A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven Read Free Page B

real proof of the existence of God other than the usual suspects that the clergy and the like point to, such as man and the universe and all that jazz. But that, to me, is horseshit. Science has given us so many more bits of proof than God has, and even though He is lauded, He has no track record in my eyes. Just because the universe exists and man exists in it, that is no reason and no proof for the existence of an invisible man in the sky. I would sooner believe that Santa Claus was our creator, seeing as I get my wishes answered with the same relative consistency. God never saved me and Santa never gave me a harpoon gun, so fuck my life.
    Two, too many of humanity’s fingerprints are on God and his so-called achievements. Men wrote all of God’s books, fought all of His wars, and have been the first to point out all of His miracles since he first blamed snow on His Holy Frosty Breath. Now why humans, who are vainglorious to a fucking fault, would give credit where it is not due is a psychotic fucking mystery to me, and yet people adhere to doctrine because they have been indoctrinated. It has been hammered into their skulls that God exists, even though men were so busy swinging the hammers at the time, they never realized they were using them on each other.
    Three, God is about as real to me as those who reside in Asgard or in Valhalla. He might as well be in comic books, which is actually a good idea if you want the younger generation to take the idea of Him seriously. At the end of the day, God is infallible because man is fallible, and a lot of people need someone to believe in who is better than ourselves. Fair enough . . . but then why not believe in the Tooth Fairy? The Tooth Fairy at least pays you for pieces of your face that you were going to throw away anyway. God makes you put those same quarters in His collection plate, even though the church is tax exempt. Well, because of inflation, my son gets dollars for those molars, so a lot of tooth money goes to them now. Sounds pretty fucked up to me, but then again, none of it is mine.
    I am appalled at the hate that His followers pour into the world like factories spewing pollution into country streams. I laugh at the self-proclaimed prophets who are too busy selling their own side of His story to consider that because their prophecies do not jibe with everyone else’s accounts, there is no real continuity to His word. I abhor the fractious state of these worldwide Judeo-Christian and Islamic cults because they all think they are right. Religion has divided us more than it has brought us together, and normally anything that violent and dissenting would have been outlawed or driven from society if not for the fact that these pious pricks have their fingers in all the pies on Earth.
    So yeah, I am not a God man, myself. But therein sits the fucked up rub: How can I be an atheist, a man who dismisses the grand conjectures of the righteous with no connection to religions and the like, and yet believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the paranormal? I do not pretend that one has anything to do with the other, but they have been intertwined since we were monkeys scrambling to make sense of anything that we could not eat, fuck, or excrete. Cynics will claim that my “eyewitness accounts” can easily be described as “flights of fancy,” or “the trappings of an overactive imagination.”
    “There is no possible way that could have happened.” “I do not believe you—you are a liar and a charlatan.” (Well, no one ever called me a “charlatan,” but, man, it would be great if they did). Oh, and the one that I hate even worse than those others: “You saw what you wanted to see and nothing more.”
    Let me fucking tell you something: I did not want to see this shit, and I still do not want to see this shit. These things have haunted me for a very long time, and anyone who has had to wrestle with terrible memories will know they never go away. I can see them