperwork.

--If religious indoctrination of children ceased tonight, tomorrow's world require far less missile defense systems.

Frankly, a person shouldn't be allowed to explore religious options until he's old enough to drink.

--Too often, political talking heads and opinion writers refer to "the Republics" doing this and that, or "the Democrats" believing this and that. Almost always, not all members of one political party agree with every other member of the same political party on any particular issue. This kind of generalizing has become too pervasive, and it's lazy. Even one of my favorite celebrity personalities, Bill Maher, will say something like, "Those crazy Republicans always blah, blah, blah." Not ALL of them. Name names. I believe that this political generalizing in the media only causes prejudices in less discerning minds. How do you think the asinine term "libtards" was born?

--Politically speaking, I prefer to consider each individual issue holistically and then 

choose a position, instead of tagging myself as Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, thus choosing a blanket position on all issues. 

The following is a bunch of religious stuff that bothers me. Caution: I'm going to belabor the point.
  
--Faith, by definition, is belief or trust in something that lacks logical proof, or despite evidence to the contrary. Do you realize some US lawmakers dictate policy via faith!? If I told you I had faith that a loose leaf notebook could halt a SCUD missile you'd shrug me off. That is, until I became an elected official and contracted Dunder Mifflin to build a coastline defense shield. 
How did Occam's Razor get so dull?

--A pastor on the radio said that God has a plan for all babies (the pastor noted that God especially has a plan for Christian babies. Go figure!) and He knows what the future holds. (Some babies are born with heroin addictions or faulty livers or, ah dead, but whatever.) If God has a plan for all babies

—thus He has a plan for EVERYONE—then free will doesn't exist. If free will doesn't exist, than the whole premise of God's judgment is void. However, if free will does exist—meaning that God doesn't interfere with mankind—then why bother praying.

--And enough nonsense about God only giving a person tribulations that he can handle. Is that what they tell the orphans in the burn unit?  

--A friend's Facebook post recently claimed that Christianity is a religion of peace, but Islam is a religion of violence. Apparently, this particular Christian has never read the Bible. Perhaps Muslims simply have the courage to follow through with the crazy nonsense their god Allah directs. Read the Bible, especially the Old Testament. I have. The Christian god advocates or decrees activity that would arouse a spirited thumbs up from Allah. (I bet those two drink at the same bar. Imagine Jehovah and Allah, tipsily swaying shoulder to shoulder and wailing Piano Man in a smokey pool room, or puckering their lips for high-angled selfies.)

Okay. Enough funny business. Grab your snatch whackers Christian foot soldiers, and start murdering those who work on the Sabbath, as God suggests. Or make sure rape victims marry their rapists, as God instructed. And keep slaves. Surely, you will rewarded in Heaven.

--When the God who tells Earthlings "Thou Shall Not Kill" is the same God who murders the entire Earth in a flood (recounted just a few pages into His autobiography), explanations are needed.

Consider this, many children are read First Bible Stories at bedtime. Right there on page two is the Noah's Ark story. That's literally one of the first stories a child learns, the most widespread mass murder in the history of the world, perpetrated by He who watches you sleep.

And what's more, page one is the Adam and Eve story. One of God's first bits of dialogue goes something like "don't eat of the tree of knowledge." Right of the bat, the divine judge, jury and executioner is warning the reader not to question anything in the following pages, or face eternal punishment. Heeelllooo.

The (what should be) obvious...

--You don’t need religion to be a good person. Regardless to whom you pray before bedtime, you shouldn't be loving, or giving, or sympathetic only to impress a feckless god.

However, many people are various sorts of assholes—Muslim or Christian or whatever—because the same feckless god clearly and concisely instructs (or at least strongly suggests) them to be.

ISIS; Hamas; Westboro Baptist Church; Al Qaeda; Michelle Bachmann..."Imagine no religion."

--The Pope is the one-man royal family of Catholicism. Sure, he rides around in a bullet-proof phone booth on wheels, lives in the penthouse (or, ah, "guest room") of a snow globe, and requests that you collapse to your knees and smooch the gaudy ring on his finger because he's a living god on Earth and all, yet…he's soooooo humble.

--Speaking of…Pope John Paul II is a saint now. Apparently, medical experts have verified that he orchestrated two miracles (conveniently, the exact number of verifiable miracles needed to become a saint) during his residency as pope. Now, either Pope John Paul actually conjured his papal powers to manipulate physics and broach the fabric of the cosmos to, what, heal a leper or something? Or, the so-called experts fudged the numbers to allow for sainthood? Which is more likely?
"Congratulations John Paul, you performed juuust enough miracles to become a saint…two."

If, in a lifetime of attempting to perform miracles, all you can pull-off are a measly two, maybe pope-hood just isn't in the cards.