Warming Up

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Friday 7th October 2005

So George W Bush is saying that God told him to invade Iraq. How fucking terrifying and unsettling is that? The last person I remember who argued that God had told him to do stuff was Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. Which either means that people who think that God is talking to them are all mental or possibly that God is a really twisted and screwed up entity who likes to see what evil things he can get people to do. It started off with Him thinking, “I wonder if I told someone to hit prostitutes with a hammer whether they would do it…. No surely not. No-one would be that stupid… Fuck me, he did it! Brilliant. I wonder what other stuff I can get these idiots to do.”
Would the God who had made one of his top ten rules “Thou Shalt Not Kill” really encourage people to go to war? It seems a bit of a change of tack. I mean we mustn’t question God, he has a bigger plan, but it seems a bit unfair that he is so selective about who he talks to. If he’s going to start telling people what to do it’d be nice if he’d let me know what I should get up to next or what jokes I should tell to the people of Glasgow tonight.
I can’t believe we live in a world where a man in charge of so much weaponry can say he thinks God is talking to him and telling him to kill people and we don’t immediately have him sectioned or at least take away his powers. How would we have felt if the police had accepted Peter Sutcliffe’s word and said, “Oh right, well if God told you to do this, then we can’t really argue with that. Here let us give you some better and more efficient hammers.”
What does Bush mean exactly? Is he saying God has actually literally spoken to him and told him to do the things he has done? If so then he is mentally ill and we are all fucked. Or he is just pretending that God has spoken to him in order to justify what he has done, in which case he is morally bankrupt and we are all fucked.
Possibly God is really speaking to certain people and telling the Christians to kill the Muslims and the Muslims to fly planes into buildings and blow up buses and then sitting back and enjoying the mayhem… in which case we are all fucked.
And if Bush believes that God is looking down on him and approving all his actions then why should be worry about the environment. God will surely sort that all out for him with some miracle magic.
We are all going to die my fine friends. Make the most of these last few years. I hope there is no God. I am not sure I want to spend eternity with the nutcase that religious people seem to believe in so unquestioningly.
Is there a chance that we could overthrow religion or at least make it law that no-one who believes that God speaks to him should be allowed to be in charge of things? I am afraid there isn’t. It’d be nice if we could all wake up tomorrow and decide to believe in stuff that we can see and accept that we are responsible for what goes on on this ball of rock spinning through space, that no-one else is flying this thing. But it’s not going to happen. We are fucked. So let’s get pissed and enjoy the end of the ride.

I do love being in Glasgow though, because I have a medical condition where I get a bit dizzy if I am more than 30 metres from a Gregg’s. And luckily there isn’t a single location in this whole city where you are not within spitting distance of a branch of this fine bakers. I am not exaggerating (well I am, but barely), there is a Gregg’s on every block. What does that say about what Gregg’s thinks about its customers? “We’re going to need another Gregg’s on this street.”
“But why? There is one literally twenty metres up there.”
“Yes, but our customers eat so many pies and pastries that a walk of that distance would kill them. We’ll have to put one here as well or these people will starve to death.”
Maybe they’re thinking of one of their fat customers walking to work. He can get breakfast at one Gregg’s, but by the time he has managed to drag his bulk thirty metres up the road it will be lunchtime, then he’ll be round the corner for dinner and then comes the long crawl home.