Posted 9:23 AM by Gene

Now that the world has survived for another day let us consider the two types of nonbelief demonstrated by this fraud from California (or wherever he's from; he might be from the planet BAKKER) and DR. BRAINIAC. Despite his woeful physical state DR. BRAINIAC plainly has a high opinion of himself, having put incomprehensible tomes about physics or astronomy or whatever on millions of coffee tables, so the owners can boast of their scientific literacy without even having to crack the darn thing. Possibly the Doctor is tired; possibly he's tired of living in that crippled body nobody gave him (well, if there's not a God, then nobody gave him that body), and possibly he realizes there are no more books to weigh down coffee tables with, so now's as good a time as any to talk of fairy tales.

As for the FRAUD, the best we can say for Him is He's a babe in the woods; but you don't get to steal tens of millions from the innocent by being innocent. His nonbelief consists of painting God as the sort of caricature Mark Twain had in mind when he sneered of Heaven as peopled with Victorian angels playing harps; He is John Brown, His face lathering with rage, His hair standing on end and His psychotic's flowing beard rigid as steel, forever hurling thunderbolts at His offspring for no apparent reason other than that He's perpetually angry. In the end there's no difference between these two nonbeliefs except that the BRAINIAC's is high-end and the FRAUD's is low-end, but they both come together in agreement of the worthlessness of the species some accident created. Certainly both have hoodwinked the people for profit, in different ways. (And in what must be the sole adult dispatch to come out of the FRAUD's nonbelief, His had victims.)

I will not paint myself as any deep thinker on religion -- it's the last thing I'd want to be -- but for my money THE MASTER summed up the unknowable answer neatly in speculating on the existence of ghosts: "All argument is against it; but all belief is for it." Dr. Johnson was perhaps the most powerful intellectual in history. He was also a believer.

P. S. at 3:44 p. m. We are now sorry we typed this as we have since delved into this clod from California, and we are not now certain of what he believes -- possibly he doesn't know; but we will say our supposition that he saw God as John Brown came from the notion of an ANGRY GOD, and an angry God would visit all sorts of terrors on a people subject to a predetermined schedule. We should have left well enough alone when we called this stunt "a kind of Beckist or Palinesque populist brain cramp." Given the clod's assets we reserve the right to call him a fraud, and if the stunt was not a pure expression of nonbelief it has surely led to nonbelief in those foolish enough to believe him.

From now on we will try to bone up on our subjects before supposing things.