THE GULLIBILITY OF THE HUMAN RACE

We can declare ourselves an intelligent species only because there is no other species to dispute us.

 Exceptional savants produce art and music and architecture that we consider evidence of higher-level thinking skills.   Our scientists have taken us into new frontiers, and we are living in a world of advanced technology, as compared to only fifty tears ago.

   

But then we can tune into a Trump rally, or see white supremacist marching with tiki-torches, or the glazed look of people attending televangelist mega-churches and we must conclude that, on the whole, we are a pretty mediocre species and prone to the highest level of gullibility.

Without any proof or logical analyses, people choose to believe in gods and angles and devils and heaven and hell and ghost and vampires and werewolves and fairies and sprites and witches and shapeshifters and alien abductions  ….

There are those who have historically taken advantage of our gullibility.    P.T. Barnum said ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’   He also said, you can never make a mistake by underestimating the intelligence of the human race.

The human race is not special.  We are here only by the dice-roll of evolution.   What we believe doesn’t matter, because we don’t matter.  Had our mother gotten up to pee and delayed our father’s ejaculation by a few minutes, a different sperm would have fertilized her egg and someone else would be here – or if she had finished with a blow job…

So, enjoy yourself.  Believe what you want to believe.   But the intelligence of the human race can be summed up in one simple statement:

Here - Hold my beer.

the Ol’Buzzard

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE

After reading Dan Brown’s Inferno I had to read Dante’s Divine Comedy:  I got through Inferno and half way through the second section, Purgatorio, but then Stalled out.

I am not sure why I picked up the book Damned by Chuck Palahniuk, but it turned out to be a parody of Dante’s Inferno.   Except, instead of a Pilgrim, the traveler through Hell it is a dead, thirteen-year-old, precocious girl. 

The travel is spiced with sexual innuendos and some outright outrageous sexually specific scenes (not pedophilia.)    There are demons, and rivers and lakes containing various bodily fluids.  Not a read for the squeamish.

The travelers

A strange book.   It has hooked me.   I will read the sequel: Doomed.

the Ol'Buzzard

ATHEISM IS A RELIGIOUS TERM

It is understandable if a person wants to identify themself by their belief in a religion, a church, a political party, an ethnicity…; but it absolutely makes no sense that you would feel the need to identify yourself by what you do not believe.

I do not believe in vampires, werewolves, zombies, big foot, fairies, alien autopsies, ghost or things that go bump in the night.

I do not believe that the world is flat or that the sun rotes around the earth.

I do not believe that dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time

I do not believe that a snake whispered to a woman who ate an apple which brought sin into the world.

I do not believe that a six-hundred-year-old man and his hundred-year-old sons built a boat and sailed on a flood that mixed salt water and fresh water, carrying two of every animal on earth, and that upon landing a kangaroo hopped twelve thousand miles across three continents to go home to Australia.

I do not believe that a child was born to a virgin.

I do not believe that statues bleed. 

I do not believe in devils and demons and angles and gods, or in a physical heaven or hell.

I do not believe a man god walked on water, or that a brutal human sacrifice was performed to ‘take away the sins of the world.’

The name Atheist is a religious term that supposes the legitimizing of religious beliefs and proposes to delegitimize anyone that doesn’t accept the fairy tale. 

If you feel the need to attach a name to me to identify what I don’t believe in, me you might just call me sane – I can live with that.

the Ol’Buzzard