UNSOUND BITES
(Don't) Let Slippery Dogma Lie

The poll results are in. “What do you think of absolutes?” found the following:

44% “Absalutes are our patriotic duty, aren't they? I spend hours each day at the gym, saluting men with great abs.”

16% “That's a Vodka brand, isn't it?”

21% “You have to have them: Without absolutes, we'd have lawlessness, anarchy, freedom, happiness--it's a slippery slope.”

19% “Absolutes are tools for the willfully ignorant to avoid asking real questions.”

3% “Absolutes are necessary. It's like in math; you have to have things add up.”

(The last group brought the total to 103%.)

This poll was conducted by the Pew Research Center, that surveys Americans sitting in churches across the nation. But the results are likely skewed since Christianity has a predilection for absolutes. Take Commandment #1: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Commanding belief--now there is a brilliant strategy for persuading skeptics! Kind of like parents ordering their teenagers not to drink alcohol or have sex. Aside from having a negative success rate (they inspire uninterested kids to go out and drink and get laid), such edicts just show the parents to be so insecure that they can't even discuss things with their kids anymore. At the national level, absolutist rulers have more success since they have armed, uni(n)formed lackeys who arrest people and beat them up, but underlying the edicts, executive orders, or papal bulls lie insecurities (”if I can't keep arrested ‘terrorists’ incommunicado, they might tell the world about my family ties to the bin Ladens, and how we armed Saddam even after the 1991 Gulf War”).

So I’ll brave God’s rather unpleasant powers of enforcement, and venture to say that it, likewise, seems a tad insecure of the Omniscient and Omni-present to ban His subjects from a little spiritual window-shopping. Is He really afraid they will find something better? But this is questioning, which is to Christianity as releasing the trap is to clay-pigeon-shooting. Belief, on the other hand, is behind the gun. It's just like the fish...

You know, the cute fish bumper stickers with some strange letters squeezed inside. We are asked to believe that the fish was the secret symbol of early-days persecuted Christians--something that modern SUV drivers apparently can relate to. Then we have to believe that those odd letters are Greek for "fish,"and are pronounced “Ich-thus.” It is not “my rash is really getting me,” which is not something that troubled Jesus after meeting Mary Magdalene. We must believe that Jesus was pure and did not have children as is described in the Apocryphal New Testament books; in fact the Apocryphas don't exist and were never black-listed by a politically motivated church. Also, Jesus has been behind our every war, and we should not question why he seems to have been a hippy peace freak who traveled with a posse of apostles, handing out whatever he did that made people have visions and hallucinations.

So, we paste our Jesus Fish on our new Humvee and participate in the quintessential American philosophical discourse, seeing if our bumper-sticker sound-bite can be more abrasive than the next, a dialogue that is only occasionally disrupted by gunfire from the adjacent Dodge Ram-and-Ram-Again model that comes off the assembly line with a “My Guns Speak for Me” bumper sticker.

The Evilutionists, of course, couldn't leave well alone--they did their Satanic ritual and adapted the Jesus Fish. It got little legs, and “Itch-thus” became “Darwin.” The Christian retort was typi-cal in measure and restraint: A huge fish, with the word “Truth” inscribed in it, savagely devouring the Darwin fish. A reminder that Christianity is the Truth, and that those who question its dogma, or who happen to be in its way, are flayed alive and dismembered. Thus went the Moors, the witches, the scientists, the savages of the New World. Thus go abortion providers; thus go Iraqi children. Because we have Truth on our side; we, as our president puts it, are “good.”

That's one of George W. Bush's unquestioned absolutes: We are “good.” Other unquestioned absolutes include himself and Donald Rumsfeld. Once upon a time, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction swirled around the Iraqi countryside, where nukes proliferated like rabbits. Today, we know that all Iraq’s WMD were consolidated into two trailers where there is no trace of weapons. W., though, is still right and true and good... A round of tax cuts to the filthy rich and we're over 2 million jobs shorter, so let's do another round. It's for the good of average Americans... Our own Justice Department criticized itself for secret detentions, human rights violations and Constitutional trampling; consequently, our Attorney General demanded expanded powers. These are times for absolution, not absolutes. Maybe times for ablution, Lady MacBeth-style. Perhaps a simple admission of being wrong? No! For the sake of the Empire:
Let slippery dogma lie!

For those of us with no empires to safeguard, no slippery, lying bitches to protect, the above is just a preamble to an errata: Gale Norton is not the head of the EPA, as our headline from May heralded. She is, of course, the Goddess Heading Our Untouched Land (GHOUL), whose tiara is studded with oil-well-drill-bit-shaped diamonds. Christine Todd Whitman is the head of the EPA, or was, before she underlined the administration's mob mentality by quitting for “family reasons.” I should also state that our error is not a result of hiring our local Fairbanks paper's headline writer--it's just that Ms. “Alaska's Coastal Plain is a Flat, White Nothingness” Norton is the quintessential (wait, we used that word earlier, how about hex-essential?) environmental Bush-ite. The latest EPA “State of the Environment” report, which basically omitted mentioning global warming because there was no way to spin it in favor of stinking industries and high-car-emission devotees, seems to fit snugly under the auspices of a woman who suppressed unwelcome science from her own staff about the effect of arctic oil drilling on wildlife, including fish.

But remember that “fish” is spelled “ghoti” (“gh” as in “laugh,” “o” as in “women,” “ti” as in “nation”). That’s the English language--the nemesis of foreigners. Ask John Ashcroft, and he'll tell you that the compete lack of logic in English is a divine plan for catching aliens, who are drawn to the language’s anarchy but then are ensnared by it when on the job they hear it’s a “fat chance that a wise man will be overseeing the work,” and they relay that there’s a “big chance that a wise guy will be overlooking the work.”.

Of course, “ghoti” should be spelled “goatee,” which is neither a fish, nor a goat, nor someone whose goat has been gotten, but a beard, like the one I have. The problem is that when all the above information was fed into the Homeland Security computers, they spewed out a warrant for my arrest. But you’ve gotta know how to play their game, so when Mr. Ashcroft, dressed as his fictional alter-ego, came a-knockin', I beat him to his Biblical mantra: “Do onto others before they do onto you” (see photo).

Che

Do onto others before
they do onto you

UNSOUND BITES(Don't) Let Slippery Dogma Lie

UNSOUND BITES
(Don't) Let Slippery Dogma Lie