...I find the irony delicious that the baby Jesus chose an atheist through which to express the ideas and ideals he originally intended to communicate through the gospels. I think it's fairly clear that no contemporary religious person could hope to fathom the truth -- they're too busy believing in dogma-crap.

"Nothing REAL can be threatened. Nothing UNREAL exists. Therein lies the peace of God."

Forgetting for a moment that God doesn't exist, what is particularly, "good news," (gospel) about the lack of actual threat in the universe as God created it?

Well, for one, we're not talking about human reality when we start talking about absolute things like God. Human beings perceive actual and imaginary threats all the time. Were an omniscient and omnipresent truth to exist, one thing can be said for certain, such a truth could be threatened by no one and by nothing. Very literally. Nothing threatens the existence of God like nothing. I suppose the "good news" is that whatever we have before us, it is demonstrably not, "nothing." Therefore, our discussion with one another proves beyond a shadow of any doubt that something put us here to begin with.

Proto-life, meta-life -- something -- is everything that is real about the universe. Reality in the most meaningful sense, is not about human life at all, but about what makes everything possible.

Science would like us to believe that the scientific method will yield all that is knowable about everything. If sensory perception can not register its presence, science declares such knowingness, "irrelevant," and marches onward through the fog.

Science looks into the cosmos and sees an edge of a universe that is actually younger than its expected age. Science looks into the energies of the atom and finds both waves and particles, abstractions and yet tangible energies with enormous potential for devastating causality. And here we all sit, somewhere in the midst of all this information, just as lost as ever. We sometimes feel dropped behind enemy lines with defective equipment, when we're not slapping each other on the back and congratulating each other for being the petulant life forms that we are.

My point -- and I do have one -- is that if you actually believe that your religion offers you certainty in the midst of all that is unknown about human existence, you're out of your mind. Very literally. You don't like your mind, you don't like thinking, and you don't like human experience worth a damn. You see a reflection of your own tortured inner self reflected back at you repeatedly and the uncertainty of it all terrifies and frightens you. So you run to find the certainty of your own stream of conscious thought and find it in pseudo-authorities who baffle people with bulls*t.

Grow the f*k up. All of you. You are seeing yourselves when you believe you see objects and ideas outside of you. Everything is a part of everything that is, was, or ever will be.

And if you're dumb enough to believe that a loving God would pursue you into some afterlife and punish you for playing with your peepee, you're nuttier than a damn fruitcake. Personalities and bodies change. By definition, that which is not absolute is not real. Either you really WANT to be a part of Everything that Is, or you don't. Don't kid yourself. God may be the silent witness in your mind right Now, but everything you've taught yourself to value in your pathetically short existence is going to get ripped from your greedy little hands before you expire whether you ate a hot dog on Friday or not.

Dwell on this, all of you, please: everything we have taught ourselves to value will eventually all be taken away from us. Meditate on that factoid and then ask yourselves WHY religion, WHY atheism, WHY anything at all?? What's the friggin' point?

And for the sanctimonious lurkers out there, do remember that the Baby Jesus made a friend of death. Why would He do that?? Why would He choose an atheist to clarify His remarks at this point in human history? Why do we actually believe that it was Him?