Pretty Much Irrefutable Proof That There Is A God
I know how cool we all like to play it because we’re so young and so beautiful and nothing bad will ever happen to us in our lives! Our youth and our beauty will protect us. But our grandparents were once young if maybe not quite as beautiful. Everything ends eventually, and at some point you may want to start hedging your bets and believing in a higher power, if only to get the goodies that comes along with the benefits of membership. I’d much rather spend the afterlife playing golf with President Coolidge and Charlotte Bronte than not-existing. Or burning in Hell with all the popes ever, for that matter. There would probably be some coffee breaks in Hell, although maybe that would be hellish after a while, too. If it was all non-stop torture for eternity you’d probably start to like being pinched and prodded and burnt and so they’d probably find a way of torturing you would end up being to stop torturing you for a while.
You: “Won’t you please stab me in the neck with a pitchfork?”
Demon: “No! Drink your coffee!”
You: “Come on!”
Demon: “Eat a scone!”
It would be nice to believe that the Earth just kind of magically became the beautiful place that we know and love over years and years of glaciers cutting across vast wastelands. And that our two-legged species just so happened to defeat all other species to become the dominant bunch on our planet. We defeated the dinosaurs and the gorillas and the unicorns in battle? Or the game was stacked by an all-powerful beautiful and terrible wizard-creator? I think the answer is clear.
That’s not to say I’m against Evolution or whatever. But just because there’s evolution doesn’t mean there isn’t a God. What fun would it be if when you bought Sea Monkeys at the store they came in their 100% monkey form already? No fun. The fun is watching them bloom into monkeys. So it was with humans and the Earth. The fun was in watching them start walking upright, shed their tails (“Noooo! My tail fell off!”) and start growing huge breasts and penises. Clearly there’s a difference between random magical evolution, the beginning of everything when before there was nothing, and controlled evolution. You spread around the instant life crystals and watch the Mayas and Incans rise and fall.
Here is some of the Irrefutable Proof That There is a God I came up with while stoned.
WHY DOES POO SMELL BAD?
I understand a lot of things. I’ve read a few books. And I almost got 1200 on my SATs. One time I did a whole one of them sudokus. So I ain’t no slouch, OK? And yet I’ve spent hours staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out why shit stinks. I get that your body takes steak and broccoli and turns it into something you don’t want to keep in your home for very long. But there is absolutely no magic science answer for this. Oh, sure, they’ll tell you about methane gases collecting in your esophopendix or whatever. But I’ll tell you what the real purpose behind smelly poo is. So that humans don’t pick it up and eat it. It is a poop-nundrum.
Eggs fall out of chicken butts and somehow some early humans started eating those. Imagine if shit fell out of us and smelled good? They’d go right back inside us! And the Mobius strip of poo would never end. I know we’re somehow not supposed to take complexity as a sign of intelligent design. Just because a single-cell organism somehow ended up becoming Sigmund Freud does not mean anyone intended for Sigmund Freud to ever be born. But there’s intelligent design and there’s Mommy Design. I contend that excrement was made to smell bad because our human creator did not want us to eat it. This came after the adventure in Eden, in which humans ate the thing God allegedly didn’t want us to eat (although I contend that God didwant us to eat it, or at least wanted to see if we’d eat it or not, it was like one of those complete reverse psychology mindfucks, and I bet that fruit of good and evil was tasty). After that, God banished us to this unique pleasureworld in which things come hard and we’re always pretty dissatisfied.
I told my friend Will Yackulic this theory, and he contended that it’s not that poo and farts smell bad, it’s just that we’ve come to understand their smell as bad over years and passed that down archetypally throughout countless generations. We shall call this the Yackulic Effect. My retort is, but they just smell so bad. Especially mine. Like something died and then dipped itself in badness and then fell out of me. Covered in a burrito made of spent uranium. I will refer to this as the *Too* Collorary. Farts and Poops are just *too* smelly to be simply be perceived of as smelly. They are designed to be smelly. Like puke and rotted fruit and other gross things.
WHERE ARE ALL THE DRAGONS?
So if evolution traveled forward unchecked in every direction, then where the fuck are all the dragons? You’re telling me we still have otters, but the dragons have been wiped out? They’re the ones that would be standing on top of the big pile of everything dead at the end of the world next to the nasty roaches, stinkbugs, and probably Tom Cruise. They will all survive while we perish. So the ones that spit fire and flew, they got eaten by whom exactly? Bilbo Baggins and his tiny little glow-in-the-dark sword? I don’t think so. Sorry, Darwin. I ain’t buying it.
Maybe you’re saying there were no dragons. There never were dragons. We have never found dragon bones. Even bringing up dragons hurts your already-flimsy-enough hypothesis. Whatever. Tapestries don’t lie, people! And there are lots of dragons on all kinds of tapestries. So dragons existed! They didn’t get caught in tar pits because they flew. Or they may have debanked to another, less human-dominated planet. Most likely they are all just hiding out in Dragonstahn, planning something fiery. There is no way dragons got weeded out by your run-of-the-mill evolutionary parlor tricks. There are no dinosaurs around today, either. But that’s not surprising — they were all built to look kind of wobbly. And like they all might eat each other. I can understand why they’re not around. They couldn’t spit fire. That is a pretty good trick, a very handy thing to be able to do. I have absorbed the requisite texts on the matter and in all those Game of Thrones books dragons are awesome. If you learn how to ride one, you can mostly likely become queen of everyplace. So there’s no way that they fell by the wayside. Humans didn’t wipe them all out. Humans fuck up everything, and most animals have the good sense to stay away from humans. Maybe someday we will find out where they’ve been hiding — and when we do, there will be your proof. Nothing says Creator more than a winged, fire-spitting killing machine.
MEDICINE
I’m no pharmaceutical salesman or anything. The only drugs I take with any regularity are allergy ones. I should probably be on a regimen of anti-psychotics, but whatever. When a team of people creates a video game, one in which you go around shooting people and people shoot you, what’s something that they always build into the equation? A way for you to recover from gunshot wounds. Life wouldn’t be worth much if you died every time a bee stung you or you tripped on the sidewalk while shooting at people. We’ve all recovered from various things that used to kill people back in the day. They used to blame sprained ankles on unclean ghosts in your head and would use wine corkscrews to, well, you get the idea. Our knowledge of the world has generally gotten a little better. And in some cases we forgot things we shouldn’t have forgotten.
But, in general, we keep finding ways to live longer, solve our problems and figure out the world a little better. They take an acorn they find on the forest floor, zap it with a laser, and figure out it makes your boobs huge. They do this kind of stuff every day, smart people. What does this suggest to me? That there are still things to figure out, that we might someday defeat the diseases that still kill us. That someone wants us to find these things, even though they are hard to find. That they are out there to be found. What fun is it if you never find the afikomen inside of the old VCR during Passover? It’s not much fun; it gets weird and funky in there. Then maybe the smell will help you find it, during the other later high holidays. If the Easter Bunny hides a plastic Easter egg someplace super hard and it goes unfound, perhaps it gets found by future generations. Who are like, hey, a Hershey kiss that is still wrapped and not covered in bugs, yum. We just accidentally discovered penicillin, which just accidentally existed and was in a place where it could be accidentally found and accidentally save humanity from extermination. What exactly are the chances of that ever happening? Like Mr. Ed winning the Kentucky Derby chances. Considering Mr. Ed was a fictional talking horse on a TV show, pretty wildly bad odds. He was not fast, more of a talker. We all still die of cancer and probably always will because the healthcare system kind of demands that we do, imagine if we cured cancer, there would be so many bored doctors and everyone would live forever. That would be like being a lawyer with no crime around. Pretty boring.
But life is precious, and not just because it can be taken away in an instant, but also because people can heal. Because there is hope we can and will get better. And it seems like someone wants us to heal, live longer, discover more things about ourselves. Only to lure us to a planet and eat our faces and make Stringer Bell kill us. That last sentence was brought to you by the upcoming movie Prometheus.
OCCAM’S RAZOR
Occam’s Razor concludes that, where there are multiple hypothesis that might explain how something happened, the correct answer is usually the one that’s the least complicated and has the least amount of crazy. O.J. Simpson killed his wife and that waiter. Not “the real killers.” So isn’t the answer to the question of whether a Creator of the Universe exists most likely correct? That the universe came plop right out of the birthing canal of some omnipotent life force that probably looks a lot like a young Grace Jones? “Amazing Grace,” etc? I’d buy that over the idea that one cell split infinitely by complete accident with no help whatsoever to create your mom, your dad, Public Enemy, hotdogs, subways, orgasms, everything. Everything exists with absolutely no design or reason, it’s just dumb luck we aren’t eaten by flying sharks on the way to work every day? Thank goodness Evolution takes billions of years. Because flying sharks are gonna suck! Maybe we’ll have evolved into having large, sharp tusks protrude from our wrists, but if that was gonna happen wouldn’t that have happened already? Humanity has been fighting each other in wars for thousands of years. Shouldn’t we have developed some kind of defense mechanisms? Why are my hands so soft and so small? It’s almost as if some Motherly Force didn’t want us going around slaughtering each other all the time. Because if I had sharp fangs or spit fire I wouldn’t spend very much time on the internet at all.
SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT
Aren’t cats the best? So cute. And yet so hard to get their attention. So why would you poison a cat with a dirty bomb inside a box? I heard about this on an episode of “The Big Bang Theory.” And it is an interesting conundrum. Of which this universe is a larger example. We cannot know definitively whether there is a God — or at least not until we die. And end up in the empty cave blind, dumb, deaf and dead forever and ever. Or in hell, which might or might not have good coffee. I mean, I just imagine that the climate in hell is perfect for the making of some great beans. Or at the gates of Heaven trying to remember how many times you gave coins to homeless people on the street. Until we are dead, when we will find ourselves either completely relieved to be playing cards with our great-greatgrandparents or dead and gone and it doesn’t matter anyway. There is just no hard evidence either way that God exists or doesn’t. Which obviously means that there is a God.
There’s a book written by some anonymous monk or nun called The Cloud of Unknowing that you’re not even supposed to read unless you’re a real true believer, but it’s pretty good and I won’t tell the anonymous nun or monk on you if you choose to. Anyway, that book sets up this scenario: That there is a loving god who does care about us, but who created an obscuring force between humans and God. And mere knowledge or proof cannot pierce this protective force field. Only pure love and thoughtless, almost Buddhist-like contemplation can bridge the gap.
A conundrum, like the one the text suggests, can only be created. Random acts are seldom clever. They are generally random, and skew toward the dumb. A billion correct things had to happen to create me to write this article at this place and time, in my underpants on a hot afternoon. Or a billion incorrect things, as the case may be. But there’s no real way of knowing if I’m right or wrong until we’re all dead. When I will be gloating. So very hard. Imagine that for all eternity. Me, buying you drinks at a sports bar in the sky, giving you a little wink, a mouth click and a point. Forever and ever. Our inability to determine if there is a God is a situation only a god would create. If there was no God, wouldn’t there be an easy way to prove that? Why would there be any question at all? You might say that religion is an opiate of the masses, like Orwell contended. But we’ve found that religions actually incite rather than placate populaces. Without religions we would probably be more servile, easier to separate and control. Very few truly don’t wish to exist. Wouldn’t the Jews have stayed enslaved without Moses’ magic tricks and plagues? And none of those crusades ever have been fought without people believing in weird different gods. Maybe God doesn’t want us to believe in a God. Some people just like doing things anonymously and not getting any credit.
And so, the creation of a universe which makes sense to people who either believe it was created by somebody or just kind of happened and has no meaning, to this theologian at least, suggests that it was created. Who could keep this many balls in the air? Magic! I guess we will someday have to open the box to find out if the cat inside it is alive. I mean, you would probably hear the cat if it was alive, cats don’t like being in boxes and get pretty whiny when you leave them in there.
WHY DOES SEX FEEL SO GOOD?
I understand biologically why sex should be pleasurable for humans. But we would probably still do it if it didn’t feel as amazing as it does. I mean, life is pretty boring. Having sex and getting high or drunk are the only things really worth doing most of the time. We feel lust, it directs us towards being fruitful and multiplying. That would pretty much cover it. But if sex was merely about procreating, why is it so hard for some people to get pregnant? Some animals have, like, barbed penises that don’t release themselves from vaginas without ejaculating a million times directly inside to make sure that the job gets done. Humans have soft tiny unbarbed penises. That come really fast and then make us nap. At least in my experience. And I have never impregnated anyone! I made a giant list of all the people I have had sex with and it was depressing. And none of those people had any babies because of me. This seems like a giant waste of evolutionary effort. Also, I have heard about this thing called the female g-spot. Have you heard of this thing? And the clitoris. Have you ever found that? I have never found it. But apparently it is, wait for it, outside of the vagina. That seems like an awfully stupid place to put it if sex was only meant to feel good through intercourse that makes babies. Vibrators feel better than penises! And we don’t have lots of robot babies being born! Think about that.
Nipples also. Nipples. What is up with those? Why does it feel good when we kiss people on the nipples? I won’t even get into why the male pleasure button is up men’s asses. These are all huge design flaws that would have been weeded out a long time ago in humans, except if sex was designed for something more than just procreation between a man and a woman. By God. A God that wanted us to have all kinds of 50 Shades of Grey kinky-time.
God doesn’t make mistakes. And if God didn’t want penises to fit up asses he would have made them square or with like a hammerhead or something. You know those big long poles that they tie to grocery carts so you can’t get them out of the grocery store and keep them in your house? Something along those lines. The fact that homosexuality exists, for me, confirms the existence of God. Deal with that, Pope.
I don’t think the Things Just Accidentally Evolved Thing really completely explains it all in any way that means anything. The Earth is a little too perfect in its imperfection. And sex makes us do an awful lot of dumb things there is just no way we would ever do. The world is a weird, wild place. And someone is laughing all about it. Probably Tom Cruise.
Related: The Dos And Don’ts Of Time Travel
Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.