Al Klein wrote:

On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 22:02:59 -0600, "Ratt-Baggs & Rusty Beddsprings"
<P@P> said in alt.atheism:

# Hunt me down? LOL!!!! Why? Because we all LOVE my mixed race grandson
and your family rejected YOU? What has my grandson got to do with YOU
calling PRs and bi-racial people "Black ***** human wannanbes, monkeys and
baboons?" You call Hispanic single mothers "sluts." You can't seem to
handle that everyone in the family LOVES my grandson. It's eats your guts
out that my GS is so loved, and so treasured - while YOU were treated like a
dog by your mother's family, and abandoned by your father's family! Deal
with it Jabbers.... you're a LOSER!

If he had any honor at all he'd go swimming in the Hudson wearing a
pair of cement hip boots.

But he'd sink.
...Ooooh.

On Sun, 06 Feb 2005 04:44:09 -0800, John Ings <nodamned@spam.org>
said in alt.atheism:

## You're as welcome as Dan Quayle at a MENSA meeting.

Are you saying that MENSA members don't have senses of humor?

PRIEST.

Now that the fatal hour is upon you wherein the veil of illusion is
torn aside only to confront every deluded man with the cruel tally of
his errors and vices, do you, my son, earnestly repent of the many
sins to which you were led by weakness and human frailty?

DYING MAN.

Yes, I do so repent.

PRIEST.

Then in the short space you have left, profit from such timely remorse
to ask that you be given general absolution of your sins, believing
that only by considering the reverence of the most comfortable and
holy sacrament of penitence may you hope for forgiveness at the hand
of Almighty God our Eternal Father.

DYING MAN.

I understand you no better than you have understood me.

PRIEST.

What's that?

DYING MAN.

I said I repented.

PRIEST.

I heard you.

DYING MAN.

Yes, but you did not understand what I meant.

PRIEST.

But what other interpretation . . . ?

DYING MAN.

The one I shall now give. I was created by Nature with the keenest
appetites and the strongest of passions and was put on this earth with
the sole purpose of placating both by surrendering to them. They are
components of my created self and are no more than mechanical parts
necessary to the functioning of Nature's basic purposes. Or if you
prefer, they are incidental effects essential to her designs for me
and conform entirely to her laws. I repent only that I never
sufficiently acknowledged the omnipotence of Nature and my remorse is
directed solely against the modest use I made of those faculties,
criminal in your eyes but perfectly straightforward in mine, which she
gave me to use in her service. I did at times resist her, and am
heartily sorry for it. I was blinded by the absurdity of your
doctrines to which I resorted to fight the violence of desires planted
in me by a power more divinely inspired by far, and I now repent of
having done so. I picked only flowers when I could have gathered in a
much greater harvest of ripe fruits. Such is the proper cause of my
regret; respect me enough to impute no other to me.

PRIEST.

To what a pass have you been brought by your errors! How misled you
have been by such sophisms! You attribute to the created world all the
power of the Creator! Do you not see that the lamentable tendencies
which have misdirected your steps are themselves no more than effects
of that same corrupt Nature to which you attribute omnipotence?

DYING MAN.

It seems to me that your reasoning is as empty as your head. I wish
that you would argue more rationally or else just let me alone to die
in peace. What do you mean by 'Creator'? What do you understand by
'corrupt Nature'?

PRIEST.

The Creator is the Master of the Universe. All that was created was
created by Him, everything was made by His hand, and His creation is
maintained as a simple effect of His omnipotence.

DYING MAN.

Well now, He must be a very great man indeed! In which case, tell me
why this man of yours, who is so powerful, nevertheless made Nature
'corrupt', as you put it.

PRIEST.

But what merit would men have had if God had not given them free will?
What merit would there be in its exercise if, in this life, it were
not as possible to choose good as it were to avoid evil?

DYING MAN.

So your God proceeded to make the world askew simply to tempt and test
man. Did He then not know His creature? And did He not know the
outcome?

PRIEST.

Of course He knew His creature but, in addition, He wished to leave
him the merit of choosing wisely.

DYING MAN.

But what for? He knew all along what His creature would choose and it
was within His power- for you say that He is all-powerful-well within
His power, say I, to see to it that he chose correctly?

PRIEST.

Who can comprehend the vast and infinite purpose which God has for
man? Where is even the man who understands all things visible?

DYING MAN.

Anyone who sees things simply, and especially the man who does not go
looking for a multiplicity, of causes with which to obscure the
effects. Why do you need a second difficulty when you cannot explain
the first? If we admit it is possible that Nature alone is responsible
for creating what you attribute to your God, why do you insist on
looking for a master hand? The cause of what you do not comprehend may
be the simplest thing there is. Study physics and you will understand
Nature better; learn to think clearly, cast out your preconceived
ideas and you will have no need of this God of yours.

PRIEST.

Miserable sinner! I Understood you Were no more than a Socinian and
came armed with weapons to fight you. But since I see now that you are
an atheist whose heart is closed to the authentic and innumerable
proofs which are daily given us of the existence of the Creator, there
is no point in my saying anything more. Sight cannot be restored to a
blind man.

DYING MAN.

Admit one thing: is not the blinder of two men surely he who puts a
blindfold on his eyes, not he who removes it? You edify, you fabricate
reasons, you multiply explanations, whereas I destroy and simplify the
issues. You pile error on error, and I challenge all errors. So which
of us is blind?

PRIEST.

So you do not believe In God?

DYING MAN.

No, and for a very simple reason: it is impossible to believe what one
does not understand. There must always be an obvious connection
between understanding and belief. Understanding is the prime condition
of faith. Where there is no understanding, faith dies and those who do
not understand yet say they believe are hypocrites. I defy you to say
that you believe in the God whose praises you sing, because you cannot
demonstrate His existence nor is it within your capacities to define
His nature, which means that you do not understand Him and since you
do not understand you are incapable of furnishing me with reasoned
arguments. In other words, anything which is beyond the limits of
human reason is either illusion or idle fancy, and since your God must
be either one or the other, I should be mad to believe in the first
and stupid to believe in the second.

Prove to me that matter is inert, and I shall grant you a Creator.
Show me that Nature is not sufficient unto herself, and I shall gladly
allow you to give her a Master. But until you can do this, I shall not
yield one inch. I am convinced only by evidence, and evidence is
provided by my senses alone. Beyond their limits, I am powerless to
believe in anything. I believe the sun exists because I can see it: I
take it to be the centre where all of Nature's flammable matter is
gathered together and I am charmed but in no wise astonished by its
regular courses. It is a phenomenon of physics, perhaps no more
complex than the workings of electricity, which it is not given to us
to understand. Need I say more? You can construct your God and set Him
above such phenomena, but does that take me any further forward? Ann I
not required to make as much effort to understand the workman as to
define His handiwork?

Consequently, you have done me no service by erecting this illusion of
yours. You have confused but not enlightened my mind and I owe you not
gratitude but hatred. Your God is a machine which you have built to
serve your own passions and you have set it to run according to their
requirements. But you must see that I had no choice but to jettison
your model the instant it fell out of step with my passions? At this
moment, my weak soul stands in need of peace and philosophy: why do
you now try to alarm it with your sophistry which will strike it with
terror but not convert it, inflame it without making it better? My
soul is what it pleased Nature to be, which is to say a consequence of
the organs which Nature thought fit to implant in me in accordance
with her purposes and needs. Now, since Nature needs vice as much as
she needs virtue, she directed me towards the first when she found it
expedient, and when she had need of the second, she filled me with the
appropriate desires to which I surrendered equally promptly. Do not
seek further than her laws for the cause of our human inconsistency,
and to explain her laws look not beyond her will and her needs.

PRIEST.

And so everything in the world is necessary?

DYING MAN.

Of course.

PRIEST.

But if all is necessary, there must be order in everything?

DYING MAN.

Who argues that there is not?

PRIEST.

But who or what is capable of creating the order that exists if not an
all-powerful, supremely wise hand?

DYING MAN.

Will not gunpowder explode Of necessity when lit by a match?

PRIEST.

Yes.

DYING MAN.

And where is the wisdom in that?

PRIEST.

There isn't any.

DYING MAN.

So you see it is possible that there are things which are necessary
but were not wisely made, and it follows that it is equally possible
that everything derives from a first cause in which there may be
neither reason nor wisdom.

PRIEST.

What are you driving at?

DYING MAN.

I want to prove to you that it is possible that everything is simply
what it is and what you see it to be, without its being the effect of
some cause which was reasonable and wisely directed; that natural
effects must have natural causes without there being any need to
suppose that they had a non-natural origin such as your God who, as I
have already observed, would require a good deal of explaining but
would not of Himself explain anything; that therefore once it is
conceded that God serves no useful purpose, He becomes completely
irrelevant; that there is every likelihood that what is irrelevant is
of no account and what is of no account is as naught. So, to convince
myself that your God is an illusion, I need no other argument than
that which is supplied by my certain knowledge that He serves no
useful purpose.

PRIEST.

If that is your attitude, I cannot think that there is any reason why
I should discuss religion with you.

DYING MAN.

Why ever not? I know nothing more entertaining than seeing for myself
to what extravagant lengths men have taken fanaticism and imbecility
in religious matters - excesses so unspeakable that the catalogue of
aberrations, though ghastly, is, I always think, invariably
fascinating to contemplate. Answer me this frankly, and above all, do
not give self-interested responses!

If I were to be weak enough to let myself be talked into believing
your ludicrous doctrines which prove the incredible existence of a
being who makes religion necessary, which form of worship would you
advise me to offer up to Him? Would you have me incline towards the
idle fancies of Confucius or the nonsense of Brahma? Should I bow down
before the Great Serpent of the Negro, the Moon and Stars of the
Peruvian, or the God of Moses' armies? Which of the sects of Muhammad
would you suggest I join? Or which particular Christian heresy would
you say was preferable to all the others? Think carefully before you
answer.

PRIEST.

Can there be any doubt about my reply?

DYING MAN.

But that is a self-interested answer.

PRIEST.

Not at all. In recommending my own beliefs to you, I love you as much
as I love myself.

DYING MAN.

By heeding such errors, you show little enough love for either of us.

PRIEST.

But who can be blind enough not to see the miracles of our Divine
Redeemer?

DYING MAN.

He who sees through Him as the most transparent of swindlers and the
most tiresome of humbugs.

PRIEST.

'O Lord, thou hearest, but speakest not with a voice of thunder.'
(orig. italic, no source for quotation).

DYING MAN.

Quite so, and no voice is heard for the simple reason that your God,
perhaps because He cannot or because He has too much senseor for
whatever other reason you care to impute to a being whose existence I
acknowledge only out of politeness or, if you prefer, to be as
accommodating as I can to your petty views, no voice, I say, is heard
because this God, if He exists as you are mad enough to believe,
cannot possibly have set out to convince us by using means as
ludicrous as those employed by your Jesus.

PRIEST.

But what of the prophets, the miracles, the martyrs? Are not all these
proofs?

DYING MAN.

How, in terms of strict logic, can you expect me to accept as proof
something which itself first needs to be proved? For a prophecy to be
a proof, I must first be completely convinced that what was foretold
was in fact fulfilled. Now since prophecies are part of history, they
can have no more force in my mind than all other historical facts, of
which three-quarters are highly dubious. If to this I were to add
further the possibility, or rather the likelihood, that solely
historians with a vested interest transmitted them to me, I should be,
as you see, more than entitled to be sceptical.

Moreover, who will reassure me that such and such a prophecy was not
made after the event, or that it was not just politically or
self-fulfillingly contrived, like the prediction which foretells a
prosperous reign under a just king or forecasts frost in winter? If
all this is in fact the case, how can you argue that prophecies, which
stand in dire need of proof, can themselves ever become a proof?

As for your miracles, I am no more impressed by them than by
prophecies. All swindlers have worked miracles and the stupid have
believed in them. To be convinced of the truth of a miracle, I should
have to be quite certain that the event which you would call
miraculous ran absolutely counter to the laws of Nature, since only
events occurring outside Nature can be deemed a miracle. But there,
who is so learned in her ways to dare state at what point Nature ends
and at what precise moment Nature is violated? Only two things are
required to accredit an alleged miracle: a mountebank and a crowd of
spineless lookers-on. There is absolutely no point looking for any
other kind of origin for your miracles. All founders of new sects have
been miracle-workers and, what is decidedly odder, they have always
found imbeciles who believed them. Your Jesus never managed anything
more prodigious than Apollonius of Tyana, and it would never enter
anyone's head to claim that he was a god. As to your martyrs, they are
by far the weakest of all your arguments. Zeal and obstinacy are all
it takes to make a martyr and if an alternative cause were to furnish
me with as many martyred saints as you claim for yours, I should never
have proper grounds for believing the one to be any better than the
other but, on the contrary, should be very inclined to think that both
were woefully inadequate.

My dear fellow, if it were true that the God you preach really
existed, would He need miracles, martyrs, and prophecies to establish
His kingdom? And if, as you say, the heart of man is God's handiwork,
would not men's hearts have been the temple He chose for His law?
Surely this equitable law, since it emanates from a just God, would be
equally and irresistibly imprinted in all of us, from one end of the
universe to the other. All men, having in common this same delicate,
sensitive organ, would also adopt a common approach to praising the
God from whom they had received it. They would all have the same way
of loving Him, the same way of adoring and serving Him, and it would
be as impossible for them to mistake His nature as to resist the
secret bidding of their hearts to praise Him. But instead of which,
what do I find throughout the whole universe? As many gods as there
are nations, as many ways of serving them as there are brains and
fertile imaginations. Now, do you seriously believe that this
multiplicity of opinions, among which I find it physically impossible
to choose, is really the handiwork of a just God? No, preacher, you
offend your God by showing Him to me in this light. Allow me to deny
Him altogether, for if He exists, I should offend Him much less by my
unbelief than you by your blasphemies.* Think, preacher! Your Jesus
was no better than Muhammad, Muhammad was no better than Moses, and
none of these three was superior to Confucius, though Confucius did
set down a number of perfectly valid principles whereas the others
talked nonsense.* But they and their ilk are mountebanks who have been
mocked by thinking men, believed by the rabble, and should have been
strung up by due process of law.

PRIEST.

Alas, such was only too true in the case of one of the four.

DYING MAN.

Yes, He who deserved it most. He was a seditious influence, an
agitator, a bearer of false witness, a scoundrel, a lecher, a showman
who performed crude tricks, a wicked and dangerous man. He knew
exactly how to set about hoodwinking the public and was therefore
eminently punishable in the type of kingdom and state of which
Jerusalem was then a part. It was a very sound decision to remove Him
and it is perhaps the only case in which my principles, which are
incidentally very mild and tolerant, could ever admit the application
of the full rigour of Themis. I forgive all errors save those which
may imperil the government under which we live; kings and their
majesty are the only things that I take on trust and respect. The man
who does not love his country and his King does not deserve to live.

PRIEST.

But you do admit, do you not, that there is something after this life?
It hardly seems possible that your mind has not on occasion turned to
piercing the mystery of the fate which awaits us. What concept have
you found to be more convincing than that of a multitude of
punishments for the man who has lived badly and an eternity of rewards
for the man who has lived well?

DYING MAN.

Why, my dear fellow, the concept of nothingness! The idea never
frightened me; it strikes me as consoling and simple. All other
answers are the handiwork of pride, but mine is the product of reason.
In any case, nothingness is neither ghastly nor absolute. Is not
Nature's never-ending process of generation and regeneration plain for
my eyes to see? Nothing perishes, nothing on this earth is destroyed.
Today a man, tomorrow a worm, the day alter a fly-what is this if not
eternal life? And why do you believe that I should be rewarded for
virtues I possess through no merit of my own, and punished for
criminal acts over which I have no control? How can you reconcile the
goodness of your alleged God with this principle? Can He have created
me solely in order to enjoy punishing me-and punish me for choosing
wrongly while denying me the freedom to choose well?

PRIEST.

But you are free to choose.

DYING MAN.

I am - but only according to your assumptions which do not withstand
examination by reason. The doctrine of free will was invented solely
so that you could devise the principle of Divine Grace which validated
your garbled presuppositions. Is there a man alive who, seeing the
scaffold standing next to his crime, would willingly commit a crime if
he were free not to commit it? We are impelled by an irresistible
power and are never, not for a single instant, in a position to steer
a course in any direction except down the slope on which our feet are
set. There are no virtues save those which are necessary to Nature's
ends and, reciprocally, no crime which she does not need for her
purposes. Nature's mastery lies precisely in the perfect balance which
she maintains between virtue and crime. But can we be guilty if we
move in the direction in which she pushes us? No more than the wasp
which punctures your skin with its sting.

PRIEST.

So it follows that even the greatest crimes should not give us cause
to fear anything?

DYING MAN.

I did not say that. It is enough that the law condemns and the sword
of justice punishes for us to feel aversion or terror for such crimes.
But once they have, regrettably, been committed, we must accept the
inevitable and not surrender to remorse which is pointless. Remorse is
null since it did not prevent us from committing the crime, and void
since it does not enable us to make amends: it would be absurd to
surrender to it and absurder still to fear punishment in the next
world if we have been fortunate enough to escape it in this. God
forbid that anyone should think that in saying this I seek to give
encouragement to crime! Of course we must do everything we can to
avoid criminal acts-but we must learn to shun them through reason and
not out of unfounded fears which lead nowhere, the effects of which
are in any case neutralised in anyone endowed with strength of mind.
Reason, yes reason alone must alert us to the fact that doing harm to
others can never make us happy, and our hearts must make us feel that
making others happy is the greatest joy which Nature grants us on this
earth. All human morality is contained in these words: make others as
happy as you yourself would be, and never serve them more ill than you
would yourself be served. These, my dear fellow, are the only
principles which we should follow. There is no need of religion or God
to appreciate and act upon them: the sole requirement is a good heart.
But, preacher, I feel my strength abandon me. Put aside your
prejudices, be a man, be human, have no fear and no hope. Abandon your
divinities and your creeds, which have never served any purpose, save
to put a sword into the hand of man. The mere names of horrible gods
and hideous faiths have caused more blood to be shed than all other
wars and scourges on earth. Give up the idea of another world, for
there is none. But do not turn your back on the pleasure in this of
being happy yourself and of making others happy. It is the only means
Nature affords you of enlarging and extending your capacity for life.
My dear fellow, sensuality was ever the dearest to me of all my
possessions. All my life, I have bowed down before its idols and
always wished to end my days in its arms. My time draws near. Six
women more beautiful than sunlight are in the room adjoining. I was
keeping them all for this moment. Take your share of them and,
pillowed on their bosoms, try to forget, as I do, the vain sophisms of
superstition and the stupid errors of hypocrisy.

NOTE

The Dying Man rang, the women entered the room, and in their arms the
priest became a man corrupted by Nature - and all because he had been
unable to explain what he meant by Corrupted Nature.

PRIEST.

The Creator is the Master of the Universe.