God Damn It! or Mykel's February 2024 Blog/Column

 

Monday, January 01, 2024

God Damn It! or Mykel's February 2024 Blog/Column

  

You’re STILL Wrong 
Mykel's 
February 2024 Blog/Column 
God Damn It!
by Mykel Board

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.      --Mother Teresa

God is emotional and impulsive and gets things wrong and even loses; just as He is neither omniscient nor omnipotent, neither a flawless robot nor an errorless computer--  so we too dear reader. We have been granted the right to do wrong. Rejoice!    – Ze’ev Maghen 

Aren't you one of those atheists who says God doesn't exist?"  "Who said that? I believe that God does, unfortunately, exist. It's just that he's a fascist."  – Umberto Eco

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'                                                            – C. S. Lewis

Who is it that makes you cry, cripples children lets them die, lets the bad guys win, puts acne on your skin, gives cancer to Aunt May, then she’ll giggle when you pray? It’s God! It’s God!                                                      –
                                                                 -- Artless, from the song GOD

This was the original first paragraph I’d planned for the blog:

By the time you read this, I’ll likely be dead. You’ll understand why by the time you get to the end… I think. In murder cases, they always ask for motive, means and opportunity. The rest of this blog will show the motive. The means, I haven’t decided yet. It could even be GOD, doing her natural causes bit… as if that had a meaning when ANYTHING that happens is a natural cause. More likely it’s something quiet… too much too soon. A mix of this and that… with an extra shot of that. Maybe I’ll ask Jim Testa to write the obituary. 

But all of a sudden, I had a change of heart. Instead of writing about me, I decided to choose a smaller and easier subject: GOD. I can escape from my bedbugs, my instant senility, my deafness and all the other effluvia ruining my life right now. So now I’ll leave my current life and join a continued discussion that’s spanned the life of everyone who’s ever lived in a college dorm. 

You’ll read later about a conversation I had with an atheist in Eastern Europe. Although it took place more than 40 years ago, I still remember it. In a way, the logic of the girl I spoke with is behind the logic of most current atheists.. though they wouldn’t admit it. 

More recently, a Jewdhist friend named Richard Goldberg told me. “Mykel, if you want to find God, imagine everything that exists in the universe. That’s God.”

But let’s go back to earlier times: 

Flash to Prague... commie times... the end of the 70s. I’m visiting the grave of Franz Kafka, one of my favorite writers. No, his tombstone is not crawling with cockroaches. He’s buried in the same grave as his father… spending eternity with someone he hated. There is a lot of Hebrew on the grave, but the tenants’ names are written using the Roman alphabet. 

 As I approach the tombstone, I see a woman… stout, with gray hair… tending to the grave… brushing away weeds… picking up garbage. When I come closer, the woman looks up at me.

“Shalom,” she says.

“Hi,” I say.

“Are you Israeli?” she asks.

I shake my head. “No, I’m not,” I tell her.

“But you are Jewish,” she says, her voice without any question intonation.

I nod… and smile.

“I have a daughter...” she says and invites me to dinner.

I don’t remember what we ate. I do remember that the daughter’s name was Helena. She was slightly zaftig, blond hair and she wore a mezuzah around her neck. After dinner mom says, “You children go into the living room and talk. I’ll have to clean the dishes.”

Together we go into the living room and sit on the couch. I look at her breasts.

“I see you’re looking at my mezuzah,” she says. “I wear it for my mother. She bought it for me and I promised to wear it. It tells people I’m a Jew… but I don’t believe in God.”

“Oh?” I ask. “Why not?”

“If God is up there in the sky… living on a cloud… he would just fall down.” She says, as if it were obvious.

BOING! I get it. It hits like an errant erection. If I believed rabbits were pink and delivered eggs at Easter… I wouldn’t believe in rabbits. The atheist commies (or maybe all atheists) believe God is an old man who lives in the clouds… then deny his existence. Of course!

If, like Richard Goldberg, you define God as everything that exists… then God must exist… otherwise nothing exists. The literal existence of Jesus Christ is open to debate… though I think most people will say he existed in some form or other. If you believe Jesus is/was God, then if Jesus existed, so did God. If you believe he had supernatural powers… turning water to wine or feeding a hundred on one loaf of matzoh… that’s open to debate.

What atheists do is define God like Helena defined God… an old man who sits in the clouds. Then they deny his existence… he’d just fall down. Supernatural powers? What are those? It used to be that flying flying humans would show supernatural powers until airplanes came along and made the powers as natural as a boarding pass. Yesterday’s supernatural is today’s mundane. We need some other way to judge.

For some, God is just a comforting thought… an appreciation that there’s something bigger than us… more in control… without physical shape or corporeal body. How can you NOT believe that?

People’s belief in God is a reflection of who they are… or who they want to be. I see God as a nine foot tall woman in a black leather bikini wielding a whip. She sees her job as making my life so bad that I kill myself… and she wins. I can prolong the game by refusing to give in. If SHE has to kill me, I win.

Is my God real? Of course she’s real. God isn’t a human. She’s whatever we make her. She’s what’s useful to us and what explains the universe. Bedbugs, cancer, war, earthquakes, plagues… what more do we need to understand the pestilence of the universe? Atheists tell me that mosquitoes are proof that God does not exist. Bullshit. Mosquitoes are proof that God is either not omnipotent or that God is not good… or both. But they don’t disprove her existence.

When you say you don’t believe in God, you’d better tell me what that God is that you don’t believe in: the egg-delivering pink rabbit or the bunny you see hopping around the garden.

Note: On the unlikely chance that I am still alive and not stroked out from the stress-- or allowing God to win the contest, you can donate to my bedbug fund through my GoFundMe. Just a little will help… and show me I haven’t been abandoned by all but the evil goddess. (SHE thinks of me continually) Thanks in advance for whatever you can do.

See you in hell,

Mykel Board

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]

→ Death and Taxes Dept: Well, no taxes in this one, but some death. My long term pal Roger Armstrong… who wrote the Japanese scene reports for MRR when I was the zine’s bad guy there… has bit the dust... a motorcycle crash. I visited Roger in Arizona where he lived with his son and Hiromi his Japanese wife. We kept in touch on facebook regularly and with a nengajou. (Look it up!) Roger’s wife answered this year’s nengajou with a “passed away last month” card. Who’s next?

→ Talk about Hol(e)y Dept: Uexpress reports South Korean model “Angel Box Girl”, is being prosecuted for obscene exposure. In Seoul and Gangnam, Angel walked through the streets wearing a large cardboard box with holes for her arms and legs -- plus two more in an unnamed place. She invited strangers to put their hands into those extra holes to grope around. She attracted large crowds that police were called to disperse. "It's freedom of expression," she said.
             “My kind of freedom” I’d say.

→ Irony Dept: I’ve become fascinated by the AI program Aria, that comes packaged with the Opera Internet Browser. It quickly answers questions without stupid weblinks that have nothing to do with those questions. So I asked Aria what country has the highest percentage of atheists. Here’s what she said:
The Czech Republic is often cited as the country with the highest percentage of atheists in the world. According to various surveys and studies, a significant portion of the Czech population identifies as atheist or non-religious. I wonder if they all think God is this old man who lives in the clouds and who would fall down if he really existed.

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions, complete, and questions I’ve never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.

I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.

Here's a start:

My new pal Trey Mayhem sent me a great letter and some porno email pix. He’s got a blog that’s connected to his label Murder and Mayhem records. You can see the blog here.

My long-time friend Sid Yiddish appears on a YouTube DatingGame-like video. Guess who wins the bachelorette!

Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com

Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency

And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.

And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.

Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.

Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.

Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.

George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.

And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.

And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.

Here are a couple video links.

This from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low

And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong, whose death you read about in this blog:.

Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.

Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both. It’s hard (and costs money) to send him email. So. If you remember how to write a letter… send him one at: Kyle Nonneman, #16534211, Snake River Correctional Institution, 777 Stanton Blvd Ontario OR 97914-8335

My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.

Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.

Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. mykelboard@gmail.com

(MRR 348) May 2012 Mykel vs Atheists & Other Critics

You're Wrong

An Irregular Column

by Mykel Board

"God did not create man in his own image. Evidently it was the other way around.” Christopher Hitchens

I'm madder than a Republican with anal warts. I should be happy. Hatemail again... after such a long dry period. I'm no longer preaching to choir... or maybe I am, but they're sure as shit a choir in a different church.

One letter was absolutely correct about my error in crediting my half-hero, Ron Paul, with something he didn't write. One letter looked as if the author googled my name with “pedophile” and used all the results to incriminate me. Jezus fuckin' Christ.

Ok, I tried it. I googled the combination of Millard Fillmore and pedophilia. The results?

About 10,500 results (0.38 seconds)

Try it yourself... from home... not the library. Though with the way Google is, YOUR inquiry will probably match YOU with both Millard Fillmore and pedophilia when someone else asks.

With Rick Santorum complaining that Obama is not governing “by biblical principles.” And this from Newt Gingrich:

I have two grandchildren. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they'll be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists.

It's clear that Americans live on the dark side of the moon of idiocy. Of course, those politicians may not be as stupid as their quotes, but THEY are preaching to the choir.

I just finished reading a book called GOD IS NOT GREAT, HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING. It's by anti-abortion atheist Christopher Hitchens. As a pro-abortion non-atheist, I expected to disagree with a lot of what Hitchens had to say. I didn't expect, however, how useful his book would be in providing examples for this column.

So, now Brothers and Sisters. I want you to stop reading for a bit. Close your eyes. Get down on your knees. Feel the power coursing through your veins. It's the power of MYKEL. Imagine the touch of MYKEL on your forehead. Feel the love of MYKEL. Listen to the song of MYKEL as he preaches to the unpreached. MYKEL telling it to the congregation. MYKEL preaching to you on HOW NOT TO THINK.

Take the quote at the beginning of this column. What it means is: 1. God did not create human beings. 2. Human beings created God.

Okay, then add the idea God does not exist... and BINGO! LOGICAL INCONSISTANCY. Our first way NOT to think.

If human beings created God, then God MUST exist. It is not possible to create something if that thing does not exist. That should be as plain as the wart on your anus created by anal intercourse. An argument based on the non-existence of something you say was CREATED is a non-argument. It contradicts itself. Get it brothers and sisters?

Flash to a dark empty stage... a single spotlight focuses on a wooden stool.... the sound of footsteps... a man enters the spotlight. He wears a dark suit, a black cape with bright red lining, and a top hat. He bows to the audience, removes his top hat and sets it-- upside down-- on the stool.

“Thank you ladies and gentlemen,” says the man, “I know magicians are supposed to pull rabbits out of top hats...” he gestures to the top hat with his left hand.

While the audience looks at the hat, his right hand quietly reaches under his cape‚ “but this hat is empty today.” He holds up the hat in his left hand to show the audience it is empty. This action hides his right hand that now grasps something.

“Instead,” he continues, “I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having a hare up my nose.”

He drops the hat onto the stool and puts his right hand to his nose releasing a rubber rabbit. He holds it high. The audience laughs. It's call magic. And it's called misdirection.

Look over there! And while you're looking, the author pulls a fast one. In Hitchen's case, he writes: Faith-based fanatics could not design anything as useful or beautiful as a skyscraper or passenger aircraft. But, continuing their long history of plagiarism, they could borrow and steal these things and use them as a negation.

It's clear Hitchen means that religion (especially Islam) cannot make anything on its own, but can only destroy what was made in the secular society. By implication (misdirection), the World Trade Center Attacks were MUSLIM attacks. The reason was religion... a fanatical Jihad.

Bullshit.

Logic says this attack was NOT religiously motivated. If it were, why not Big Ben or some synagogue in Des Moines for fuck's sake? The World Trade Center is a symbol of American TRADE, business... not religion.

If someone attacks your people, kills your leaders, invades your country, you don't need religion to tell you to fight back. The US has destroyed the middle-East for OIL. MILLIONS of people have been killed, either directly by the US, or by US financed troops that later find themselves killed by other US financed troops.

The pilots who flew into the Twin Towers could've been Zoroastrian for all that mattered. 

Hitchens, like the American right, and the pro-Israel everybody else, made a political attack into a religious attack. It's a trap, and if you fall into it, you'll be a victim of MISDIRECTION.

I don't remember it exactly, but in college I saw the play Cyrano de Bergerac. I remember that Cyrano was supposed to be some kind of intellectual who had great ideas and a big nose. When people didn't like what he said, but were unable to come up with an adequate objection, they made fun of his nose. Maybe I got it wrong, but it doesn't matter. What's important is the idea.

That's called AD HOMINIM. It means “if you can't attack the idea, attack the person.” I write a column complaining that people are more concerned about a football coach accused of a non-lethal crime than they are about Apple making iPhones at companies with such bad conditions people have committed documented suicide... REAL DEAD PEOPLE. Two letter-writers attacked me, personally, with only the briefest mention of the IDEAS in the column, and nothing refuting them.

And Hitchens?

We now know Pope Pius XII composed the following letter to Berlin: To the Illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer and Chancellor of the German Reich!... We wish to assure you that We remain devoted to the spiritual welfare of the German people... May the prosperity of the German people and their progress in every domain come, with God's help, to fruition!

What's it mean? CATHOLOCISM IS BAD. Why? Because one pope writes a nice letter to Hitler. That is ad hominin... a kind of misdirection and it's a way you should NOT think.

NOW try this one from Hitchens: Pythagoras refuted astrology by the simple means of pointing out that identical twins do not share that the same future.

While I don't believe in astrology, I know even identical twins are not born at exactly the same time and would therefore have different “charts.” I also know that no astrologer believes your life is determined 100%... down to the smallest anal wart... by the stars. There are still other influences-- or free will. It's SCIENCE that's trying to do away with free will (the gay gene, the alcoholic gene, the obnoxious personality gene)-- not religion.

Hitchen sites an expert and POOF, it's true... NOT!

Type “Experts Agree” into Google and among the 10,300,000 results you'll find these things they agree on:

Experts Agree With Ron Paul’s Controversial Foreign Policy

Experts agree biodiesel must be part of a sustainable society

Romney Vs Paul: Experts Agree GOP Contest Now A Two Horse Race

Experts agree: Pack's Aaron is simply amazing

Winter forecasts vary, but experts agree it'll be wet and stormy

Experts Agree This Is The Most Effective Diet In The World

Experts agree - Sugar is a health destroyer

Experts Agree: Cindy Crawford’s 10-Year-Old Daughter Is Genetic Perfection

Experts Agree anti-gay texts of major faiths taken out of context

Get it? If you want to convince people without actually having facts, just make it up and put it in AN EXPERT's mouth. Better, a bunch of experts... all agreeing (with you).

You can be vaguer. Try EVERYBODY KNOWS... or IT'S COMMON KNOWLEDGE THAT...

There's even a linguistic trick called the agentless passive that does the same thing.

[Aside] A brief intro to Grammar 101:

Active: Natalie Portman thinks Mykel's penis tastes like licorice.

Passive: Mykel's penis is thought by Natalie Portman to taste like licorice.

In the active sentence Natalie Portman is the subject. In the passive sentence, the subject is Mykel's penis. The agent, however, (the one who does the tasting) in both sentences is Natalie Portman.

I can use a passive with no agent. Mykel's penis is thought to taste like licorice. That way, I don't have to say who actually did the tasting... the reader has to guess. [End of aside]

From Hitchens: As a materialist, I think it has been demonstrated that an embryo is a separate body and entity, and not merely a growth on or in the female body.... the words "unborn child" describe a material reality.

Who demonstrated it? Who gets to call a sliver of barely more than a snotball an unborn child? The agentless passive answers those question... but it shouldn't. And it's a way you should NOT think.

Ok, Brothers and Sisters, that's enough for today's sermon. I'm not sure if next month's column will be written from New York or Gibraltar. Probably the latter. The one after that: AFRICA. Yes MUSLIM AFRICA. You wanna make somethin' of it?

ENDNOTES: [email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com) or blog viewers (mykelsblog.blogspot.com/) will get live links and a chance to post comments on the column]

-->Right again dept: After the WTC attacks, Ron Paul spoke about how the US itself, caused the attacks. Not in some stupid conspiracy-theory way, but because of how the US is viewed by other countries in the world. Read the text of his speech at: tinyurl.com/RonPaulon9-11.

-->King Bloomberg dept: NY Mayor Bloomberg said in a speech at MIT that "I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world." A private army for the mayor. Occupy that!

-->Pay to Play dept: Supervisors of Riverside County California voted for a bill that would force jail inmates to repay the country for the costs of jailing them. Supervisor Jeff Stone, who introduced the measure, called the jails "prison hotels."

-->Sid Yiddish sent me this note from the IRS:

You can treat your child as meeting the residency test even if the child has been kidnapped, but both of the following statements must be true. The child is presumed by law enforcement authorities to have been kidnapped by someone who is not a member of your family or the child's family.

      In the year the kidnapping occurred, the child must have lived with you for more than half of the part of the year before the date of the kidnapping. 

Now that's what I call compassion!

-->Website magazine reports that email spam in November 2011 was the lowest in three years. Only 70 percent. I guess most folks are like me and only read our Facebook mail, deleting everything else. So spam killed email and now it's killing itself.

-->Arizona does it again dept: Sorry Sid, but that is one fucked up state. This time, five Arizona Republican state senators have introduced a law that prohibits teachers from talking about anything that would not get past the FCC.

     The law not only cripples the ability to teach about sexuality and other non-Victorian topics, but it also puts teachers in jeopardy for teaching The Canterbury Tales, The Catcher in the Rye, Ulysses, and probably every work by an obscure English writer named William Shakespeare.

      But the bill goes further. Because the language in the bill doesn’t distinguish between public speech or conduct and just plain old every day speech or conduct, the law could require schools to fire teachers who use profanity and have sex in their private lives away from school. 

     With the Republicans continued attacks on teachers and schools, and the guaranteed lowering of educational levels... they guarantee a society of ignoramuses! Exactly the people who will be voting Republican! 

--end--

you can find Mykel's African adventures at: www.mykelsdiary.blogspot.com