Tag Archives: humor

July 3, 2026 · 1:36 am

The Magic of Pez

In 1927 in the mythical land of Austria, where they seem to know how to make candy… a condensed form of peppermint was created in a lozenge form and then placed into a plastic toy dispenser.  The spells that were cast to make this magical item probably had nothing to do with toad warts and bat wings and eye of newt.  It has more to do with Mickey Mouse, then Katzenjammer Kids, and Marvel Super Heroes.  I have been caught under the spells of a PEZ fixation since childhood.  I remember begging for a Bugs Bunny dispenser in Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines when I was probably six years old.  My parents wisely said no hundreds of times when I was a kid.  Who wanted to spend a nickel on a penny’s worth of candy?  Just for a Pez dispenser.  If they ever caved to my begging, even once, I don’t still have the dispenser.  But now I am supposedly a responsible adult.  I have money.  Well, I used to have money before I spent it on collecting PEZ dispensers.  I can’t even eat the the stupid candy.  I have diabetes.  So I feed the candy to my kids and risk giving them diabetes.

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Here, my minion Stuart is showing off my Avengers collection.  It took him nearly thirty minutes to line these six dispensers up so that they were all standing at once.  The Hulk kept falling on him repeatedly.

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I am proud of my Toy Story collection.  I had to go to some lengths to find some of these (particularly Slinky Dog and Rex).

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Disney Princesses were easy.  Both at Walmart and Toys R Us they were all grouped together on the Disney hooks.

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The Muppets were also grouped together with the Disney Pez.

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Winnie the Pooh is Disney, too.  I got some of these on discount at Toys R Us.  I still need Piglet and Owl… and Christopher Robin.  I don’t have an unbroken Minnie Mouse either.  I had small children when I first started collecting these, and now I have fat children and a lot of empty Pez dispensers.

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My Star Wars collection seems to be evil Pez dispensers and Yoda.

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And poor Stuart is getting tired of standing up Pez dispensers, so I will end here without having shown you all of my PEZ dispensers.  Besides, I have reason to keep the newest dispensers a secret from my minion.

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July 2, 2026 · 12:11 am

How to Be a Farm Boy Without Really Trying (or Wanting To)

Farmgirl is adapted from a picture borrowed from the Belmond Area Arts Council.
Farmgirl is adapted from a picture borrowed from the Belmond Area Arts Council.

I was born in Mason City, Iowa (the original River City of Meredith Wilson’s Broadway musical, The Music Man).  But my parents didn’t hold with no big-city Ioway sort of life, so we eventually moved to my mother’s hometown, Rowan, Iowa.  It was roughly about 275 people (if you count the squirrels… which a lot of the townsfolk were… qualified squirrels).  My two maternal uncles and my grandparents were busy maintaining the family farm there, and though I lived in town because Dad was an accountant for a seed corn company instead of the farmer he grew up as… I got more than my fair share of farming-type opportunities.  You know the stuff… shoveling pig poo… cow poo too…   I got to help feed the chickens (and get chased by roosters, and get pecked by hens when we checked their nests for eggs, and watch the rooster rodeos as revenge for all the chasings… because roosters don’t lay eggs and the only thing they are really good for in an egg farming setting is lopping their heads off, and watching them flop around like rodeo bulls with no heads for fifteen minutes until they finally figured out they were dead, then plucking ’em and watching Grandma Aldrich cook ’em).  I got to drive a tractor, although they didn’t trust me to do more than the simplest of tractor-driving jobs like pulling the hay rake.  I got to shovel chicken poo out of the hen house and out of the brooder house.  (Notice how a lot of the world of the lowly farm boy centers somehow on poo?)  It was a rustic rural life reminiscent of Norman Rockwell… although he depicted mostly town life and not as much of the fields and animal pens (and poo) that are central to Iowegian farm culture.

Brent Clarke is a me character in my stories... but also one of my farm boy friends.
Brent Clarke is a me character in my stories… but also one of my farm boy friends.

Growing up a farm boy has a few advantages to go along with the many drawbacks.  First off, you learn young where babies come from.  Piglets and calves and puppies and kittens are not born in secret.  And it doesn’t take much spying out on farm life to learn how those baby animals are made either.  There is ample opportunity to learn what you are not supposed to learn at a young age from farm girls too… but we were gentlemen… and extremely embarrassed by the fact that baby people are made in the same grisly, awful way that baby animals are out in the barn.

You also learn to be somewhat self-sufficient.  I learned how to tend a garden.  I learned how to fix a flat.  I learned how to repair a roof and build a rabbit pen.  Hammer, pliers, screwdriver, saw… I learned to use them all and make stuff.  Crude stuff, sure… smashed-finger-with-hammer-stuff too.  I made a bookshelf in shop class that had a bit of Michael blood built into it.  But I learned things that boys should know, and really don’t anymore.

So, I guess I am claiming that because I am an Iowa boy… a farm boy… and despite my many shortcomings and short-changings, my life has been good and worthwhile… being a farm boy is good.  And one of the greatest shames of the modern world is this… There just aren’t many farm boys anymore.

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July 1, 2026 · 12:33 am

Cooking More Futzbatter

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“What’s this with the made up words thing?  You can’t just make up words!”

“Why not?  I’m an English teacher.  Who better to make up words?”

“But you are making up nonsense words, and using them to make fun of Iowegians!  That’s, like, racist or something!”

“Iowegians is a made-up word.  It is a play on Norway, Ioway, and Norwegian… and because a lot of white people in Iowa are of Scandahoovian descent.”

“See what I mean?  Racist!  Scandahoovian makes fun of people of Norse descent.  That is totally unacceptable!”

“I don’t see it that way.  I think we Iowegians should own it.   You know, like the way Texas rednecks are proud to be called rednecks.  I think that’s far more racist than saying Iowegian or Scandahoovian.”

“Why are we even talking about this?  Why couldn’t you have just posted more about your goofy flowers?  You have a lot more flower pictures you could use.”

“Yesterday was just a scrapbook sort of entry.  I wanted to post a variety of different things to fill space and waste time.  My writing goals were already completed for the day yesterday.  My novel is at 39,565 words right now.”

“But why did you have to make up gibberish words?  Don’t you know enough real words?”

“My Uncle Everett used to use Foobah when he was around the womenfolk so he didn’t say the word he was really thinking and offend Grandma Beyer.  That kinda makes it a real word.  And you’ve heard me say Futzbatter before.  It is a word like Paffooney… something I have used enough that you know what it means without even asking.”

“But what gives you the right to make up words?”

“What gave William Shakespeare the right?  Or Lewis Carroll?  Remember Jabberwocky?”

“But they were famous writers.  They probably earned that right.”

“I’m a writer too.  Are you saying I shouldn’t do what great writers do?”

“But you’re not a great…  Republican… yes, I meant to say, Republican.”

“I’m not a Republican at all.  I’m an independent liberal.  I’m a progressive.  I believe we need to change things to make the world a better place for all of us.  Using new words and changing the language can’t be that bad a thing, can it?”

“We aren’t talking about politics!  We’re talking about you making up weird-sounding goofus-doofus words and using them like they actually mean something!  You can’t love the language and change it at the same time!”

“Why not?  You just did.”

“I did?  How?”

“What does goofus-doofus mean?”

“OH!  Darn it!  Don’t you see what you are doing to me with all your nonsense?  You’re making me talk funny too!”

“Speaking of funny talking, do you want to see the new Minions movie with me this afternoon?  It is playing at 3:25 at the Webb-Chapel Cinemark 17.  There’s a lot of funny talking in that.”

“Dang it!  You just posted the time and place you are planning to be.  What if that lunatic Winchuk boy decides he wants to use the information to get even with you for his entire seventh-grade year?”

“No chance of that.  He can’t read… or tell time.  He had me for a teacher.”

At that point the logical left side of my brain doubled up both of his fists and belted the creative right side of my brain in the chin as hard as he could.  Of course, that didn’t hurt at all, because both of his fists are metaphorical.  What a futzing foobah!

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June 17, 2026 · 12:01 am

Terry Pratchett, the Grand Wizard of Discworld

image borrowed from TVtropes.com
image borrowed from TVtropes.com

I firmly believe that I would never have succeeded as a teacher and never gotten my resolve wrapped around the whole nonsense package of being a published author if I hadn’t picked up a copy of Mort, the first Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett that I ever encountered.  I started reading the book as a veteran dungeon-master at D&D role-playing games and also as a novice teacher, having a world of difficulty trying to swim up the waterfalls of Texas education fast enough to avoid the jagged rocks of failure at the bottom.  I was drinking ice tea when I started reading it.  More of that iced tea shot out my nose while reading and laughing than went down my gullet.  I almost put myself in the hospital with goofy guffaws over Death’s apprentice and his comic adventures on a flat world riding through space and time on the backs of four gigantic elephants standing on the back of a gigantic-er turtle swimming through the stars.  Now, I know you have no earthly idea what this paragraph even means, unless you read Terry Pratchett.  And believe me, if you don’t, you have to start.  If you don’t die laughing, you will have discovered what may well be the best humorist to ever put quill pen to scroll and write.  And if you do die laughing, well, there are worse ways to go, believe me.

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Discworld novels are fantasy-satire that make fun of Tolkien and Conan the Barbarian (written by Robert E. Howard, not the barbarian himself) and the whole world of elves and dwarves and heroes and dragons and such.  You don’t even have to love fantasy to like this stuff.  It skewers fantasy with spears of ridiculousness (a fourth-level spell from the Dungeons of Comedic Magic for those fellow dungeon masters out there who obsessively keep track of such things).  The humor bleeds over into the realms of high finance, education, theater, English and American politics, and the world as we know it (but failed to see from this angle before… a stand-on-your-head-and-balance-over-a-pit-of-man-eating-goldfish sort of angle).

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Terry Pratchett’s many wonderful books helped me to love what is ugly, because ugly is funny, and if you love something funny for long enough, you understand that there is a place in the world even for goblins and trolls and ogres.  Believe me, that was a critical lesson for a teacher of seventh graders to learn.  I became quite fond of a number of twelve and thirteen year old goblins and trolls because I was able see through the funny parts of their inherent ugliness to the hidden beauty that lies within (yes, I know that sounds like I am still talking about yesterday’s post, but that’s because I am… I never stop blithering about that sort of blather when it comes to the value hidden inside kids).

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I have made it a personal goal to read every book ever written by Terry Pratchett.  And that goal is now within reach because even though he is an incredibly prolific writer, he has passed on within the last year.  He now only has one novel left that hasn’t reached bookstores.  Soon I will only need to read a dozen more of his books to finish his entire catalog of published works.  And I am confident I will learn more lessons about life and love, and laughter by reading what is left, and re-reading some of the books in my treasured Terry Pratchett paperback collection.  Talk about your dog-eared tomes of magical mirth-making lore!  I know I will never be the writer he was.  But I can imitate and praise him and maybe extend the wonderful work that he did in life.  This word-wizard is definitely worth any amount of work to acquire and internalize.  Don’t take my convoluted word for it.  Try it yourself.

borrowed from artistsUK.com
borrowed from artistsUK.com
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June 11, 2026 · 12:13 am

Avoiding the Tiger Traps of a Humorous Life

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In point of fact, using humor in the classroom is one of the easiest ways I know to become a beloved and effective teacher.  But it requires skill.  It is like dancing barefoot in a mine field that is littered with pit traps for trapping tigers.  See how I linked the title to my opening paragraph there?  Kids in the classroom don’t… unless you make it funny.  Sometimes they want you to fall in the tiger trap on purpose even though there are punji sticks at the bottom.  They want to see what the consequences of the mistake really are so they are not surprised when they immediately make that same mistake.

So, let me tell you about a few of those tiger traps and how to navigate through them.

Poo-Poo Jokes

Yes, one of the unfortunate truths about humor in the classroom is that nothing is funnier to middle school and high school kids than references to sticky brown stuff.  (If that last statement made you snicker, then you know that it even goes beyond school.)   And it can be a devastating thing on fragile, fledgling egos in a school environment where boys will invariably stick a half-eaten chocolate bar in a back pocket on a hot day even though they are wearing khaki-colored jeans.  Over-reacting to a sudden fragrance from one of a number of volatile digestive systems packed into the same small classroom can completely empty the room and imperil the teacher’s job.  (Principals don’t appreciate unauthorized leaving of the classroom… so teachers need to quickly learn how to calm-and-continue in an unusually gassy environment.)  Of course, the girl leading the lemming rush out of the classroom under gas attack is usually the one who dealt it.  But you can’t point that out without crushing some young flower’s petals of self-image.  It is necessary to lay down fences of regulation at the beginning of the school year to regulate exactly how brown and sticky a bathroom joke can actually be before it traps you in eternal detention.

Hurt-y Humor

There is the kind of humor that numerous comedians use as their fall-back style, that Don Rickles-esque “Your mama’s so fat that satellites can see her from space”sort of humor.  It is also a highly tiger-trappy sort of humor to use in the classroom.  Students don’t perform well after being the butt of slappy-face-style put-downs.  You don’t want to remind the kid in the back row of how he mixed up the words “pied” and “peed” in last week’s read-aloud right before taking the State science test that will determine his educational future and your next evaluation.  So how do you resist the urge to tell the snooty little cheerleader that just told you her mom is going to get you fired that she’s got a tail of toilet paper hanging down from the back of her skirt… when she actually does… and the football player she most idolizes is watching every move she makes with that big, tart and trippy tongue of hers?  You take pity on them, and remember that if you break them down into tears in front of their peers you are doing the same thing to them that Bully Bob Beegshout did to you back in high school.  Self-deprecating humor is far more effective at defusing a confrontation.  You get them to laugh at themselves by making them see themselves in the story you just told on yourself.  You can often make them laugh themselves right out of the bad behavior that way.  (Oh, and I didn’t point out the toilet paper, but you can wait until someone else inevitably does and karma can balance the universe in that way.)

So, now that I have rolled well past the 500-word goal and still haven’t used up the whole list of tiger traps, I suppose it is time to reveal there will be a follow-up to this post.

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June 10, 2026 · 12:12 am

Something Creative Goes Here

Not Alone

Sometimes the creative brain gets a little too hot and needs time to cool.  That means I need a meaningless filler post to maintain my every-day posting.  So, I give you a picture of Mike Murphy carrying his girlfriend, Blueberry Bates’ books home from the bus stop on a country road in Iowa.  And, of course, they happen to meet an alien named George Jetson, whose father named him after a character on his favorite Earther TV show from the 60’s.  It is a strange thing to have your brain over-heat from too many creative neurons firing at the same time.  But it can lead to notions of intergalactic peace and cultural exchange… or racist comments like, “Tellerons have heads that look like giant boogers!”  But I should be able think more rationally tomorrow.  I hope that turns out to be a good thing.

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June 6, 2026 · 11:51 pm

Homely Art – Amos Sewell

Still being under the weather and filled with sinus head-pain, I decided to go back to a subject I love so much that the post will simply write itself.  You know I love Norman Rockwell and his art, and I fervently believe that kind of mass media oil-painting does not put him in a lesser category than Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Raphael or any other painter with a ninja turtle namesake.   He is a genius, and though he is not a realist in so many ways, his work is more truthful than practically any other kind of painting.  If you are taken by surprise and didn’t know I had this passionate obsession, maybe you should go back and look at this post;   Norman Rockwell

Now that I got that out of my system, here is another Saturday Evening Post artist that is often confused with Rockwell.  His name is Amos Sewell.

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Sewell was an amateur tennis player who was talented enough to win tournaments.  He was an employee of Wells Fargo who was headed towards anything but an art career until he decided to make a leap of faith in 1930.  He started as an illustrator for Street and Smith pulp fiction, and soon caught the notice of the big-time magazine markets for his art.  He published art for Saturday Evening Post,   Country Gentlemen Magazine, and Women’s Day.

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Like Rockwell, he was able to find the funny in everyday scenes, like the dance party to the right.  That young man at center stage is trying so hard not to step on the feet of the red-headed girl, that you want to laugh, but can’t because it’s obvious how embarrassed he would be, and the charm of the picture leads you to shun the thought of interrupting.  The scene is so real the boy would hear you laughing as you looked at the Post cover.

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More expert on this kind of art than I am is the Facebook site that I first got turned on to Sewell by.  Children in Art History

They can also be found on WordPress.  Children in Art History (WordPress)

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There is no doubt that Amos Sewell belongs in the same pantheon of artists as Norman Rockwell, Thomas Kinkade, or Paul Detlafsen.  They are all artists who achieve in their work exactly what I have always striven for.  I want to be able to hold the mirror up to our world the way they did.  I want to capture both the fantasy and the reality in the subject of everyday family life.  I also want to share this work with you because I cannot stand the idea that such artistic ambrosia could one day be forgotten in archives where no one ever looks at it and feels the message in their heart.

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June 4, 2026 · 12:26 am

The Care and Feeding of a REALLY BIG DOG

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My neighbor, Wendy Wackyname, is the owner of a really big dog.  I asked her how she managed a dog that was bigger than a moose and weighed more than an elephant.

“You have to be able to solve problems you never thought you could have,” she said.

“Problems like what?” I stupidly asked.

“Well, a dog that big not only chases cars, but he often catches the littler ones like yours.  It became a real problem when he finished chewing on them and wanted to bury them in the back yard.  When we lived in Oklahoma, our back yard just wasn’t big enough, and the local police kept wondering about what might be buried there.  I guess they had a lot of missing persons cases.”

“Oh, that does sound bad.”

“Yeah, but moving here solved that problem.  We now live next to this nice big park with lots of room for a dog to bury stuff.”

“So he isn’t cured of chasing cars?” I asked nervously.

“No.  But that isn’t the worst problem.  Feeding him is really expensive.  We have to buy a truckload of dog food every week.  That problem has gotten worse since we left Oklahoma.  There used to be a cattle ranch nearby.  At least until the last of their stock mysteriously disappeared.”

I decided I should probably change the subject a bit.

“How do you walk a dog that big?”  I asked.

“Oh, I don’t.  I climb up on his neck and hang on to the collar as hard as I can, and we go for a run.  We ended up in Waxahachie, Texas, last week.”

“Does your mother ever let the dog in the house?”

“Oh, no.  Foozy is an outside dog.  If he wags his tail indoors, he breaks all the furniture in the room.  Besides, the doors in this new house aren’t big enough for him to fit through.”

“Wendy, did you ever read those kids’ books about Clifford the Big Red Dog?”

“Oh, sure.  But life with Foozy is nothing like that.  Giant dogs are a much harder pet to take care of than people think.”

I remembered then how my little dog somehow managed to make five poops a day.  Did Foozy do that, too?  And how did poor little Wendy go about bagging it and depositing it in the trash?  I finally decided I didn’t want to know.

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May 27, 2026 · 12:39 am

The Oubliette

Every Dungeons and Dragons player, especially game masters, know about the oubliette.  In the foundations of towers in the castles of the French you often find a windowless room with the only entrance in the ceiling.  It is a dark hole where you throw captives you want to simply forget.  In fact, the name comes from the word in Middle French, “oublier” which translates to “forget”.  Now, of course, as a former school teacher, I know about oubliettes.  I have been in one more than once.  I have tossed bad kids in there more than once.  But the thing I had to learn about “forget holes” is that there is always a way out.

Eli Tragedy

I had a principal who decided I had betrayed him because he overheard me talking sympathetically to a teacher he had been berating for asking that he discipline students she sent to him for disruptive behavior.  He overheard me saying that he would be more understanding if he tried to manage a class himself once in a while.  For my indiscretion he took away my gifted class and gave me in its place a class composed entirely of students who had been repeatedly sent to him by teachers for being disruptive and unmanageable.  It was a class from hell.  Really… from hell… Satan’s stepson was the first student he put in that class.  I was told I would have to discipline them entirely without help from him.  But as tough as it is teaching twenty dysfunctional learners at once with no outside help, it was do-able.  In fact, I liked some of the kids in that class.  (Hated some too, though, because you can’t always like every kid no matter how crappy they act.)  I didn’t manage to teach them much English.  They all spoke Skuggboy fluently the whole time.  But I did endure.  In fact, when that principal was suddenly jobless two-thirds of the way through the year and replaced by a new principal, I got a chance to get some back.  She overhead Satan’s stepson doing his comic stand-up routine in response to my specific directions and came in to remind him who was in charge in the classroom and who deserved respect.  That reminder lasted for a good fifteen minutes and was a prelude to a parent-principal conference that same afternoon.  I saw his evil smile turned upside down for the first time that school year.

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Whenever I put a student in the oubliette (asked them to stand outside the classroom door until I could talk to them about their bad behavior) I never left them there more than five minutes.  I would quickly give the class the directions they needed to continue on their own, and then I would go out to execute the prisoner.  It usually was an explanation of how I wanted them to behave, and then giving them a choice, whether they wanted to go back in and do the right thing, or they wanted to visit the office with a written explanation by me of exactly what they did wrong.  Even though nothing would probably happen to them in the office, they rarely chose that option.

So, there is always a way out… but there are many forms of the oubliette, and no one is immune to being sent there.

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May 20, 2026 · 1:10 am

Notes From the Archangel Michael

I was born and raised a Methodist.  But I married into the Jehovah’s Witness faith.  Yes, those annoying little people who come knocking at your door offering free Bible studies and wanting to talk to you about the “good news from God’s Word the Bible”.  I was one of them for the better part of 20 years.  And I want to tell you from the outset that I have been guilty of knocking on doors.  I have been threatened to have the dogs sicked on me.  I have been threatened with guns by Winchuks, Hickenloopers, and other rednecks.  Laughingboy Larry, a seventh and eighth grade former student of mine even begged me to come to his door so he could throw a pie in my face.  I requested lemon meringue pie because… mmm, lemon meringue!  Jehovah’s Witnesses are not bad people.  They are real honest-to-God Christians who believe and teach the essential lessons of Christianity, Love and Forgiveness.  Some of the finest people I have ever met are self-sacrificing, hard-working Jehovah’s Witnesses.  I would never speak against them.  But this post has to explain why I no longer am one of them.

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I have always been a reader of the Bible.  I began seriously reading it in my youth when I was a victim of sexual assault and the life-threatening depression that can cause.  A very thoughtful and loving Methodist minister, the father of my best friend, taught me how to use the Bible to seek answers and find comfort.  As a Jehovah’s Witness, I have read the entire Bible cover to cover twice.

But I have also always been a Christian Existentialist, even before I knew what that was.  I believe that existence precedes essence.  There has to be a real, observable rock in front of me before I grant faith in the existence of a rock.  I don’t accept “rock-ness” as something that is real because other people tell me that “rock” exists.  If God is going to be the rock upon which I build my faith, then I have to observe that God is real.  I need proof.  Superstition is acceptance of something without proof.  As far as I can tell, almost all religions… organized religions… are based on superstitions.  “How do you know that Jesus loves me?”  “Because the Bible tells me so.”  “Why must I believe I go to Heaven when I die?”   “Because your father and his father before him believed it.”  “Can I accept these as real reasons… as evidence?”  “Of course not.  These things follow the patterns of superstition.”

“Kill the infidel! Die a hero’s death, and you will be granted 99 virgins in paradise.”  “How do you know this to be true?”  “Allah has told me in a dream.”

So, if you follow any of this (undoubtedly due to the same curse of relentless intelligence that plagues me), you are probably wondering why I don’t just come out and claim to be an atheist like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens?  Well, because I believe in God.  I have seen the proof.  When I talk to God, he answers me.  When I ask him to guide me, he sends signs and leads me to the answers I seek.  He comforts me, even though it is only by helping me to find comfort in my own mind… my own self.  He helps me find the power within me to do what is right and overcome what is wrong.  Why, then, am I not still a Jehovah’s Witness?  Why am I not still knocking on doors?

The truth, as I see it, is… each of us must find God for ourselves.  Each of us must obtain the certainty we seek with our own efforts, or be satisfied with a perpetual state of not knowing all the answers.  Either result is perfectly acceptable.  Jehovah’s Witnesses will tell you that you can’t obtain eternal life unless you believe what they believe, do what they do, and accept everything just as they interpret it from their magic book.  Personally, I believe there is no eternal life.  I am made of star stuff (as Carl Sagan used to say, because science has mathematically proven it is true).  When I die, the configuration of star stuff that is me will simply be no more.  But I have existed.  And my atoms will go through a large number of processes that disperse them and turn them into something else.  My individual consciousness will be disbanded, but the overall consciousness of the universe will remain.  The universe is greater than I am.  In fact, the whole human race could wink out of existence in a massive fireball that consumes planet Earth, and the whole still remains.  I don’t have to worry about any of it.  I am the author of my own story.  I am responsible for its content, both good and bad.  And I am not sorry for any of it.

lamour-a-lepine

Most of the angels used in this post are by William-Adolphe Bouguereau…and one is by me.

Now you know the awful truth.  Mickey is a humanist.  He thinks for himself about everything… even matters of religion.  How horrible!

“Tell me, oh great and powerful, Vishnu, will I be offered 99 virgins in paradise if I kill him for you?”

“No, Singh-Rama O’Malley.  You are simply being stupid and superstitious.  And besides, that particular superstition doesn’t belong to my religion.  You are mixing things up.”

“Oh, sorry, Lord Vishnu.  But is it okay if I don’t kill myself for my error?”

“Singh-Rama, you are a child of the universe… no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here.  And whether or not it is clear to you, the universe is unfolding… as it should.”  (Note; These last words are the words of the poet Max Ehrmann in his wise poem, Desiderata.)

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