The State of the Union address at the beginning of the year 2000 ended with a remark so hypocritical and downright irritating it will go down in the annals of history--if the future lasts beyond Judgment Day.

With the infamous slogan "God Bless America," President Billy Bob "Hee-Haw" Clinton effectively shut out intelligent citizens from his ethereal dream of an all-inclusive nation. Let spoiled rich boys frolic in Wyoming, let "heroes" who hit balls with sticks rub shoulders with the First Lady, let Hispanics play the bagpipe in the middle of Lake Wobegon for all he cares, but don't let smart people participate in anything, especially the 21st-century American lovefest.

Billy Bob, being a lawyer, probably realizes God does not exist. But he likes dumb people and he likes their support. Lucky for him, there are a whole bunch of dumb people in the United States. He knows that logic means nothing to those who have fallen prey to the voracious appetite of religious zeal. "If your god knows everything, he must know what it feels like to get diddled." Such a simple postulate is for some reason offensive to religious types, who run screaming from the room (only to return with an army of Visigoths). Or if they're feeling lazy, they simply argue, "I know there's a god. I can feel it in my heart." Well, once I was downright convinced that I had a tumor on my neck, but thankfully it turned out to be a zit.

You see, the whole concept of a higher power was made up a long, long time ago by people who didn't know any better. They saw the moon floating up there in the sky and imagined it was a piece of cheese. They thought the stars were connect-the-dot pictures of crabs and fish and cows. Not everybody felt like this--not the Buddhists, anyway--but a few of the more erroneous explanations of the natural world stuck in the stories that passed from generation to generation. Eventually they became tools for leaders and leader-wannabes to get slaves and other lackeys to follow them. These ruthless, creative megalomaniacs conjured up numerous gods, each with his or her own particular wicked streak, and made the very threat of their vicious wrath an expedient way to keep less intelligent people in line.

The notion of a "one, true god" was a natural progression from the early days. It made things a lot more efficient. Now it was just a matter of interpreting the various rules these whimsical despots conceived in order to alter human behavior. The wording of those edicts was often exceedingly ambiguous and contradictory: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" is a good example. Doesn't this acknowledge that there were other gods to begin with?

One particularly cheeky so-and-so decided 1,600 years ago to write a sequel to the Bible, a tedious piece of fiction known as "The New Testament." It is a tour de force of superstitious babble created and still put to use in order to subjugate and alienate as many of one's enemies as possible. People still fight over whether or not their god has a manlike son. Jewish people don't think Jehovah ever got laid. Christians say Mary got knocked up some way or another, but certainly not by having sex. Muslims don't give a hoot who Jesus' parents are, since Muhammad is the last prophet of Allah, the all-powerful god they pray to a hundred frickin' times a day. Hindus still get off on lots of gods, but they're all related to the same divine principle: what goes around comes around. How profound.

There's more, but I'm sick of it. Anyone with half a brain has figured out that religion is a barrel of hooey. It's a good excuse to wage war when you want some extra land or food or gold. It's also good for keeping kids from stealing each other's milk money, and it's good for politics. I'd like to think that all this silliness will go away eventually, particularly with science disproving everything god-mongers ever say--like, for example, the notion that a volcano won't erupt if you throw a virgin into it. But thanks to the words of pious philanderer Billy Bob, who claimed in his little speech that we should embrace our differences, even celebrate them, then stopped to say, "Oh, except for smart people," that day is still far off.

c. January, 2000 The Cool Cricket Company (tm)