NIETZSCHE: WHERE’S THE CORPSE?

Before I get to today’s post, I’d like to comment on the vast amounts of correspondence that I’ve received on killing mimes. It turns out everyone likes it—you have no idea how good it feels to finally have a positive response instead of all those complaints from folks who don’t want to be killed. Sure, everyone is fine with killing until I pick their group as a viable target, then wa wa wa. Technically, there was one mime who gestured revenge, and a lot of silence in my voice mail box, but I’ll take that compared with my normal vitriolic feedback.

I’d like to think that god is dead, but I have yet to see a body. And until then, I don’t believe the concept of deicide should be retired. (Of course, until the god-fearers can produce a god, I don’t think we should waste our Sundays or Saturdays or whatevers either.)

Deicide: to kill one’s god, or I guess you could kill someone else’s god too—I think this strategy has been the Fundamentalists’ (of all persuasions) modi operandi and even raisons d’être since they first coalesced into factions.

SO HOW CAN YOU KILL A GOD?

Most people assume that gods are immortal, but anyone who watched (or read, but so few people seem to know how to read these days that I’ve about given up on that medium—and yes, I understand the irony, but until I get a film deal or a TV show or can even figure out YouTube, I am confined to this space) the Lord of the Rings should have realized that the Elves are immortal but a broad axe or arrow are perfectly effective of ending their journeys through Middle Earth.

Face it, gods can die. Ask Jesus the next time he happens to walk down the road to Emmaus. Or Osiris, if you can find all his parts (my guess you can probably find him in an afterlife court suing Jesus for plagiarism). And the Greeks and Aztecs and Hindus and pretty much everyone else seems to have dead gods somewhere in their genealogies.

So if gods can die, why do we not hear more about deicide? Excellent question. Once the first couple gods died, the rest got nervous. Face it, you create a bunch of people, screw with their lives, and then expect them to idolize you? Gods figured out rather quickly that their best defense was hiding, first up on mountains and in the oceans, then in the sky, and finally so far out in space that Voyagers I and II won’t find them until long after we’ve gone extinct. Every time one comes on the planet, they get killed. Name one that has come on the planet and stayed … See?

So if all these gods are in hiding, how can we get one down here to kill? That, dear Watson, is the real enigma. We’ve tried obeying, we’ve tried sacrifice, we’ve tried devotion and war and self-righteousness, and what, NO GODS!!!

THE ANSWER: the answer may seem counter-intuitive, but that is the genius of it. We have to, all of us, ignore the gods. After a few generations (although my suspicion is that it would take less than a year or so—the gods are so fuckin’ vain) they’ll have to come down to prove themselves, explain where the hell they’ve been for these past millennia, do a few miracles or create new planets or something. And then, we have them. Personally, I’d prefer a simple beheading, but I know there are centuries and more of bad governance to atone for. I can understand the desire to torture, but somehow the gods always use suffering to their advantage.  So I’d say, kill ‘em quick, send them all through a tree shredder, and feed the carnage to pigs and goats. I can’t imagine that anything coming out of goat or pig shit could stake any claims to divinity.