the tentacles of love

his face was flushed as heavy drinker’s sometimes are

his body befouled by the reek of booze oozing from his pores

drunk or sober, he smelled like a bathroom in a bar

the aftershave he overused only adding the odor of a urinal cake

her face was painted garishly like the aging whore she was 

until no one would pay her anymore

the implants she’d had years ago when she was firm and toned

now made her breasts twin cantaloupes rotting over stones

each settled for the other because there wasn’t another

who’d touch them no matter how long was the pole

he was father to a daughter long forgetten; she a mother

to a half a dozen bastards better off being orphans

they’d fallen for each other like they were falling in the same hole

they were deeply serious, completely mysterious, demons sharing the same soul

at night when they sweetly, sweatily screwed they proved

there is nothing blinder than endorphins

she died first, the victim of a wasting social disease

with her last foul breath she whispered to him i love you

he nodded in his taciturn way, not trusting words to his unease

then left the corridors of the hospital into a summer day that mocked his grief

with nothing left to want, and nothing left to do

he lumbered on doing the things alone he once did when they were two

often he rode the bus to the pauper’s grave where she had found relief

with sunrise the caretaker gave him a nip from his flask then told him to leave

he didn’t die, at least, he hasn’t yet

he goes on a wretched warrior no one told about the truce

he’ll never die nor will he soon forget

the tentacles of love will never let him loose

when hecate’s your nurse

when i was young and dumb and full of cum

i marched my own cadence, i beat my own drum

now i’m old and cold and not nearly as bold

and the pride of my soul has long since been sold

and the place where i kept it is covered with mold

i was, then i wasn’t, but will be again

as is the folly and fate and the future of men

they leap from a pussy full grown dressed in rags

they stagger with drink and swagger their brags

till toe-tagged and trepanned they curl up in black bags

my life is no different than those gone before

i saw mother’s face in the eyes of a whore

then wooed her and screwed her but left her no coin

for the course that she set from the day i was born

was a thrust and a fevre to return to her loins

you think me a loony, insane in the brain

for saying the things left unsaid by most men

but a swine in his silence eats at the same trough

and i am a poet and i’m from the south

where capote was famous for using his mouth

so dress me in garlands of garlic and sage

throw me in a hole at the end of my age

for dying is easy and living is worse

and a limo foreshadows the back of a hearse

and her cold tits are tasty when hecate’s your nurse

Death and Truth

I am not a hard scientist.  My background is in literature and philosophy.  But I am not an academic pontificating from an Ivory Tower with no experience in the real world outside of a university campus.  Everything I say is backed up by years of living out my beliefs on the street where it counts.  If a belief system fails to produce when applied to our lives then it is the system that is at fault and needs revision.  Life is the ultimate test of any theory. My atheism doesn't come from any discussion in a cloistered environment or from reading books on the subject, although I have done more than my share of each.  My atheism comes from knowledge of and an attempt to live out theism in my life.  I spent 50 years of my life struggling to make theism work only to find, at every turn, the belief system did not answer any problems or offer any solutions but rather made my life more miserable and me a far worse person than I would have been without it. Atheism answered all the questions and made good on all the promises that theism failed to answer or to keep.  Not just on paper, but in my life.  I know from personal experience that other people would be far better off if they rejected the primitive belief in God and accepted their own mortality.  When I admitted to myself that I was not an immortal being, that I would one day die and that with my death would come the cessation of my existence, I found the need for God to exist dropped from my eyes like a blindfold and I saw the world as it really was for the first time. So much for my personal testimony.  I'll get more into my experiences later as they are germane to my atheism.  For now this brief introduction will have to suffice. Yesterday's letter dealt with death and 'the lack of alternatives.'  My reasoning was based solely on the evidence and I made truth statements, mainly that death, decomposition and the cessation of existence were obvious facts and that theism was a turning away from the truth and the acceptance of a lie.  The unpopularity of 'truth' talk comes from the theistic misuse of the word.  This situation is exacerbated by the cowardice of contemporary philosophy and the hard sciences in the academic world.  The academic population is only a subset of all peoples and classes.  Their motivation is career advancement and, as such, they are loath to make truth statements that may lead to ridicule from their peers.  So both theist and atheist define truth in the limited sense of being 'absolute certainty.'  The application of the twin notions of infinity and eternity extend the probability of an event occurring or a being existing outwards and inwards, forwards and backwards to the point that nothing can be spoken of with absolute certainty about anything.   Since God is defined as an infinite and eternal being he is the only one who can make comment on his own existence or lack thereof, or so the theist argument goes.  If I make the truth statement 'God does not exist' the counter-argument is I would have to have the attributes of God in order to know with absolute certainty that he doesn't exist.  Because of this conundrum, we have an extended argument over the existence of God that would seem to have no possible resolution. What we have are two different definitions of truth.  The truth that is 'out there,' objective truths based on observation, and the truth that is 'inside me,' the interaction between objective truths and myself.  The problem is the latter should be referred to as my beliefs and the word truth should be reserved for the former. Belief differs from truth. Belief is fixed in time and space.  Everyone knows this.  There is the conversion moment in Christianity where one believes and is saved.  One moment you didn't believe, the next you did.  Belief is an on/off switch, either you believe or you don't.  There is no middle ground.  Doubt, the attempts of the rational mind to regain control over one's beliefs, is looked upon as a disease to be cured, not a habit of mind to be cultivated.  Belief is the cessation of the search for the truth and the substitution of a false sense of certainty that has no referent in the real world. Truth is a dimmer switch taking you from the darkness of primitive superstitions and gradually illuminating the world around you.  Truth is reliable information that can be used as the foundation for further truths yet to be learned.  Truth is an ever-elusive goal that carries us forward into the future.  Belief freezes us at one time and refuses the accumulation of further knowledge.  Truth leads to freedom, belief to stagnation and insanity. Death is the truth not because I need it to be true.  The belief in human immortality is created and sustained by the human need to deny death and live forever.  The motivation for people to believe they are immortal is so strong all religion has to do is tell one lie and they have millions of people turning their back on the truth and willingly giving up their freedom and minds. You have on one side a truth that is harsh and uncompromising and unpleasant to the point that its acceptance makes you a social pariah in a country full of believers... ...And on the other side a belief that is deeply and intensely motivated not just by the promise of immortality but the social acceptance of your surrounding culture... ...then how could you impugn a selfish motive on the former and applaud the latter? That is what is happening in our country.  An atheist gives up everything for the sake of the truth. Christians give up nothing and are, in fact, highly rewarded for their willingness to believe a lie. Yet we are the enemy, the antichrist, and the monster. We are the ones they will come for in the night.

Death and the Lack of Alternatives

How many times would you have to see the same thing happen before your eyes before you acknowledged the truth of the lesson being presented?

How about every single time?  Wouldn't you have to admit that if there's any validity to the concept of truth then something that is attested to by every occurrence has to be considered true?

Gravity, of course comes to mind.  Fire burns.  Daddy's razor is not a toy. These are truisms we've all come to live with.  Why?  Because we have a vested interest, avoidance of pain, in remembering these things and none whatsoever in each time testing to see if, just this once, the laws of nature have been rescinded. 

The ultimate, of course, is death.  

Everyone dies.  Everyone decomposes.  Nobody comes back.

This is the truth.

Do I really have to bring out arguments in support of a truth that has been played out by everything that has ever lived and ever will live on this planet?

Death is the truth.  The truth is death.

Don't like the sound of that?  Tough.  Get used to it. Nobody's going to change the laws of nature just because you think they shouldn't apply to you.

Grow up.

If you only remember two words from this essay, then I hope these are the two:

Grow up.

On some level, deep inside no matter how much dirt and rocks you've piled on top of it over the years...on some level you know the truth.  Not on a conscious level; on a totally physical level.  Your cells die daily.  They know what your brain can't admit to.  Your lungs know what it would feel like if they tried to take that next breath and couldn't.  Even your brain, not your mind, but the fleshy, animal part of your brain...even your brain knows death far better than you.

The soul is a red herring.  A distraction. Like those O2 masks that come down from the ceiling in a plane crash that don't do anything but give the passengers enough oxygen to calm them down before they die.  The soul, religion, all the rest of that malarkey, is nothing but something to keep you're mood up even as your body ceases to live and the little spurts of energy firing within your brain start flickering out like city lights in a slow, rolling black out.

Look, suppose you had a perfect AI, passes the Turing Test with flying colors every time.  A computer created artificial intelligence indistinguishable from a real person in blind tests.

For that matter, you could have the AI programmed to remember his life before he became totally paralyzed in a whitewater rafter accident.  Really fix it so this AI doesn't know that he isn't a living human being, just one whose only interaction to the outside world comes through his computer.  Kind of like your average teenager, for that matter.

Now, let's get really cruel...remember, this is just a demonstration on a computer simulation that mimics a human being...and program into the computer the absolute, religious faith that he has an immortal soul and when he dies he will go to Heaven to be with Jesus.

You with me so far?  Pretty cool, huh?  Like Frankenstein, but instead of meat life, we're creating a human soul.

Or are we?

Now, here's the question, the payoff to this set up.

What would happen if we totally destroyed the hardware this AI program was loaded on to?  I mean, we're talking Arnold slipping into the vat of molten metal at the end of Terminator 2 kind of destruction.

I think most of us would agree that the AI program we created ceased to exist when the microchips it was encoded on were destroyed.

The fact that the AI was programmed to believe he had a soul that would survive his corporeal destruction could not change the truth:

He didn't.

There was a time when we didn't understand the flow of energy around us, the spectrum of light and sound and the splashing and crashing chaos of our world was limited to our five senses.  Back then; we hadn't a clue what we were talking about.  It was easy to speculate because we lacked the equipment to measure the world around us.  So we could all have souls that left the body at the moment of death.  

It was pretty easy to keep up believing in this nonsense until we had people start dying while they had all these wires and machines hooked up to their brains and bodies.  All of a sudden you've got to ask yourself, Where's the soul?

Now if all of the brain cells were stone cold dead and there was this vague little halo of energy left inside off in a corner of the dead man's head that was still registering on the monitors and pumping out little 'hey, it's me' signals, then we might have something to talk about.

We don't. 

I don't think people quite get what medicine brings to the table when it comes to the debate between rationality and superstition.  Or what they don't bring, I should say.  No energy, capish?

You get some people who still want to claim there's a human soul that survives the death of the body in spite of the fact.  They say the soul is composed of energy that can't be detected by our machines but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist and we're ignoring their theory and not giving it credibility

Strange thing about this elusive energy:  the only reason you infer its existence is that without it your whole house of cards comes a tumblin' down and your porcine-behind is out of a job.

That's what it's all about, of course, not the money.  Everybody got it all wrong back in the days of the televangelist scandals.  These guys were amateurs, the goons. Weren't even smart enough to cover their own litter.

The thing about coming back from the dead is that it's kind of tricky.  Anyone who's seen both George Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Stephanie Myer's Twilight can appreciate the difference between coming back as a mindless consumer and coming back as yourself, with coherent memories tying you to the past life you just gave up when you died. 

Most of us don't believe in the reanimation of dead flesh.  Those who do are in dire need of a check up from the neck up, as Kinky Friedman likes to say.

We believe in the immortality of the soul.  Now Paul, the devious genius that he was, came up with the idea that your spirit has to have a body to reside in.  The problem is, our spirits are stuck in flesh like a horse stuck in the mud.  So we got to wash off and put on a new body...but this one's a Spiritual body, wink, wink...nudge, nudge.

So you have a soul that is what?  Your mind?  A mirror image of your mind...kind of a back up system in case the main brain crashes?  Energy that's just too elusive for us to detect?

And this soul has to survive the death of your body with enough of you intact so that you have a coherent afterlife.  Your hard drive is gone, liquidized.  So in order to survive, your soul must be a form of free-floating energy.  But in order to carry information about you and your recently departed life, this energy must first, be organized and encrypted and, second, must adhere to only energy like itself in order for there to be an afterlife.  Dissipation, I'm assuming, would be a problem since we're talking about a free-floating ball of energy with you recorded on it like a demo tape for the afterlife.

And the way you get to the afterlife is by having faith...

...wait a minute, this is beginning to sound familiar!  

I got it!  

Tinkerbell!

Remember, when her light was going out because she drank the poison instead of letting Peter drink it, and you had to clap and squeal real hard:

"I believe in fairies! I do, I swear I do!"

Until the stagehand had enough begging and started turning the dimmer switch back up.

Grow up.

Acknowledge the truth.  We die, we decompose, we don't come back.

OK, take a deep breath now.  You don't have to do it, all you have to do is imagine what your life would be like if that were true.

Now first, there's a technical problem with your senses and there's nothing to be done about it except try and find some wiggle room around it.  The problem is the human mind cannot conceive of it's own non-existence.  Least that's what I've heard; sometimes I think I can almost grasp it, then it slips away.  

But, good old logic to the rescue, you know exactly what it means to be non-existent.  You were non-existent for an eternity before your birth.  So, when you die, you go back to being in the same state you were before you were born.


On August 1st, 1950 I did not exist.  Sometime during the day on August 2nd I came into existence...or are you one of those sick-o's who believes that yucky stuff that fills up the nipple on a used, stretched condom is alive?  Christ, the murders I have committed literally at my own hand are astronomical!

OK, here's the deal with life.  You got to be able to keep it on your own or you lose it.

Adam was created from the dust of the earth.  His body was completely created and formed in every detail but not animated by a living soul until God Breathes the Breath of Life into his mouth at which point he becomes a living soul.

So we don't become souls until we are capable of sustaining life on our own.  Mom did her best while she had you in her Lovin' Oven now it's up to you to breathe or die, sweety.  That's why frogs and insects have all kinds of kids.  That way you don't get attached.

And here's a thought:

If they're keeping you alive with machines then you aren't a human being any more, you're a science experiment.

Probably stole that from somewhere.  Was it Hemingway who said "All writers steal, good writers know what to steal."

I'm wandering, but I do my best thinking when I let the dog off the leash and let her chase the coon herself while I sit up here on the porch in my rocking chair with my shotgun across my knees while Chet and Molly's retarded boy plays that same damn song on the banjo over and over again.  Dadgum boy done went all Hollywood since that movie.

You see, it's not a stream of consciousness if you try to use a rudder.  The worst mistake a writer can make is to get in the way.

Point is, we know that when we fry a hard drive on the barbie that everything stored on the drive is gone and isn't coming back.  Unless it's NCIS and Abbie gets hold of it, of course.

We know our bodies die and decompose.  We know they don't come back.

We just don't say it aloud.

Because if you say it aloud then you give it power.

How about if we do that whole sinner's prayer thing they had in the back of the Chick Tracts...talk about great American Primitive artwork...I was proud to hand a sinner a Chick Tract because I knew I was giving him a quality product.

You know the one, where you say aloud how you believe in and accept him into your heart...blah, blah, blah, 23 pages of boilerplate, standard savior/sinner contract...been a hell of a lot easier if his dad would have only signed his name...who knew thirty was underage for an eternal being?

Here's the deal, I'm not asking you to ask me into your heart.  Even though Valentine's Day is coming, that would still be just creepy...

What I want is for you to say aloud one simple, absolutely true and undeniably significant statement.

Here, I'll show you how easy it is.

When I, Philip Jarrett, die I will cease to exist.  

My body will decompose.

I will not go anywhere or come back from anywhere.

There will come a time when I, Philip Jarret, will no longer be the center of the universe and all existence.

The universe and all existence will continue on without me.

There's nothing personal about this, it's just business the way it's done in our universe.

Nobody can get me off the hook for old times sake.

There will be no last minute call from the governor staying my execution.

It is a harsh truth but no belief system has been able to stop death.

They are failures, they are a waste of time.

Time, as in your life.  Time that if you accept your own mortality will become the most precious part of your life.  The flow of the sand in an hour glass, the ticking of the clock on the mantel, the candle as it sputters out...or perhaps is snuffed.

If you believe you will meet your parents or children or anyone else in heaven or you will get a chance to make up for your failures in another life here on earth then where is the motivation to do something about these things in the real world, the here and now world?

This isn't moral.  This isn't ethical.  This is a lie.

Anyone who tells you there is life after death doesn't know anything more than you do on the subject and that makes him a liar.

If the truth makes you free then anyone who tells you a lie is tring to make you a mental slave.

Free Minds can make a Free World. 

But we aren't born free.

Freedom is not a gift from a supernatural being.  God does not believe in Free Will.  With Him it's either My Way or the Highway to Hell.

Each of us has to fight for our freedom.  Each of us has to swim upstream against the flow of history. 

You have to kill who you are to become who you want to be.  And you'd better best get in the habit of doing it every morning if you want to life a happy life.

Here's a clue from my person Atheology:

Since death is the ultimate and escapable truth of life, then each moment of our life is our life.

If you want to have a happy life, then you have to learn to stream together as many happy moments as you can.

Admit the truth and be happy.  Believe the lie and live in fear of either eternal damnation or an afterlife of blessings you know deep down that you don't deserve.

There's a line from City of Angels where Nick Cage explains to Meg Ryan about the supernatural afterlife and the existence of angels by saying:

Somethings are true whether you believe in them or not.

Great line, too bad it was wasted on an Oprah Winfrey feel-good movieto Meg.

I think we, as atheists and non-believers, should steal and re-word this line for our own purposes:

Somethings just aren't true no matter how badly you want to believe they are.

An Elaboration On Truth and Fable

Adam and Eve were offered two choices:  Eat of the Tree of Life and live or of the Tree of Knowledge and die.  The Snake lied to them and told them they would not die.  They ate and this is why Daddy has to work hard in the fields and Mommy hurts so bad when she’s having a baby and Snakes crawl on their bellies.  This was the fable before Christianity weighed it down with all the baggage of Original Sin.

The first step in gaining knowledge is the admission of your own mortality. 

You have to shun the fruit of the Tree of Life in order to partake of the Tree of Knowledge.  

The Snake is the one who says they will not die.  And he's lying to you.  Anyone who tells you that you are immortal is lying to you.

Let me repeat that.

Anyone who tells you that you are immortal, that there is life after death, that you will resurrect from the dead in your own flesh and rule with Jesus in a Thousand Year Kingdom here on Earth is telling you a lie.

It doesn’t matter how old the lie is or how confusingly ornate and baroque the lie has become or how many people believe the lie.

It’s a lie.

When someone who knows no more than you do tells you what you want to hear and you believe it then he is a liar and you are a fool.

Am I claiming that I know more than you do?  No, I’m saying there are only two things we can say with certainty on the subject of death and the afterlife:

We all die.

Nobody comes back from death.

Anyone who claims knowledge beyond those two indisputable facts is lying to you.

Why do I keep hammering on the word ‘lie’?  Aren’t they just of a different opinion than me and shouldn’t I respect their right to believe and teach what they want to on the subject? 

You’re right; I can’t stop people from believing a lie.  But they can stop themselves.  They can begin to learn anew the terrors of freedom, of thinking rather than regurgitating.

When someone tells you wild tales about Death and Damnation, Heaven and Hell, God Versus Satan and that you are at the Epicenter of a Cosmic Battle for your Eternal Soul it’s all very thrilling and exciting, especially that part about you being immortal and that when you die you don’t cease to exist but live on in some ethereal sense to return to your bones at the End of Time and be judged for the Sins of your Life and sent to either Eternal Paradise or Eternal Punishment and that the only way you can avoid Burning In Hell Where The Fire Is Not Quenched And The Worm Dieth Not is to turn your life, money and mind over to him and he’ll see what he can do for you...

...I think I can safely say we’ve left a simple lie far behind and gone deep into the territory of psychotic fantasy.

Here’s the tricky part.  This same person who tells you all this also tells you whoever would come around making you question his fabulous tales is trying to steal your soul and if you listen to him it’s an automatic one-way ticket Down and there’s nothing he or anyone else can do for you.

You’ve got to admire a con game with that caveat inserted to keep the mark on the hook!

Do I sound angry to you?  I hope I do, because I am.  I’ve lost fifty years...a half of a century...of my life when I was a Christian just as surely as I would have if I had been placed in prison for a crime I not only didn’t commit but a crime of which I was the victim!

Death is the truth; life after death is a lie.

I’m not shy about using the word truth.  When the likelihood of an event occurring is ever more increasingly scarce with every minute of every day then refusing the word truth would be like refusing to call a rock, a rock.  In any other species than man, we accept as a given that part of the description of the life form is it’s longevity.  

The sea turtle can live a 150 years, then he dies and does not come back.  My dog will live 12 to 20 years, and then he will die and not come back.

With the human species we can trace the longevity rate from age to age, but in the end we always die.  

And in spite unsubstantiated rumors that must, by definition, be accepted without proof...hell, the less proof the better!  For believing something in spite of tangible evidence to the contract is the ultimate act of faith!

And no one has ever come back.  Sorry, Jesus, but until we perfect time travel and a DNA sample is collected while you were alive (if you ever lived at all) then another after the resurrection (if that even happened) then the premise of my argument applies to you as well.  One of the many high points along the way towards atheism was when I realized and accepted the simple truth:

If it doesn’t happen now, it didn’t happen then.

You want to study the alleged miracles in Christian scripture then you study their modern counterparts.  Faith healing, prophecy, exorcism, glossolalia are all being practiced today.  If they happen now, then we can conclude they happened then.  I spent years in Charismatic/Pentecostal religion and have practiced and experienced all of these things and more.  Not once did I encounter anything that could not be described better and fully without reference to the supernatural.  I have read anecdotal ‘evidence’ (that is to say, the brags and boasts of people whose motivation is to increase their standing in the church they attend) but I have never encountered a single miraculous event in any serious, peer-reviewed publication or while bouncing up and down in a back pew, hands in the air, snot flying from my nose and tears from my eyes…OK, maybe the tears were kind of forced.  

It’s hard to get that thrill you did the first time you did something…sex, the Holy Spirit, LSD….and when you can’t you feel like a failure, the tension builds inside you like the bugs just under your skin that only you can  see…till you take it a little bit further than the time before…just far enough to get that sick thrill.  When I was a witch…I’ve been in every kind of religion they make and some I made up myself…I use to tell people that if you aren’t scared shitless when you were casting a spell then you weren’t doing it right.  

The addictive cycle, the ever increasing risk, all to make the ultimate commitment, to get that thrill you got the first time one more time.  It's why men have affairs and women have vibrators. It's the same in sexual perversion at it is in religion.

Ted Bundy started his career from a chance glance of a woman in an open window undressing set off the cycle of thrill, then dullness and repetition, that ends when the person takes it a step to far.  Ted Bundy ending up raping and murdering women.  The question is, when if he’d walked home that night without seeing the woman undressing in the window?

What if it was you?  What if you saw the woman in the window?  Is there a Ted Bundy inside of you molesting your Inner Child?

I know Evil.  I’ve seen it in others, sure, that’s easy and most of the time other people call Evil isn't Evil as much as irritating.  Spotting it in others…Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Ladin…that’s the easy part. 

Seeing it up close, being in the same room, the same house with it day after day does something to you.

Something bad, something you never come back from.

It's when you realize that you aren't one of the Good Guys.

No, you don’t know Evil till you see it staring back at you in the mirror.

 But I digress…

We refuse to accept that when we die we don’t come back, can’t ‘come back’ because we don’t go anywhere except down the drain on a mortician’s slab.  Hence, death without return is a descriptive of the human species.  

A descriptive is based on all available evidence and can only be changed if evidence to the contrary is discovered.  To describe something is not in the same class as theorizing and is not subject to the laws of probability and, therefore, can be stated as a fact.

A word about probability.  There is an argument against making truth statements of any kind that goes since there is an infinity of probable outcomes then that teapot orbiting the sun could possible be there or, in the extreme, will be there in some alternate universe.  This isn’t an argument at all, just an exercise in semantics. My objection is that this is an imaginative exercise made possible only because we lack the evidence to disprove a fantasy.  I think it was Chris Hitchen’s who re-worded the old cliché “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” by adding the caveat “the absence of evidence where evidence should exist is evidence of absence.”  Probability theory points the way for further study and should not, cannot be accepted as an end within itself.

But to treat it seriously and dismiss it in the case of human mortality I’ll pretend it has value.

Probability theory only functions within an infinite set.  In other words, if you take the universe(s) as your evidentiary group, then anything can happen, has happened and will happen.  In the case of human mortality, we are not functioning in an infinite set.  What we have is a finite set consisting of every human being from Eve to the extinction of our species…another unavoidable, since extinction is evidenced in all species just as all individual members of the species are mortal.  As such, we can make truth statements within the boundaries of the finite set of the human species.  Never mind all those orbiting teapot species that are immortal, we can say as an observable fact we are not included among them.

Remember Philip’s Law:

If it doesn’t happen now, it didn’t happen then.

The corollary of which is:

If it doesn’t happen now, it won’t happen in the future.

The laws of this universe are constants as far as the finite set of the human species.  Just as a miraculous inversion of those laws in a particular incident is impossible and would, in my opinion, lead to destruction of our universe, then we can say with certainty these laws haven’t changed in the 200,000 or so years humanity has existed and will not change in the 200,001 to perhaps a million years before we become extinct although that figure is too high since we are the first species capable of bringing about our own extinction as we seem intent on doing.

The population is every dead person in the world from Adam to Dick Clark.  It is a finite population, therefore we can make positive and negative statements.  In this finite population, what is the percentage of people who have come back from the dead...people with have empirical evidence for?

The answer is zero.  We have a hundred per cent mortality rate as a species.  No one has ever come back from the dead.  How can we be sure?  Investigate cases of claimed resurrection from the dead as we have in our world now.  One would be more accurate to study zombification in Voodoo if one were truly interested in the resurrection from the dead.   

One more slight digression, then I’ll give everyone a chance to tell me what an idiot I am.

Think about Jesus being God Incarnate.  Set up a computer model if you have the skill and inclination.  If the Creator of a Universe were to Incarnate into his own Creation would he not set up an infinite loop that would end in the destruction of the Universe?  

I’m reminded of Robert Heinlein’s Glory Road one of his few attempts, and maybe the only one’ at fantasy.  There is a creature who attacks the gang of intrepid questers (isn’t there always?) who is indestructible by definition.  How do they overcome such a creature?  They feed the creature it’s own tail and continue to stuff the tail in the mouth until he is the size of a beach ball then a basketball then a baseball then a marble then a speck of dust until all that is left of him is a greasy spot on the hero’s hand.  

I submit that the Incarnation upon which Christianity rests is an impossibility just as making a monster disappear by feeding it it's own tail.

Don't know the science that could prove the impossibility of the Incarnation, got a hunch it's out there somewhere.  But I'm no scientists.

I am, in truth, (drum roll please)

An English Major!

And even worse,

With a Philosophy Minor!

As Sheldon put it:

"Oh, the Humanities!"

In conclusion, we die.  We don’t come back from death.  


In order to become a grown, adult human being you must first acknowledge these truths.  Clinging to superstition and fable wastes countless lives to potentials they will never be able to fulfill.


I know it did me.


Atheism is admitting the truth.


The Truth.

Da-da-da-Dah!

But remember or hear for the very first time a lesson that is hard in the learning:

The Truth won't set you Free...


...you have to Free the Truth!

and the field ‘neath my feet will lay fallow

the world is a harsh metaphor

for something i can’t understand

twelve candles or stars

or tongues of fire

against a darkness not evil, but bland

i’ve stumbled and grumbled my way through life

passed sixty years now and nothing to show

a month-to-month rental

some trinkets and trifles

a head full of nitro with no fuse to blow

so come along girls and all you young men

the promise was made to be broken

with god for a lover

and satan your friend

there is much left better unspoken

life is a mystery and death is its solving

and all the rest is a red herring

the sun will rise ever

the moon keep revolving

so learn when you’re young to stop caring

old age is a blessing and death is no curse

as i drop through the hole in the gallows

one last shit and it’s over

for better or worse

and the field ‘neath my feet will lay fallow

nibbled to death by ducks

nibbled to death by ducks

there isn’t much that’s left of me

some bones and hair and strips of flesh

i am being slowly, relentlessly nibbled to death by ducks

all that once was pure and fresh

has long since succumbed to obscenity

my shriveled soul has slipped my grasp and sank beneath the muck

death holds a paltry, insignificant fear

compared to premature decomposition

pain, though unpleasant, shrieks i’m alive

not agony, but numbness plots the course of my deletion

and at night in deathly dark i strain my ears to hear

the flutter of wings at my window as they arrive

soft thudding of webbed feet

creeping closer while i feign sleep

struggling to stay still in hopes that they will wander off

my fingernails, grown long, lacerate my useless skin

and i hear, dear god, i hear their muttered, quacking soft

my eyes, shut tightly shut, squirt tears as i quietly weep

then the first cold bill nudges me

and the feeding frenzy begins

the clown at midnight

the knock, the knock at midnight comes

my skittering heart turns chill and numbs

no strength to run, no place to hide

i’d burned my bridge with white-hot pride

for i have been more places than

i can explain...you understand

my pervert past has given me

no peace, at least, i can foresee

the room is cold, the room is bare

the town is eastward of nowhere

i thought i’d left him far behind

but now he’s here and now it’s time

i shuffle on a tattered robe

slip slippers on my slippery soles

i scuffle cross the wooden floor

and hesitate before the door

the knock knocks on with no less force

a metronome without remorse

clump-clump, clump-clumping on it goes

i grab the doorknob, curl my toes

i twist and yank and pull it back

the door slams hard, the wallboard cracks

dark splashes in about my feet

grabs at my thighs, most indiscreet

betrayed by night that once had leant

some solace to a soul most bent

i feel my face flutter and flinch

a grim, unsculptured countenance

the hand that knocks is fisted still

a fist that lists my listless will

as yet another stone to pave

the path from pussy to the grave

and here he is and here i stand

i, in my slippers brown and tanned,

he, in his shoes impossibly wide,

waiting, as they do, to be asked inside

his shoulders slump, his spine a hump

his fingers gnarled, the blue veins jump

his breath is fouled by bloody bile

caught in his throat a demon vile

his make-up white, bone in moonlight

the scarlet slash, his mouth a gash

the rubber ball a bloody boil

sits top his nose a ghoul’s gargoyle

black tears drip down beneath dead eyes

no pity there, no compromise

his hobo coat tattered and torn

the lapel lily limp, forlorn

‘you’ve traveled far’ i found my voice

‘aye, that i have, but not by choice’

his words cackle, croon and caress

‘but now it’s time we both should rest’

‘come in, then, if that’s what you will

it’s cold and i’ve a bottle to kill’

he took the chair his rump ker-plonk

and with a rag his nose did honk

i sat on the bed, rested my head

he talked a while, i talked instead

we drank the bottle till it was dry

and with the dawn he helped me die

the ghosts of these dark hills

the ghosts of these dark hills


if i could see the flowers growing as van gogh once saw flowers grow
then these poems would twist and writhe upon the page in torment slow
splash and swirl with yellow passion, hock and spit a madman’s green
vomit blues and blacks across the night in a sky stark and obscene
but my eyes are forced to faces and catch the bend of breaking backs
as black and bitter coal comes crushing down on souls in shacks

if i could hear the voice of war come floating down throughout the years
as once made forever living by beethoven’s dying ears
then these poems would ache with steel come screeching down from scarlet sky
and tremble with the clatter of the body carts piled high
but the gunfire on blair mountain is all i hear above the din
the scream of mortality realized from the mouths of murdered men

if i could feel the gulf stream churning ‘neath the thin hull of my boat
catch the sun on marlin burning as hemingway once wrote
then these poems would clip and clatter with precise, staccato prose
and when i’m old and fatter i’d trip the trigger with my toes
but it’s the feel of my forefather’s flesh wearing my skin like a glove
that defines me and reminds me what my soul’s shroud is made of

these poems are of my body, the rhymes my rhyming limbs
the meter is the beating of my blood through ink stained veins
i chortle and i chuckle, i grumble and i roar
i throw myself at heaven and i fall back on the floor
i have nothing left of charming words or pretty paint and pleasing sound
nothing but the ghosts of these dark hills who await me in the ground