The Elf Wax Monolith

The universe is like the sway bar in my car. You just drive over that same stretch of horribly maintained road too many times, and the lynch-pin snaps. The behemoth machines tear trees off their roots and toss them into trucks, and off they go. Ruin my road in the rain, sleet, ice or snow. I have to be honest with you folks out there, I use wood on a prolific scale. Being a woodworker by trade and by hobby it is just what I naturally do. I also have a job at a Barbecue joint and they burn good hickory just for food. So I have a hand in all this logging business, and I've even cut down a few trees myself. It's just not good for the environment. Logging ruins perfectly good dirt roads, and they don't care until it gets too bad for their trucks. I've bottomed out daily for a month, and is it any surprise that my radiator leaks, and the sway bar has snapped off? Just imagine what those animals are going through.

But wait a second. You may be asking yourself "What has this all got to do with the universe?" or perhaps "Is this is going to be a terrible philosophical metaphor?"

Well, there is a lynch-pin that holds the entire universe together like my sway bar, but it is religion, and not the loggers who are fucking it all up. And yes, this is a terrible metaphor, because just like the logging industry, religion would not exist without the support of those they are ruining.

The Cult of the Fire

A squat hairy bit of folk discovered fire before any other human ancestor. They were probably the oldest ancestors of the Neanderthals, although it is difficult to tell for sure. Groups began a primitive kind of fire-worship, quite literally believing God was alive within the flames. This was in contrary to Sun worship, which was the predominant belief among Cro-Magnon ancestors. Early Cro-Magnons shunned the use of fire, sun-drying all flesh they did not wish to eat raw. There is evidence of Fire worshippers being killed en masse by spears made Cro-Magnon style, but only up to the exact point at which fire pits are found in Cro-Magnon settlements. Is killing eachother the only way we've been able to stop ourselves from becoming god? We were all once the evil cult of the fire.

The Lynch Pin Snapped

God is dead even if you think he lives every day in you. He is getting to be a couple of thousand years old anyway, and is probably good and tired of taking the fall for everything that happens. Perhaps he committed suicide if we're really made in his image. The fact is that religion has caused too much death, pain, and exploitation for anyone with any sense to still believe. The religious tenets of Christianity do not explain why Christianity has done so much bad. At least Islam says that Allah will sort out the innocents, and I'm sure that's a comfort to many people. America is so fervently religious we're simultaneously joyful, hateful, and outraged at what has happened to the world. Gays and women who abort fetuses are the cult of the fire and Christians would have the world rid of them. Just watch Fox News, fair and balanced hatred of weird ideas like Global Warming or oh-so sinister sounding Neo-Darwinism. The Lynch pin snapped at Intelligent design, and this will be the first Cro-Magnon generation to worship fire.

What is Intelligent Design?
What a marvelous question! An intelligent design is something that was designed for a purpose by an entity with intelligence. For example, the bow and arrow was designed so that when nocked, an arrow can be launched from the tension of the bent bow. Nobody knows how bow and arrows came to be, but a scientist in Intelligent Design theory could tell you that the bow and arrow obviously did not appear out of thin air. There had to be something that came before the bow and arrow, and it couldn't have possibly been the spear. There must have been a "designer."

YOU WERE NOT CREATED IN THE IMAGE OF GOD