The Power of Idiocy: brought to you by Religion.

I try to stagger these anti-religion posts, because this is a blog that is equally about hating idiocy and stupidity in all forms, and about heavy metal. This just really got to me today, though.

I follow George Takei, who most of you know as Hikaru Sulu from the original Star Trek. He is a supremely hilarious guy, and is very net savvy. He is also very gay, and very vocal about that, which is awesome. Today he had posted up a pic of a sign that reads "Bigotry wrapped in prayer is still bigotry", and in the comments, some dumb, ugly, Southern retard Christian lady starts proselytizing and haranguing the masses of the internet about how everyone will face judgement if they don't submit to God's love, and how the Bible is the Word of God as dictated by the Holy Spirit (apparently they had stenos back in the Bronze Age), and all sorts of other crazy religious shit. She wouldn't stop either, just kept spamming comments about how God is Love, unless you don't believe in him and then you go to eternal torture forever. That's the exact opposite of love, I think.

It is just amazing to me that people can willfully ignore contradictory fantasy bullshit like that. Especially when it's blatantly obvious that it's fairy tale bullshit. If you've ever tried to make the argument to a theist that "If God is in the Bible and you say that makes him real, if I read a Superman comic, does that make him real? Just using your "logic" bro.", you'd see just how insanely angry they get that you're mocking their faith. Dude, you made the rules, I'm just following them, if you don't want me to think Superman is real cause I read about him in a book, then you shouldn't say the exact same fucking thing.

The sick thing is, enough of these people in large groups can change the nation. Right now there are enough idiot Reich Wing Republicans in Colorado's House that they've passed another "personhood" bill. You know, those completely farcical laws that say if you use birth control or get an abortion, you can get arrested for MURDERING A COLLECTION OF CELLS. Sorry guys, a collection of cells is NOT the same thing as a person, and anyone who thinks it is is a complete and total moron who should be sterilized before they breed. I'm impressed there aren't more women out there who aren't completely enraged by this.

Republicans have swiftly become the spokesmen for the uneducated theists of America. I have no idea how such a swift decline in intelligence came about, but these guys are literally the most powerful people in this nation right now and are working to basically implement the Christian equivalent of Sharia law (essentially the same thing), and no one is apparently giving enough of a fuck for them to stop. I'm amazed there hasn't been an armed uprising yet against these assholes. You can't tread on women's rights, setting this country's social progress back by 60 years, and try to get hokey religious non-facts taught in schools like they were facts, without paying the consequences, and I'm predicting that the flashpoint is going to come sooner rather than later. People need to stop feeling powerless against this onslaught of religulousness and fight back. It's all well and good to be the benign atheist and just not give a shit, but the christians are going to take that as a sign of weakness and move in for the kill, and before you know it you'll have to go to church every sunday or face prison time.

Idiocy in large enough groups is  power. This is a fact. Fight back against that idiocy, with more than just passive book-writing and angry letters. Personally, every time I see someone putting up church posters and shit all over my apartment complex, I tear em down and throw them away. I just got an invitation to some indoctrination seminar at the local hotel, I think I'll go and act like an unbelieving asshole the whole time. If you don't like it, you shouldn't have invited me, douchefarmers. Proactive resistance is the only way to stop this continued invasion of the secular society America was supposed to be. FIGHT, METALLIANS! FOR METALLL!!!!!

Death is only the beginning...

The God Delusion: Facebook edition

Before I get started, I just want to preface this with a little gem I found on the intarwebs:

I've had a few Christtrolls trying to refute logic with imbecilic nonsense on my facebook page for this blog lately, and I thought that this needed to be said. Moving on!

So lately I've seen a lot of my more deluded acquaintances from my highschool days liking various religious pics on the ol' facebook. One of them was just a poster that said in big psychedelic LSD trip letters "GOD IS GOOD!". This was followed by a tremendous circle-jerk of comments all saying things like AMEN and YES HE IS! , etc. I was almost afraid to interject that a jealous and vengeful god could hardly be quantified as good, since I think the torrent of supreme hate that would ensue would have broken the internet.

The thing that struck me about this was the fact that people I used to know, people I used to consider relatively intelligent and rational, have since ( in the 14 years since high school, I know, I'm old) turned into mindless automatons, parroting an obviously fallacious mantra. God is anything BUT good. You don't create a supposedly perfect universe with an unbelievably evil dimension of pain and suffering that simultaneously exists within this universe, unless you're inherently a sadist.

This facebook sharing of what amounts to indoctrination reinforcement is getting out of control. People I once knew as somewhat reasonable are now spam posting psalms from that fiction of fictions, the Bible, sending me invite after invite to some fucking church event where they bathe the homeless or feed the lepers or some other disgusting activity I really don't want to get involved with, and basically just basking in their own righteousness for the whole internet to see. It's really becoming quite disturbing.

Just now someone I know re-posted this sick picture of a random baby with some skin disfiguration or some such, with the tagline "SHARE AND FACEBOOK WILL DONATE $3 TO HELP THIS BABY!". Really? I'm pretty sure Zuckerberg could give even one tenth of a fuck about your crusade to feel good about yourself by posting gross pictures on everyone's news feed to make them feel bad for not caring. Even if that were true, Facebook would quickly run out of money if they tried to do this kind of shit. This ties in to my "Americans are fucking retarded" hypothesis. It just amazes me that people are this retarded in public.

This is why I try to post at least one irritating and controversial (to theists) picture/quote a day, to try to keep the idiocy from spreading too far, too fast. I know I'm only one man, but hell, if I can get more people to hop on the science train to progressville, maybe we'll stop believing fairy tales are true. Would you believe that god was good when presented like... this?:

Seriously. To think that the above means that god is inherently good and that your version of existence is automatically correct because of your childish belief, then I've got news for you: you're pretty fucking dumb. It's like Santa Claus for adults, except if you're bad, you don't just get coal, you get a trillion tons of coal, on fire, poured over you, for the rest of eternity, and you can never redeem yourself. Yeah, that sounds like god knew what he was doing when he was creating morality. Idiots.

So in conclusion: facebook is a vast desert of idiots, with small oases of reason (like this) that are slowly getting larger as time goes on. Just don't go poking the camels... you might get spit on.

Death is only the beginning...

Einstein had it right all along

I'm sure some of you have seen this before:

Sad, but true, nonetheless. I walk around my city, I travel to various places, and I am disgusted by the rampant idiocy that surrounds me. I know stupidity is not endemic to America, but I'm pretty sure we've got the lion's share. I don't know if it's something in the food, subliminal signals in all those adverts, or something else entirely. I did test all of my sunglasses to see if they would reveal anything, but alas, there was nothing. Not even Rowdy Roddy Piper showed up to help me out.

Now, as I declaimed in a previous rant, this is the Decade of the Stupid Attention Whore, which has continued for 12 years now. I'm hoping the trend will stop before the twenty year mark, but I'm not holding out much hope. Celebrity worship is one of the most retarded things that a society can engage in, and it's all too common here. I blame Jersey Shore for the latest influx of duckfaces and douchebags, but then, one could blame Jersey Shore for any number of things and still have room for more. Someone had brought up the idea that the whole show was scripted, which to me seems preposterous. I honestly can't believe that anyone would basically trash their entire public image on purpose just to be paid to act like that in a "reality" show. 

I think that's when TV programming started to get worse than it already was: reality TV. I mean come on, Survivor? A show that rewards people for surviving in a place where people already live! "I don't have my cell phone guys, this is really hard!" Ah, Daniel Tosh, telling it like it is. But I digress.

Reality shows like Flavor of Love, Next Top Model, and other assorted intellectual garbage are part of the problem. People watch this shit and think "I could be like that person!" and get their 15 minutes. The worst contributor to this smorgasbord of dumb is MTV. MTV is no longer about music. It should be called Moron TV, because that's basically the only people who watch it. I literally want to end every single person who appear on shows like "16 and Pregnant" and "Teen Mom". Even thinking about the stupid little sluts who get knocked up just to be on TV makes my head want to explode all over the place. How people can think this shit is acceptable is beyond me.

I'll admit, every once in a while I like to watch something a little lowbrow, like Dude Where's My Car?, but that is stupidity with purpose. I don't even have a cable subscription anymore. I wouldn't watch anything that is on TV right now. Netflix streaming makes my entertainment much more awesome. It's painful to have to listen to people gush about the next True Blood episode and who their favorite douchebag is on American Idol. Seriously, who gives a fuck about some jerkoff who can sing other people's songs halfway decently? I do that at metal shows all the time, no one gives me a fucking medal.

I don't know if there is a cure for this epidemic. It's daunting to try to break into the novel business when most Americans think reading is stupid and only something huge nerds do. It's sad to see people who don't know simple things, such as the fact that Europe is not a country. Exempli gratia:

 

I can't even make this shit up. The fact that we have a show called Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? is just another nail in the coffin of our national intellect. Yes, kid in the last frame, you're right to laugh at the dumb blonde. You'll end up making more money than she'll see in her lifetime. Unless of course she marries some rich old dude *shudder*. 

If you don't read books just for the hell of it, I encourage you to do so. Go outside and read a book in the park. Watch useful shows like stuff on the History channel. Don't give a single fuck for the latest trend/fad/celebrity whore. You're better than that. Rick Santorum is challenging the president's drive to make higher education more accessible to the public. It's because dumb people are more apt to believe the religious bullshit he's peddling. I don't think anyone in this country aspires to be a garbageman or a burger-flipper. Stay intelligent, my friends, or THIS might happen to YOU:

 Death is only the beginning...

God's Master Plan - A Checklist

This is taken from the following video by Scott Clifton, who portrayed Liam in the soap opera The Bold & The Beautiful. I always wondered why he seemed like he should be on TV:

1. Decide to arrange for something other than yourself to exist.
2. Create a being by the name of Lucifer with full knowledge that this being will betray you and ultimately cause an infinite amount of suffering unnecessarily.
3. Allow an unfathomably horrific dimension of existence known as ‘hell’ to emerge created by yourself or perhaps Lucifer and allow that dimension to continue existing. Do not override or prevent such a thing. It will come into play later.
4. Create objective unchanging moral prescriptions and base them upon whatever your nature happens to be and then label any action or thought contrary to these standards ‘sin’.
5. Be sure to include in these moral prescriptions edicts for social and psychological health such as encouragement to beat ones children with a rod, permission to buy and sell slaves and will them as property to ones children for life, requirement that women not be allowed to teach or have authority over men and of course the instruction to kill anyone who expresses interest in worshiping other gods.
6. Design a physical universe, planets, animals and vegetation all with the appearance of age. Be sure to include in your creation biological flaws redundancies and over-complications that appear as if they were the product of blind cumulative processes, perhaps a urinary tract that runs straight through the prostate gland or a unnecessary appendix prone to inflation and rupturing, or maybe a respiratory and digestive system forced to share the same plumbing, (these are just a few working ideas).
7. Create a garden with a tree in it bearing fruit that when eaten provides knowledge of your objective moral standards, and create two sentient cognitive beings without knowledge or awareness of these standards and instruct them not to eat from the tree which would enlighten them (in other words, arrange it so that only AFTER they eat from the tree are they capable of understanding that doing so was a violation of objective moral standards).
8. Warn these cognitive beings that they will undoubtedly die if they eat from this tree, but don’t follow through if they do. Endow a reptile with vocal chords, lips or some other means of speaking audibly to your cognitive beings enabling it to make a convincing case to one of them for eating from the tree. Do not prevent this or intervene.
9. Now by this point make sure your cognitive beings have been equipped for reproducing themselves and multiplying, and because one of them has sinned, arrange that every single one of their descendants until the end of time will be born with an inherent sinful nature, defaulting in a future of everlasting torment. Do not by any means allow each of them to be born with a clean slate and the capacity for living a sin-free life if they desire as you did with your first two prototypes.
10. Endow these cognitive beings with a ‘soul’ which keeps their thoughts and feelings and other cognitive faculties in existence forever one way or another. And then allow the sinfulness of these beings to be incompatible with your presence and let hell be the only other place that they can go once they exit the the physical world, do not make any attempt to spare these souls the eternal torment of hell such as allowing souls to stop existing altogether or creating an additional realm for them to reside besides with you or in hell.
11. Over time allow these beings to populate the earth you’ve creating, knowing with infallible certainty of course that after so many generations they will disappoint you enough that you find it necessary to kill all of them in a global flood and start all over from scratch.
12. Now when this happens (again right on schedule) make an exception for one small family of cognitive beings who you deem righteous. Of course it goes without saying that your powers of omniscience allow you to know, again, with infallible certainty that this family too will ultimately disappoint you in the same way that those who you drowned, rendering the entire endeavor futile, but for now it’s best that you pretend not to know that.
13. Instruct this small disappointment of a family to populate the entire world all over again by way of incest.
14. Declare that until further notice the only way for these cognitive beings to rectify their sinful nature while on earth is to perform ritual animal sacrifices and other acts of senseless violence. Additionally when certain sins are committed by any one of your cognitive beings, demand that the surrounding community kill that being themselves.
15. In the meantime perform many epic miracles for all to see and intervene often with your physical creations, stop the sun in the sky, part the red sea, turn rivers into blood, and women into pillars of salt, give men superhuman strength, speak to the thousands with a booming voice from heaven etc, but before these cognitive beings become advanced enough in the areas of science and communication that they could actually document, share, playback and verify these epic miracles, make sure you stop performing them all together.
16. Decide at some point that the most pressing of your objective moral prescriptions are not as obvious to these cognitive beings as you once thought, take this opportunity to chisel your top ten moral concerns into two tablets of stone and commission one of your cognitive beings to deliver these tablets to the masses. (Note to self: Roughly half of these moral concerns should center around pleasing you, praising you and remaining loyal to you.)
17. After several thousand years impregnate one of these cognitive beings so that she gives birth to your son in physical form, who also happens to be you, at the same time.
18. Allow this cognitive being who is your son but also you to grow up and make several revisions to you/your son's original standards of morality then arrange for other cognitive beings to torture and kill you/your son, authorize this sacrifice of yourself to yourself as a means of granting all other cognitive beings immunity from the consequences of their sinful nature, which you allowed them to be born with in the first place.
19. Do not however make this sacrifice free, establish that none of these cognitive beings shall be eligible for benefits of this sacrifice unless they actively believe that it happened. In other words, despite the quality of their intentions any cognitive beings henceforth who finds themselves unconvinced these events actually took place, is unwittingly designating themselves for the endless suffering of hell.
20. With that established, be sure to refrain from making it clear and knowable to the rest of the world that these events actually took place, ensure that no cognitive being after the first century has the luxury of witnessing your son who is also you say or do anything to indicate he was a living god. Again, make sure that all of this occurs before advancements in science and technology are available to verify for those who aren’t present.
21. Arrange so that the only surviving record of these events will be offered anonymously by non-eye witnesses translated to a language different from the one you/ your son will speak written no earlier than thirty years after you/your son preformed these miracles and makes these clams, however do make sure that these records feature the precept that believing in something without evidence is morally superior to investigation and verification.
22. Be sure that after only a few decades the only accounts of these events in existence are copies of copies of copies which will be verifiably altered and added to in historically and theologically significant ways from generation to generation, sect to sect. Do not preserve the original copies of these accounts, do not protect them from revision, do not set in place any mechanism for protecting them from being interpreted in hundreds upon hundreds of ways most of which being heretical and therefore punishable.
23. Do not bother to employ your omniscience in such a way as to discern which of these cognitive beings are truly rebelling, and which simply don’t know how to distinguish you from other versions of god which do not in fact exist.
24. Do not make it clear to these beings that you are are even here. Allow for your very existence to remain an easily debatable, easily questionable, easily doubtable proposition. Allow billions and billions of souls to be unthinkably tortured for all of eternity regardless of their character, integrity, bravery, responsibility or conduct because they had not correctly assumed that the right set of propositions were true by the time their lives on earth were over.
25. And finally… when all is said and done, demand that you be praised for this plan.

It's really quite sad and pathetic that so many people actually believe this bullshit, and that it's supposed to be good and right and what we should all base our morals off of. If it weren't for the perpetuation of this nonsense we'd be out cruising the galaxy by now.

Death is only the beginning...

I'll take Useless Activities for 500, Alex...

I know, I know, I'd better stop posting so much or  you'll all get used to me updating frequently, heh. Well my Metallians, I just had to say something about this, because it irritates me to no end when people do this.

So I see this as a Facebook status update tonight:

"LET'S KEEP THIS GOING ......HEAVENLY FATHER, WALK THROUGH MY HOUSE AND TAKE AWAY ALL MY WORRIES AND ANY ILLNESSES, AND PLEASE WATCH OVER AND HEAL MY FAMILY AND FRIENDS... BRING QUIET WHERE THERE IS CHAOS, BRING LIGHT WHERE THERE IS DARKNESS, AND PUT LOVE IN OUR HEARTS .... IN JESUS NAME.... AMEN .... THIS PRAYER IS SO POWERFUL ....STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING, AND RE-POST!"

To understand just what my issue is with this, one must first understand what prayer is. Prayer is a theist's way of asking their tribal sky-god to do something for them just for asking nicely. I have a nice little flowchart that explains it pretty succinctly:

This pretty much sums it up. The arrogance necessary to believe that God would change something in his Master Plan (yes, I'm not trying to be subtle on that one) just for little old you because you asked nicely and are a good little sheep is just mind-boggling. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, to coin a phrase.


The thing that irritates me the most about people who say shit to me like "I'll pray for you and your family" is the automatic assumption that I want you to pray for me. Frankly, it's insulting. I work hard and take action to change things in my life, instead of just whispering demands to a non-existent creator thing and thinking that will make shit better. Instead of wasting your fucking time beaming messages to some imaginary friend and hoping shit changes, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. 


Prayer doesn't heal illness: medicine does. Prayer doesn't build houses: people with tools and construction materials do. Prayer doesn't feed starving people: FOOD DOES. I'm reminded of another great image I found while cruising the interwebs: 

Seriously people, you're not helping. It's as simple as that. To think that all your problems can be whisked away just because you pray for it is so asinine as to be completely laughable. I really don't think they realize just how ridiculous all this shit sounds, and then they get angry because we laugh about it. If you don't want us to laugh at your beliefs, then maybe they shouldn't be so ridiculously ludicrous. I leave you with a few more great images that definitely belong here. Enjoy!

Death is only the beginning...

American culture? What's that?

Two posts in as many days! How industrious! Yes my Metallians, I'm trying to write more often on my blog thing, mainly because I have new converts to the Good Book, from my friends on the atheist pages of Facebook. Many have friend requested me, but for me, Facebook is for people I know personally. Here they can get all the sarcasm and hilarity they want! So a big thanks to all of you new folks :D

Now, I don't know how many of you listen to the shit music that is crapped out of recording studios nowadays, or watch the trash that Hollywood tries to trick us into buying, but I have to say, it's getting to be almost intolerable. I watched the Grammys, and I have to say, I'm glad that Adele walked away with all of those awards, because no one else deserved them. Almost all music that is produced nowadays, apart from metal (which is FAR from mainstream), is pure, unadulterated SHIT. Example:

This is not even including the fact that Nicki Minaj looks like someone dropped a chimpanzee in a vat of makeup and then wrapped it in hooker clothes. What happened to music in the last two decades? Really, I'm asking, what the fuck happened?

I remember the 80's. Most people focus on the bad things about the 80's, such as Reaganomics, the Lockerbie disaster, the Iran-Contra fiasco, AIDS, etc. but really, is any of that worse than the shit we're dealing with right now? The difference is we don't have any epic music shows to go to that cater to people with taste. 80's metal shows were some of the sickest concerts ever, and you had good music to listen to! Music that wasn't just about slappin bitches, jackin' foos with your gat, or how many idiot guys you've slept with (I'm looking at you Britney).

Bohemian Rhapsody, one of the most elaborate songs of popular music history, is all but forgotten by people wanting the newest Hannah Montana shitpile. Shot Through the Heart is so epic even Barney Stinson uses it to get people pumped up for partying. People only know One Night in Bangkok because washed-up ear-biter Mike Tyson tried to sing it horrifically on The Hangover Part 2, and no one knows it's about chess. Shit, people don't even know about chess anymore.

These rockstars were treated like gods at the height of their careers, and one awesome band just led to another, creating even better music than what had come previously. I think the decline came, not when grunge became popular, because Nirvana was a great band, but when Cobain killed himself, and people started looking for something less angry and depressing.

Enter the decade of the spoiled attention whore. Not content with being a successful singer (I will admit that her first album was ok), Britney Spears decided to basically spew a shitstorm of daddy issues all across the country by turning progressively stupider and sluttier, culminating in the front page (really?) news shocker of her whirlwind marriage/divorce from intellectual neuter Kevin Federline. She's still doing shows dressed in costumes that might as well be underwear (not that I mind that sort of thing, but come on, you're better than that). Lindsay Lohan is apparently "coming back" again, from what I don't know, because you have to first matter before you can comeback. It doesn't help that she looks like a 60 year old meth-head at the age of 25. Additionally, I present this:

Granted, Whitney Houston DID used to matter, but that was like 15 years ago. I listened to a few of Amy Winehouse's songs. They were quite irritating. Also, everyone who went crazy on facebook about how sad they were that an icon like Whitney died: you're all a bunch of twats. I can guarantee you that absolutely no one had remembered she was still alive until the announcement was made.

Some of you may have come here expecting a treatise on why museums and operas and shit are in decline, and I agree that that is also a sad thing, but I figured I'd tackle one problem at a time and the reintroduction of 80's pop/rock and metal to drown out the awfulness that pollutes the radio waves today seemed most relevant. This IS the Book of Heavy Metal, after all.

So in short: Americans are stupid, have terrible taste in music, and just adore attention whores. I hold no hope for the future of music unless more bands like Taking Dawn break out and start melting faces across the country with their arena rock inspired sound. I leave you with this:

March on, Metallians! FOR METAL!!!!

Death is only the beginning...