This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

It can really boggle the mind if you think about it long enough. The grown-up belief in magic. Invisible forces having power over your life. All based on ancient text the veracity of which is sketchy at best. But if you have faith child, these invisible forces will intervene on your behalf in the great beyond. Jesus will walk with you arm in arm down the path of life. How many invisible friends and helpers do you have? Just the one, huh?

But let’s put the blame where it really belongs, Zoroastrianism! This ancient religion predates Christianity by as much as two thousand years. Though now largely forgotten it has left its roots deep in the religious soil. They set the franchise standard introducing heaven & hell. A good guy trying to help you and a bad guy out to get you! A final judgement! Then all the good people who hung out with the good guy, partied in heaven for eternity. But if you failed that judgement, then eternal torment and destruction awaited you.

We’re talking 1800 BCE and though the parent religion has faded the concepts and ideas remain. And because this religion is so ancient, we can see that these concepts are more perspired than inspired. Worked out over the generations, someone has a vision. Someone must have a vision! Some prophets or perfect man have a conversation with a higher being and are inspired to take up his holy mission.

Then miracles and somebody always comes back from the dead. The ultimate magic trick bringing back the dead.

Hercules was born of a woman fathered by the god Zeus. For Hercules to prove he was worthy of his father who was in heaven. Sounds familiar and fathers can be difficult to please sometimes. Hercules was required to perform twelve labors for mankind. Then, he too could be a god. How about you? Don’t you want to be a god someday too? Amaze your friends and win cash and prizes! Rule over your very own planet?

Not in this life mind you, but later on in another life. A life you’ll have someday somewhere at a time to be determined at some later date but keep making your payments.

Now, if we were uneducated medieval peasants eking out the barest survival without electricity or artificial light. It would be easy enough to believe in magic and invisible folks. Demons and fairies, Leprechauns all those things that go boogity, boogity in the dark. But after 21 centuries of accrued human knowledge, it turns out the answer has never been magic.

Not once has a faith healer visited the emergency room and sent everyone home healed and happy. Snake handlers and foot washers and magic underwear. Dracula could be cowed by a simple crucifix because “The power of Christ compels you!” This little tin gold dipped cross can perform magic! And forcing all the local vampires to cut you a wide berth, if they know what’s good for them. Caution: Not for use on Zombies. (See owner’s manual for details.)

The new speaker of the House Mike what’s his name. Dick! No Johnson! Something like that. He believes in magic and prays for things. Because if you don’t pray for magic, you won’t get it. Mike is what they call a young Earther. All the science is wrong! The Earth is only 6,000 years old come next Tuesday. Men and dinosaurs walked together arm in arm. “Flintstones, meet the Flintstones! They’re a modern stone -age family! From the town of Bedrock, they’re a page right out of Republican ideology.”

But Mike doesn’t just believe, he BELIEVES! And because he believes, he accepts the fatalism of using every last drop of oil because God put it there for us to use. Besides, the end of the world is coming. Better you prepare your soul brother. Jesus is only taking the holy and righteous and time is short. There is no such thing as climate change; Jesus wouldn’t do that to us! It ain’t in the book so it just can’t be so. All of these cults are always preparing for the end of the world. For chariots of fire coming from the sky or we’re riding out of town on a comet tail.

Always there is always a peculiar obsession with sex. Who is having sex, and who shouldn’t have sex. Rules and regulations for the things that really piss god off. Number one, SEX! Only the Shakers were honest enough about sex to just ban the practice outright and thus ended the Shakers. Leaving behind a legacy of fine furniture and sexual frustration.

Then there is the other end of the spectrum with multiple wives bartered for and purchased outright in exchange for livestock. God’s good with that. And child brides, we can’t forget the child brides. God is cool with that practice too. Strange, you never see a 12-year-old boy married off to a fifty-year-old woman. Holy matrimony, holy shit.

Mike is worried about your soul. The end of the world is coming, you know. During a recent “Prayer call” Mike lamented, American culture was “dark and depraved,” partly because so many young people identify as “something other than straight.”

Funny thing about these cults, they always think the culture is dark and depraved. We gotta throw a virgin in the volcano or do something.

“And I call that sloth, the first big step on the road to the depths of degrade – I say first
Medicinal wine from a teaspoon, then beer from a bottle
then the next thing ya know your son is playin’ for money in a pinched-back suit
listenin’ to some big outta town jasper, hearin him tell about horse race gamblin’
not a wholesome trottin’ race, no, but a race where they set down, right on a horse
like to see some stuck-up jockey boy settin’ on dan patch, make him look-boy, well I should say
now, friends lemme tell ya what i mean

ya got one, two, three, four, five, six pockets on a table
pockets that mark the difference between a gentleman and a bum
with a capital B and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool.” – The Music Man

We’ve got a comic book code and warning labels on CDs but we’re still dark and depraved. Because the children have the opportunity to be who they feel they are. Mike is concerned about the young people who don’t identify as straight. Worried about people he will never know or interact with because see, he’s got this book of ancient text. That was based on another book of ancient text that was based on earlier myths, legends, and superstitions. The Good News!

“A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell–mouths mercy, and invented hell–mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!” – Mark Twain