Hi, I’m Wayne Jones, and welcome to re:Christian, a critical and satirical reconsideration of Christianity, the Bible, and God. This is episode 15: “Killjoy.”
As a way of illustrating how blind most Christians are to the true horrors in the Bible, the book that they reverence as inspired by the omnipotent one who couldn’t manage to make it through a seven-day work week, I’ve talked a fair bit about the killing and other sins that God himself has committed. It’s all there in the Old Testament, and in the New one too (more to come on that in subsequent episodes). It’s clear that he’s insecure (“please worship me”) and deranged (“goodbye and enjoy your stay in hell, soon-to-be-former inhabitants of [insert name of town here]”).
Alas, the demented old coot continues his spree in our own century, too. In 2024. In fact, just a couple of days ago, Tuesday, February 27, when the great comedian Richard Lewis died of a heart attack after years of suffering from Parkinson’s. He was only 76.
Now, God had some choices when he was deciding how to reduce the population of human beings on earth. There’s Donald Trump, knee-deep in KFC and criminal charges, and dangerously delusional from his neck to, as the great David Letterman used to say, “whatever that thing is on top of his head.” There are warmongers like Joe Biden, already half dead by all reports, who lies and lies and lies about why he’s sending so much money to Ukraine and why he supports Israel, the country that nobody is allowed to tell the truth about publicly. Yeah, and there’s Benjamin Netanyahu, another warmonger, who’s temporarily removed his occupation hat in order to slip on his genocidal one, which fits just marvellously. There’s Bill Gates, with a current net worth of about $125 billion, who won’t even spare a single billion to revamp the Microsoft Word software so that it’s user-friendly (for example, just try to insert different paginations in your document without having to Google a bunch of shit and then go through a ten-step process). And there’s—but you get the idea.
Many people know Lewis from the slightly overrated show Curb Your Enthusiasm, but of course he was a standup comedian to start. Personally, that’s how I remember and appreciate him. One of his best albums was a two-CD set (it was 2000 and that’s how things were measured back then) called Live from Hell. One CD is Lewis doing live standup at The Improv comedy club in New York City, and the other is an interview of Lewis by Bill Zehme, a writer whom God also took down, just last March at the age of only fucking 64. I’m beginning to think that God is killing off the young and relatively young, and preserving the old guys, who are his peeps.
Here are some samples of Lewis from the Improv performance. This is how it starts:
[disc 1, track 2, “Strangers and Jewish Satellite Dishes”]
And, later, a phone call from his mother:
[disc 1, track 6, “A Mother’s Support?”]
A lot of his material was self-deprecatory and he often talked about depression and anxiety. Here he is talking about a gig he did in the state of Maine which didn’t work out that well:
[disc 1, track 8, “Gig from Hell”]
And finally—I could listen to this all day, but I don’t want to torture you like God tortured Job that time—here he talks about getting old:
[disc 1, track 21, “Dumb and Old”]
Alas, he didn’t make it to 111. God stepped in and robbed him of about 35 years.
So. God.
He covers the full range in knocking people off. Some people make it to over 120, and at the other end God decides to kill off fetuses in the womb so that the loving couple can have the life-altering experience of seeing their conceived child emerge dead. And sometimes God snazzes it up completely. Women who are eight months pregnant are shot dead. And so the hits, literally and figuratively, continue.
I genuinely and sincerely do not know what it takes to convince Christians that their God does not exist, or that, perhaps worse, if he does, he is the most vile and evil creature that the universe, or he himself, has ever produced. How can people possibly maintain faith? If they can’t be convinced by lack of logic and lack of evidence, why don’t the near-mortal slashes that he makes at them during the course of their lives make them at least reconsider things a little? I’m worshipping this being? This is benevolence?
But no. Christians endure it all. A scar forms and they move on, returning to their former delusion. And in fact that delusion has its origin in death, namely: Christians are so afraid of death being the absolute end of it all that they have made up the idea of God and life after death just to give them the courage to get out of bed in the morning. And then churches get formed and start making money or giving their employees access to fuckable young people, and so the good folks running those churches want all that to continue. The whole unbelievable thing has built itself into such a metaphorical edifice that it must be true and real, right?
Well, no, it doesn’t of course. Let me borrow that other hat that Netanyahu has, the one for false rhetoric, and try to use it for a calm and logical purpose.
There is no God. It’s a giant mystery to me and to people much smarter than me why the universe exists as it does, but it just does. The fact that the existence of something has no origin that our tiny little human brains can figure out does not mean that there is a supernatural being that created it, or set it in motion, and who continues to preside over it until we are all dead.
Embrace the void. Live in the now. Tell the truth all the time, as Mr. Peterson enjoins us to. And be kind to yourself and others. It will all end some time, but it, and you, are still going strong right now.
And that’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. Check out the show notes for a full transcript, links to sources, and how to contact me. And please join me again on Monday.