From Myth to Mystery
by Dougie and the Gnomes of Telopea
I've been wanting to write this for years but I've never quite known what to say. When you're financially insecure and vulnerable you can't afford to antagonise your customer base.But my recent brush with destitution has blown all those ideas out of the water. Debt is like cancer. That sounds like a gross exaggeration but on American ABC television this morning one couple had lost everything, they were being forced to sell their home, their car, their furniture... everything.
And someone seriously suggested that they'd be better off blowing their brains out.
As extreme as that sounds, I get it. In 1990 I lost my business, my home, my car... everything. I kidded myself that I'd soon get back on my feet.
Fifteen years later and I'm still grovelling and crawling around on my hands and knees. Had I known that my future was going to be this bleak and desperate I would have suicided back then and spared myself the stress.
But it's good that I didn't because now I can do something useful to help other people who are going through shit.
I'm going to launch the 'Real Wild Church.' Actually, it's already launched but I've been keeping it a secret from you.
You see, I'm an atheist, and people hate atheists. Atheists kill the fantasy of an everlasting life. No one attends functions run by an atheist. No one knowingly subscribes to a web site run by an atheist. So you can see why I've kept quiet about this. It's my livelihood at stake.
But I have a problem with atheism, always have done.
I can't believe in a deity who plays tunes through his anus, murders children for fun and picks his nose while 300,000 people drown. I can't believe in a "christ" who refuses to cure a sick child because she isn't a Jew, a "christ" who curses a fig tree to death for disobeying him, and who drowns 2,000 pigs to cure one man of a mental disorder. But having said that I nevertheless find it hard to believe that there's nothing at all, that there's no purpose or meaning to anything.
So I have a problem with pure atheism. I feel that Charles Darwin got it mostly right but he missed something major. For me there is something meaningful and intelligent behind it all, something far too complicated and other-worldly for a human mind to grasp. This is more profound than mere agnosticism which is generally, if unfairly perceived as a fence-sitting exercise. There is something, but no one knows what.
Einstein didn't know the answer, he said, "I'm content to leave it as a mystery."
Professor Anthony Flew, a prominent British scientist, admitted at age 81 that he has become convinced of intelligent design in the universe.
Christians leaped at this – "Atheist turns to God," rang the headlines. But he soon put them in their place by describing the christian god as a "Cosmic Saddam Hussein."
Professor Flew was not referring to man made deities. He was describing an Intelligence which transends men's thinking. He was talking about an Intelligence that we may understand a thousand years from now.
Now that's my sort of deity.
And so the 'Real Wild Church' is not a church as we know it. The RWC is a church that welcomes men, women, lapsed godists, agnostics and atheists. It welcomes straights, bisexuals, gays and transgenders. It welcomes perverts, deviates, blah blah blah, whatever names society hurls at you.
We are not interested in worshiping a god who afflicts men with haemorrhoids for looking inside a box, a god which smears excrement on men's faces to punish them for disobedience. That's the Jewish god and Jews are welcome to it.
We are not interested in worshiping a "christ" who condones slavery and who calls a gentile mother a "dog." Nor are we interested in worshiping a demon who advises men to gouge out their eyes and sever their hands for looking at a woman with lust in their heart. And we are certainly not interested in worshiping a fiend who condemns three-quarters of mankind to hell for not flattering him with their devotion. That's the christian god and christians are welcome to it.
Sorry christians but I cannot and will not prostitute my reasoning faculty for the sake of some pie-in-sky afterlife. By reducing "god" to the level of a disgusting, spiteful, imbecile the bible insults any universal Intelligence that there may be.
So we are not interested in worshiping anything. What is the point? We know nothing about the creative force behind the universe – absolutely bloody nothing. The moment a feeble human mind writes, "God said this..." or "God did this..." we know that we're dealing with an idiot. Either that or someone making a good living by spreading lies.
The bible is nonsense from the first sentence in Genesis to the last sentence in Revelation. How can I be so sure? Because I have committed the ultimate sin – I have READ the bible. I'm willing to wager that no one here has read the bible, that no one here knows anyone or has even met anyone who has read the bible. You see, christians don't read the bible. It is too much of a challenge for them.
Only atheists read the bible. I have read the King James Authorised Version, The New American Standard Bible and the New English Testament.
I recognise crap when I see it.
More than 50% of Britons are atheists now. The church is heading for extinction in Europe. So where do people turn to now for guidance, for comfort, for comradeship, for love?
Is it a choice between the church or nothing? At the moment it is, and that's where the 'Real Wild Church' comes in. The 'Real Wild Church' exists to fill the vacuum. Bye bye bullshit, hello reality. But not a cold, severe atheistic reality, instead, a warm, humorous, sexy and accepting reality.
The reality of the 'Real Wild Church.'
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