Time Jokes

I'm a joker, a clown, an ironist. My best joke I recently wrote may be the macroinformation implicit in nobody getting my jokes, nobody repeating them, publishing them, staging them: very few quoting them. Some of my own favorite pk jokes are jokes about time: my favorite among my Nixon letters was the joke about time (now posted at my PaulKnatz blog): Nixon could promise to have troops out of Vietnam by election time, but if he extended his presidency by rescheduling the election he could continue to wage and escalate war while promising peace: and keep his promise! All that was needed besides presidential treason was a little anti-Constitutional sabotage.

But pk isn't the only such joker. My own jokes are an imitation, sometimes pale, of Twains' and Swift's jokes, and Swift's and Twain's jokes are a pale imitation of God/Vishnu's jokes. For example, tell me a better joke than this one: the Church sells God's mercy to the people. Time is important: you have till your last breath to repent. You can sin your whole life and retain a chance of getting away with it. On the one hand God tells you, through some church, through priests, that he's a terror; but he also tells you, through that church, those priests, that he's a softie, not too bright, he can be got around: especially if you support the priests in luxury.

Of course there's one problem. Let's say it's true: God is a softie, can be got around (if you support his priests in luxury). That still leaves the question open of who are his priests! Is anyone who claims to be his priest? If I come to your door with a tambourine in my hand saying I'm collecting donations for the priests of God, how do you know what I'm actually going to do with the money? How do you know the priests sent me? And how do you know they're priests of God, and not just guys calling themselves priests of God? Their IDs: are they signed by God? or are they imprimateured by priests? And if the priests did send me, how do you know I'm not skimming? When push comes to shove, who's God gonna claim as his own? There are hundreds of churches, thousands, zillions of priests: are all of their parishioners going to be saved? Let's say you tithe the Roman Catholic Church: what if it's the priests of the Jehovah's Witnesses (and their parishioners) God proves soft toward?

OK, here's my real target: what if you support the pope and the cardinals till they're rolling in luxury, and Judgment comes, and God announces that you now have a chance to offer proof that you supported his priests: and he identifies his priests: St. Francis, Ivan Illich, Paul Knatz ... How much support did you give to St. Francis? Oh, no, don't show me your cancelled checks to the Franciscans: the Franciscans are not St. Francis! Show me a video of you handing a penny to St. Francis while he was alive! While he was preaching to the sparrows! No, no, don't show me a receipt for a gift of a million dollars to the Church in 1965; show me a video of you having Ivan Illich over for dinner after the Church defrocked him. Show me your cancelled check for covering pk's phone bill once he'd founded the Free Learning Exchange, Inc.

(It won't do to show that you put a pink breast cancer ribbon on your car: show your receipt for giving money to an actual scientist actually on a track that actually promises to cure breast cancer!) (Show me the sinner repenting with his last breath that God then rolls out the red carpet for.) (how me the priest whose parishioners are actually in heaven.)

Americans believe, without evidence, that our problems will be solved: much the way Christians believe that God will forgive them no matter how much they sin, much the way Jews believe that they are a superior people of a superior nation (same thing the Nazis believed!) In exactly the same way the smokers I've known in my lifetime have believe that they's quit smoking in time to avoid mortal lung cancer. They're dying like flies along about now, those who haven't died already. I knew one who died swearing that her smoking had nothing to do with it: she cursed the doctors, flat out called them liars for linking her addiction to her health!

Charlie Chaplin become a world icon by playing the clown that gets up each time you knock him down. But by middle age, Charlie's clown wasn't getting up again, not quite so spryly. I admit that our species has some resiliance, also that the biosphere has some resilience. Causes are complex, effects may be subtle, delayed. But in general, we're fools to believe that we can crucify every messenger God sends, that sense sends, that we can silence and punish every intelligent suggestion that we stop sinning before it's too late.

I don't think I'm the only punished teacher who'll laugh in delight when God (that is, our future experience) tells us that it's too late, we smoked ten too many cigarettes before we tapered off, that Jesus forgave us yesterday, but doesn't forgive us today.

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I can't show you any of my parishioners actually in heaven: I'm not aware of having any parishioners: and if they claim to be, how come I don't know them?

Could it be that God doesn't want any humans saved? My fishing lure post suggests that God cast Jesus to us merely as a lure to feel us chomp and stomp on. I guess he throws a lot of chomp-and-stomp lures. That post suggested that then maybe God throws the lures away, chomped-and-stomped, and noone is in heaven! I also repeat: if God wants to throw me away after I too have been stomped and chomped, that's his business. I volunteered, God owes me nothing.

Funniest thing of all, perhaps: I can't show you me actually in heaven: unless you see it already: as obvious: obvious for decades, for half a century: longer.

Or no: the funniest thing of all may not be that God doesn't let anyone into heaven. The funniest thing of all may be that there is no heaven: no God: no Judgment! No awareness!!

Sentience failed. We started to develop sentience, then we stopped. We failed. So there can be no God: we stopped him from getting born.

If so: the result is still the same: we're a kleptocracy. That is its own punishment: humans claiming moral status while stealing, lying, cheating: and being imbeciles about cosmology.