While I was proofreading a book at work today, I noticed what is perhaps the funniest typo in the history of publishing.  This section of the book was discussing the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator.  Unfortunately, a fateful typographical error changed the tone of the discussion immensely.  You see, instead of discussing the Large Hadron Collider, this book had inadvertently been discussing the Large Hardon Collider.  The former obviously collides protons to help uncover the existence of fundamental theoretical particles.  The Large Hardon Collider, on the other hand, is some other experiment, one that probably is not suitable for the eyes of young children.  Where such an experiment would find willing test subjects is beyond me, as the last thing I would do with my hardon is send it shuttling toward another hardon in a high speed collision.

And what is the purpose of this Large Hardon Collider, anyway?  Are they searching for the Higgs bosom?

EDIT:  After a commenter directed me to the Large HardOn Collider’s official website, I felt as if I had to send the webmaster an email of apology.  Here is what I sent him:

Dear HardOn scientists,

Your large hardon experiments sound interesting.  I was not aware this was a real experiment.  You see, at work the other day, I was proofreading a textbook and corrected what I thought to be a typographical error, changing “Large Hardon Collider” to “Large Hadron Collider”.  Now I am worried that, perhaps, the author was referring to your hardon experiments.  Should I be worried?  Are a lot of college textbook writers taking interest in your hardons?  I am terrified that I will be fired as a proofreader as a result of this egregious error, and changing the spelling to Hadron when I should have queried the author if he really was talking about colliding hardons.

Also, sorry for making that correction, as now your tally of hardons will come up short.  And as we all know, when a hardon comes up short, that’s always a bad thing.

I’ve also uncovered, after a bit of research, how this Large Hardon Collider probably works.  The Large Hadron Collider, for instance, works by removing electrons from hydrogen atoms, leaving only protons, and then accelerating these protons around a ring by using oppositely charged magnets synchronized to turn on and off as the particles whoosh by.  In a similar manner, the Large Hardon Collider must start with penises in vaginas.  It then bombards these penis-vagina connections with baseball statistics to cause them to disengage.  At this point, with the penis free, the hardons are set into motion by repelling them with pictures of my naked grandmother, which universally repels large hardons.  Once in motion, more and more pictures of naked grandmas, becoming progressively more crusty and aged, are shown to these hardons, causing them to move faster and faster.  Once the hardons are moving at 99.9% the speed of light (at which point time slows down for the hardons to such a degree that a single ejaculation would take 200,000 years from the relative perspective of those of us watching from Earth), they are suddenly sent hurtling toward other large hardons, with the collision producing conditions that likely held less than a second after the Big Ejaculation that created our universe.  It is at this point that the Higgs bosom could manifest itself.

Skeptics universally fear illogical claims and asinine assertions, but this fear is not reasonable.  Such a fear is rooted in a Western way of thought that sees skepticism as totally opposed to credulousness.  But it is high time skeptics embraced a more mystical, Eastern way of thinking:  The Tao of Skepticism.

Modern skeptical techniques simply do not work.  For example, in light of the recent libel case against Simon Singh brought about by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA), skeptics have been ranting and raving about the lack of research showing any efficacy for chiropractic techniques on various childhood conditions like colic and asthma. This skeptical approach, however, is totally unreasonable—even bogus.

The promoters of medical nonsense and quackery have been winning the popularity contest for years, as evidenced by lumbering, well-funded organizations like the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which are being funded by respectable organizations like the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  Alternative medicine skeptics, naturally, unwaveringly stick to their traditional techniques of logical argument, continually pointing out logical fallacies and demanding evidence, blind to the fact that this approach does not win over the public.  But to the average layperson, skeptics just seem whiny, demanding, and closed-minded.  Such arguments are not convincing.

Therefore, I propose that skeptics should borrow the tactics of the believers, performing a sort of mental judo throw and using the weight of the believers against themselves. After all, for every yin, there is a yang; for every summer, there is a winter; and for every nut, there is a nutcracker.  Sometimes what is dark leads us to light, and sometimes what is wrong can be right, and sometimes the long-winded and rambling can seem poetic.  There is a time for killing and a time for healing, and a time for skepticism and a time for being credulous fucktards.  As such, we must embrace what I call the Tao of Skepticism, realizing that we must reign in our passion for critical thinking and occasionally act like raging fucktards to win over the masses to our side.  What follows, then, is a brief survey of these new, mystical, Eastern tactics we could use to battle medical nonsense and other woo.  (The focus on chiropractic is courtesy of the BCA, as bullying lawsuits against fine science writers like Simon Singh will not be tolerated by the blogosphere, and will guarantee you all sorts of bad press.  Let this be a lesson to you fuckwits.)  In the mystical, ancient technique known as the Tao of Skepticism, these tactics are known as The Sevenfold Ways of Woo:

The Way of the Big
Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is a huge, big-money industry.  It is composed of large organizations and groups, like the British Chiropractors Association (BCA), that drown out individuals, swelling to gargantuan proportions like some sort of malignant tumor or radioactive lizard that breathes fire and terrorizes the Japanese.  Using the Tao of Skepticism, naturally, we can use this knee-jerk dislike of large, corporate entities to our skeptical advantage.  For, as anyone knows, huge organizations and corporations are uniformly evil.  Those who dispute such a claim need only look toward Walmart, that giant of the retail industry, whose low, low prices come at the cost of pissing on the souls of puppies and eating the desires and dreams of little children everywhere.  Given people’s aversion to anything large, and their overwhelming desire to characterize organizations and groups as soul-less corporate husks, a simple tactic for skeptics to fight against woo is to simply refer to alternative medicine as BIG.  No argument is needed.  The next time someone tries to say anything positive about chiropractic, just sneer, “Oh, you mean Big Chiro…” and watch as your opponent withers away, unable to counter this claim.  The beauty of this argument is that it is not an argument at all.  Thus, no one can argue against a sneer of “Big Chiro”—for how do you logically refute an emotionally laden word devoid of argument?  You can’t.  Beware, though, for there is one area in which this argument won’t apply, and that is in regards to woo-woo “penis pills” that claim to offer “male enhancement” (i.e., penis enlargment).  For whatever reason, criticizing anything else as Big always seems to work wonders, but calling penis pills Big Penis only encourages people to buy more.  I don’t yet understand why this should be the case.

The Closed-Minded Way
Skeptics are not the only closed-minded people out there.  The Tao of Skepticism shows us the yin to this yang, as chiropractors and other alternative medicine practitioners, for example, are so closed-minded that they put even skeptics and atheist fundamentalists to shame.  If one innocently asserts that chiropractic is a bunch of foolish, ignorant bullshit, for instance, chiropractors will universally jump to the defensive, arguing at lenth that this isn’t true!  Of course, this is exactly how closed-minded people react.  How dare these loud-mouthed assholes be so bold as to deny that chiropractic is complete bullshit!  Are they really so closed-minded that they can’t even conceive of chiropractic as a foolish and flailing alternative medicine modality that shares many qualities with the feces of bulls?  Why can’t they open their minds and embrace skepticism, or open their minds to the fact that maybe, just maybe, cracking the spine has no fucking effect on asthma?  What arrogant, unflinching swine these chiropractors are for being closed to these possibilities!  Alternative medicine practitioners are thus arrogant and rude to so quickly deny that their treatments are bullshit nonsense that fare little better than placebos.

The Way of the Quantum Skeptic
As most skeptics know, believers who promote bunk and nonsense frequently invoke quantum physics as justifications for their nonsensical claims.  But skeptics have failed to utilize this amazing tactic, which can be used to justify almost anything, provided you have enough ignorance of the real physics.  The Tao of Skepticism, thankfully, is wholly ignorant of any physics, be it quantum or classical!  For instance, did you know that Schrodinger’s cat argues against chiropractic, because it shows that our backs are always in a superposition of alignment and misalignment, and that when we are lying on a chiropractor’s table—like a half-dead, half-alive cat—we could wind up dead after an observation collapses the wave function?  Also, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle proves that chiropractic cannot work, because a chiropractor cannot know the position of a vertebrae if he knows the velocity at which he will manipulate it, and therefore he cannot find it, and on the other hand he cannot know the velocity at which he will manipulate a vertebrae if he knows its position, and therefore he could manipulate it at too great a velocity, causing injury and/or stroke.  Thus, the chiropractor cannot possible manipulate the spine, because the Uncertainty Principle shows that he’d either manipulate it at too great a velocity or be unable to locate the spine.  Clearly, the Tao of Skepticism puts quantum woo-woo on the side of the skeptics.

The Way of the Unnatural and Wrong
Most any skeptic has encountered the naturalistic fallacy, or the claim that something is not right because it is not natural.  Of course, though this is a logical fallacy, that does not mean we skeptics cannot co-opt it for its effectiveness.  Chiropractors, for instance, are highly unnatural people who do unnatural things to the spine.  You do not, after all, go into the wild and see elephants and badgers cracking each other’s spines, or paying other animals pretending to be doctors to fuck with their neck.  (The only natural correlate to the chiropractor in the wild is the duck, which is also a type of quack.)  This defense can even be used against those alternative remedies that thrive on implications that they are “all natural”, like herbal medicine—the Tao of Skepticism, after all, can show us how even natural things are unnatural, and unnatural things are perfectly natural.  For example, one can simply remark that it is not natural to buy strange herbs from weird hippies in jars riddled with fake chinese calligraphy in the case of “natural” herbal medicine.  Clearly, what is most natural is to not use any of these alternative practices at all, whether it be sticking yourself full of needles, eating a bunch of strange, foreign herbs, or fucking around with your vertebrae.  Better to just die alone and miserable, or be eaten by a predator, which is the natural way of doing things.

The Way of Cheapness (Never Mind Efficacy)
One positive aspect to alternative medical modalities like Therapeutic Touch, herbal medicine, or homeopathy is that these treatments are generally cheaper than “Western” cures, like surgery.  Therapeutic Touch, of course, is cheap because it requires about one millionth of the skill it takes to be a surgeon.  Even a frickin retarded bonobo could pretend to move your nonexistent “energy” by randomly waving its arms six inches over your body.  Herbal medicine, likewise, is generally cheaper than western medicine because these products don’t attempt to isolate the active ingredient or supply it in fixed amounts.  You just get the whole damned herb, regardless of how much of the active ingredient is present, because isolating the chemically relevant portion of the herb would be costly!  Of course, skeptics can counter the cheapness of alternative medicine by inventing their own cheap “treatments,” using the Tao of Skepticism.  For instance, the next time someone remarks that homeopathy is cheaper than chemotherapy for treating cancer, simply reply that you have an even cheaper treatment called “trout slapping,” wherein you slap someone with a trout, and you will perform said therapy for only the cost of the trout.  Obviously, if alternative medicine is so cheap, skeptics can envision countless therapies that would be even chaper (and thereby more effective, in the mind of the believer)—and that includes doing absolutely nothing.  Why take homeopathy when sitting on your ass eating Fritos is cheaper!?  Why go to a chiropractor for a long, arduous process of spinal manipulation when I can simply “treat” you with Pudding Sock Therapy, wherein I soak my socks in pudding and then stick them in your ear?  It’s cheaper!  And if Western medicine hasn’t worked, and has cost you so much money, you have nothing to lose by trying it (except possibly your ability to hear)!  After all, if that chemotherapy isn’t curing your cancer, you may as well let me piss on you for a little piss therapy, or fart into your butthole for reverse fart therapy, as I only charge a few dollars for it.

The Way of Ancient Wisdom
It is unseemly to disrespect one’s elders.  The elderly and ancient, even those who have degenerative neurlogical diseases and are incapable of remembering how to put on pants, are universally more intelligent and wise than the young.  As such, traditional, ancient wisdom always trumps modern advances.  This is why traditional chinese medicine is seen as so effective, and why practices like blood-letting and burning witches are as effective today as they were in the past.  (This is true, by the way—they are as ineffective today as they were back then!)  Given these facts, skeptics must emphasize the ancient historicity of their claims.  Did you know that peer-reviewed medical journals were present in neolithic caves, painted on the walls with the blood of yaks, complete with P values of less than or equal to 0.001 in regards to the efficacy of yak blood as a pigment?  Did you know that ancient chinese men sitting on top of mountains believed that homeopathy is bunk and vaccines should be administered to children?  It’s true!  And we have to accept it, because it is old.  Just as we must accept it when our racist grandfather starts talking about “the Japs.”  Judging from his wrinkles, after all, he must be correct.  Skeptics, of course, have a useful resource in the form of James Randi, a man in his eighties, with a long enough beard to look like something out of the 18th century.  No one can deny HIS traditional wisdom.  Once again, the Tao of Skepticism shows us that the path of the skeptic can intersect the path of the believer, becoming one with it in a process of self-annihilation and renewal.  Indeed, the Tao of Skepticism itself is based on ancient, mystical wisdom (I swear it is not something I just made up a few hours ago!), and so therefore it, too, must be correct.

The Way of Implausible Conspiracy Theories
By now, everyone knows that doctors are secretly members of a ritualistic cabal that requires them to take an oath never to cure cancer, AIDS, or any other disease, as doing so would significantly reduce their profits.  What would doctors do, after all, if they were not continually receiving more and more patients with AIDS and cancer?  They’d all be out of business, playing golf, and never dying from cancer or AIDS!  Why would anyone want that?  Clearly, there is no incentive for doctors to cure diseases.  But on the other hand, the skeptic should note, is the fact that there is no incentive for chiropractors to cure asthma, back problems, and so on.  After all, if a chiropractor can cure a back problem in a single visit, there will be no need for the patient to return.  Clearly, if you want to have your AIDS cured, you will have to continually return to the Chiropractor, naturopath, or homeopath, except when you die, in which case the alternative medical practioner has “healed” you by sending you back to Heaven or something.  (Perhaps the oddest thing about this defense for the skeptic, of course, is that it is largely true!  Chiropractors really do try to get repeat customers by emphasizing that constant manipulations are required, even in the absence of any supporting evidence for this.)

Conclusion
There are many more tactics skeptics could adopt to counter the forces of magical thinking and alternative medicine, but there is not room enough here to detail all of them.  The Tao of Skepticism, after all, is all-encompassing.  It is contradictory and incoherent, but very well, because like Walt Whitman it contains multitudes.  What is clear, however, is that skeptics need to abandon the current course, in which they use only reason, logic, and science.  With alternative medicine infiltrating government health organizations, medical schools, pharmacies, and hospitals the world over, skeptics can easily recognize that science-based medicine is losing ground.  The irrational, ridiculous tactics of the alternative medicine movement, even in spite of their irrationality and ridiculousness, have won over countless adherents.  As such, skeptics should learn from the successes of alternative medicine and embrace a more pragmatic approach, using the same idiotic defenses of alternative medicine in support of skepticism and scientific thinking.  In the end, this is the only way in which we can conceivably gain ground.  By appeasing the believers with low-brow thinking and horrid argument, we can win the day by converting even the most hard-nosed skeptic into a bumbling idiot, which would instantly garner such skeptics newfound respect among idiots all over the world, and in effect guarantee them spots on Larry King Live, Oprah, and the Huffington Post, where they could spout their skeptically oriented idiocy ad nauseam.  Then, when the dust settles, the skeptics will have won the battle of witlessness, and they could finally return to the enclaves of science, reason, and evidence-based thinking, weary of the long, hard road they have traveled.  Sometimes, in order to defeat your enemy, you must become your enemy; you must embrace the yin in your yang; and you must become stupid if you wish to remain smart.  Such is the Tao of Skepticism.

At the latest St. Louis Atheist meet-up group, I was finally convinced to go to The Amazing Meeting. I’d been debating it internally in my head for months now, because it’s not like I’m strapped for cash or anything (I’m just a cheap bastard), but I guess I can’t pass up the opportunity to meet a lot of like-minded skeptics, the kind of people I can approach at a bar, say “How ’bout that homeopathy?”, and then engage in a long discussion of the ridiculousness of alternative medicine. Try that in a normal bar and people either stare at you blankly, begin raving about their naturopathic doctor or chiropractor, or else think you are trying to come out of the closet to them.

When I was telling my family and people at work that I was going to Las Vegas, most of them assumed I would be gambling, or drinking, or having sex with prostitutes. Of course, while I will probably end up drinking and having sex with prostitutes, I told a few people that my real purpose was to go to a skepticism and science conference of sorts. Most of them looked at me in stunned silence, as if I were insane. I tried to explain that basically you go there to talk about science and skepticism, and then later get drunk and/or party with people who also enjoy science and skepticism, but still the stares of incomprehension persisted. Oh well.

At any rate, if any of the readers/commenters of this blog will be attending TAM 7 in Vegas, I’d love to meet you guys. Hopefully I’ll be wearing my Saintgasoline Unintelligent Design Venn diagram shirt on at least one of the days, unless I soil it after vomiting profusely all over myself from a long night out, so you can easily identify me. Or you can recognize me by looking for that character in the header of my website. You can also try to search out the person having a very inappropriate conversation, as that tends to be me when I loosen up a bit around people. But leave a comment if you’ll be there and want to say hi or have a discussion or get crunk with me while there! I’d love to meet my blog groupies!

Creationists often contend that evolution is a religion. Such claims are usually met with scorn and derision, but these reactions are the result of a desperate attempt to cover up the truth. After all, those who are guilty of an accusation will always protest. Innocent people, on the other hand, readily admit to the accusation and proceed to throw themselves directly into jail, maintaining that a trial is not necessary. (Witches are similar, in that nonwitches drown and real witches float.) But of all the silly things creationists say, they have inadvertently stumbled upon a hidden, secret truth about evolution when they assert that it is a religion. What follows will surely result in my excommunication from the church, but I feel as if I must play the role of Martin Luther, figuratively nailing my criticisms and revelations concerning evolution to the door of the Church of Evolution.

Darwin, as we all know, famously recanted evolution on his deathbed. To which Herbert Spencer famously replied, “Nonsense, poopeypants!” And then a nearby unicorn zoomed by, shouting “Whoooooo!” while riding a flying pig. What isn’t reported, of course, is that after denying evolution, Darwin went on a long, rambling tirade and established the Church of Evolution. What Darwin denied was the scientific theory of evolution, and he replaced it with the religion of evolution. All of the evidence for evolution didn’t matter, for Darwin realized on his deathbed that people aren’t swayed by evidence. They are swayed by emotion, by religious fervor, by sexual favors, and by blatant lies about people’s deathbed conversions (of which Darwin’s conversion is a notable exception to this rule—seriously). Thus, Darwin repudiated the theory of evolution and constructed an elaborate, evolution-based religion, complete with rituals, priests, and even funny little hats that believers could wear, as Darwin was certainly not going to let his religion be outcompeted in the funny hat department by the likes of Sikh turbans, Jewish yarmulkes, and the lavish Pope hat.

The essential tenet of evolutionary religion is procreation. Like Christians, evolutionists are instructed to be fruitful and multiply, with the only difference being that evolutionists are allowed to actually enjoy the act and need not commit to it in pious silence and indifference. One would think, naturally, that condoms and other contraceptives would be opposed by evolutionists because of this tenet, which flies in the face of the empirical fact that evolutionists tend to wrap their weiners in all sorts of things that prevent insemination. However, weiner wrapping is often essential for future procreation. For instance, STDs are a raging problem for our species, and hence it can preserve future reproductive success to ensure that one’s junk is not covered in blisters, sores, warts, and pus-filled abscesses. Sexual partners are generally averse to infectious, disease ridden genitalia, and thus evolutionists will cover their nether regions when engaging in sexual acts with partners who have inadequate genes and who would therefore produce inadequate offspring, perhaps even producing offspring so inadequate that they become creationists or mimes or, worst of all, creationist mimes.

As can be seen, evolutionists are quite nuanced in their religious views. Whereas religious people abstain from all promiscuity and then randomly choose one person with whom to perpetually mate, inevitably producing fifteen billion children, evolutionists donate to sperm banks, have sex with many, but ultimately choose only a few select individuals with the best genetic fitness to combine genes with. Being more gene-saavy, evolutionists know better than to mate with vapid idiots who think having fifteen children is a good idea. Thus, evolutionists can engage in nonprocreative sex and even bang each other in the butt, so long as they take care to prevent STDs, as every act need not be devoted solely to producing children. Darwin was a smart man; he knew a religion that offered butt sex couldn’t be toppled by something as impotent as Catholicism.

Of course, the ultimate selling point of the Church of Evolution is the pure hedonism and moral debauchery it instills. As we all know, Darwin was not much of a party animal, unless you can consider a barnacle a party animal, as Darwin friggin’ loved barnacles. Regardless, he lived a timid life, studying barnacles and beaks and only getting crunk once in a blue moon. This is why, on his death bed, he decided to turn evolution into a religion. He shot up in bed, eyes wide, and gurgled, “PAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRTAAAAAYYYYYY!”, and it turned out his intuitions were correct, for immediately after doing this the priest attempting to read him his last rites ripped off his shirt, broke through a brick wall while saying “Oh yeah!”, and proceeded to denounce Catholicism in favor of partying hard with Darwin and his barnacles.

Most scientists like to roll their eyes when creationists argue that evolutionists only reject Genesis so they can be immoral, licentious lechers. But the truth is, this is one of the main tenets of the Church of Evolution. We believe in evolution, not because of the abundant evidence (though it’s there), but because we want to be able to eat at Red Lobster, and wear clothes of mixed fabric, and be able to touch menstruating women (one of our fondest hobbies). Only by accepting evolution can we deny these Christian dogmas found in the Bible. Otherwise, we are almost compelled to obey these deep, absolute moral truths that transcend time and space. How, after all, is one supposed to be moral without God? How else would one know that eating at Red Lobster is a sin, or that we should be compelled to ostracize nonreligious family members, or that we should stone to death those who gather sticks on a particular day of the week (either Sunday or Saturday, it’s hard to decide)? But with the Church of Evolution, these deep, ethical intuitions that universally pervade human consciousness can be denied with rationalizations about genetic fitness, bottleneck effects, and allopatric speciatiation. We know in our hearts that we should be out stoning people, but evolution allows us to deny these moral urges in favor of having lots and lots of butt sex, preferably while wearing our Church of Evolution hats, which have even more fabric than a turban and are taller than a Pope hat and even come encrusted with rhinestones. Top that, other religious hats!

Our churches and communities are the best part of the Church of Evolution, though. When we go to worship, we don’t pray. We prey. On the weak. And the elderly. And then we eat them. We’ve decided that it’s not good enough to simply know how life emerged and evolved. We’ve decided to turn evolution into a perverse ethical theory wherein eating weaker people is acceptable. (We also eat scones; delicious, weak scones, like tiny bread-like babies.) At our Bingos, there is no free space. If you want that space, you have to goddamn take it by force. And as for our charities, well, let’s just say we don’t have those, unless punching homeless people in the face is a charity.

Of course, as I close this expose, I can’t help feeling a bit sad. I will surely be excommunicated by Richard Dawkins, the current pope of the Church of Evolution. Inevitably, I will have to go into hiding so that I may avoid being naturally selected by them, and elminated from the gene pool. But though they are merciless and exacting, Darwinists are also amazingly fun and throw great parties. Just don’t believe them when they say that evolution isn’t a religion. It is, in fact, the grandest, most amazing religion known to man. But you can only join if you’ve previously eaten at least one of every existing species. A steep requirement, to be sure, but well worth it.

There’s an old riddle that asks, “What is greater God? What is more evil than Satan? The poor have it. The rich need it. And if you eat it, you’ll die.” Supposedly, children perform well on this riddle, answering immediately, whereas adults devote much thought to it and frequently cannot come to the answer. I myself thought about it for five consecutive days, finally deciding that the answer was my penis. Of course, while my penis is greater than a nonexistent entity, more evil than a nonexistent entity, often given to poor women, frequently denied to rich and snobby women, and leads to the inevitable murder of anyone who so much as tries to chew on it, this is not technically the correct answer. Children, with their ignorance of the graces of my penis, instantly know that the answer is nothing. Nothing is greater than God, or more evil than Satan. The poor have nothing and the rich need nothing. And eating nothing will cause your death. I admit, it seems a far more satisfying solution to the puzzle than the answer of my penis, one of the very few times something has ever been more satisfying than my penis. So ladies, this means I can say with the utmost confidence that nothing is more satisfying than my penis. Absolutely nothing.

My penis aside, however, the first question of this riddle is quite theologically instructive. What is greater than God? Nothing. This can be interpreted in a number of ways. Perhaps it means that God is the greatest entity there is, and nothing can be greater. Or perhaps it means that nothing itself is greater than God, that an empty void is, for all intents and purposes, greater than God. The latter interpretation, naturally, is the more theologically interesting position and can even be justified through argument.

Traditionally, theologians have defined omnipotence as the capacity to do anything that is logically possible. In this manner, theologians can dodge the age-old criticism concerning God’s strange hobby of creating rocks that he himself cannot lift. On the face of things, it would seem that omnipotence would grant God the capacity to create such rocks, but if he cannot lift these rocks, he is no longer omnipotent, and on the other hand, if he cannot create these rocks, then he is also not omnipotent. By defining omnipotence as the capacity to do anything that is logically possible, of course, God can excuse his inability to fashion rocks he cannot lift by noting that such rocks are either impossible to create (that is, it is not logically possible to create a rock that an omnipotent being could not lift) or are possible to create but impossible to lift (that is, God can create a rock that it is not logically possible to lift). Clearly, a God whose omnipotence is bound by logical possibility has no trouble explaining his rock-lifting impotence. God, after all, prefers to lift things other than rocks, like his terribly huge ego, for instance.

But if God is capable of doing anything that is logically possible, that brings us back to the first question of our riddle: What is greater than God? In terms of logical possibility, nothing (pure nothingness, or the void) is indeed greater than God. If omnipotence is the capacity to do anything that is logically possible, then nothingness is omnipotent. After all, it is not logically possible for nothingness to do anything. Therefore, even though nothingness cannot do anything, it is still omnipotent. This is one reason why people should not wish for omnipotence on forbidden monkey paws, as the forbidden monkey paw would instantly grant your wish by causing you to cease existing. You also should not wish for the thing that is greater than God and more evil than Satan, because then you’d end up with my penis, an appendage I’d sorely miss.

Of course, the fact that nothingness is omnipotent in the sense that God is omnipotent doesn’t mean that nothingness is greater than God. At best, it means nothingness is equal to God. In that sense, God is still the greatest being, as nothing is greater than God—nothingness only comes close to surpassing his power by equalling it. But this realization that nothingness can be considered omnipotent can explain many of the attributes commonly applied to God.

Nothingness, for instance, seems to trump God in terms of morality. Because God is conceived of as a creator of the universe and therefore capable of interacting with reality as we know it, we can assume that it is within the limits of God’s power to interfere with humanity in various ways. The problem, however, is that this means God would also have the power to do evil. God would have the capacity to destroy the universe, to kill Job’s family, and to rape sweet, innocent virgins in the ear. Thus, while this is compatible with God’s omnipotence, it seems to conflict with his moral perfection. The obvious response is to maintain that though God has the capacity to do evil, he never chooses to do so. But this response is not fitting. God is defined as morally perfect. If God should one day act on his capacity to do evil, he would thereafter no longer be God. But that doesn’t seem to cohere with the idea that God should be infinite and always exist. As such, to preserve God, it is necessary to show that God cannot choose to do evil, that it is not logically possible for him to do so. Nothingness, of course, already lacks the capacity to do evil, as it cannot do anything. But if God, likewise, cannot do evil, then this does not cohere with a being that is capable of interacting with a physical world and with physical human beings. Of course, perhaps there is some way in which God could still interact with the world and still be incapable of performing bad acts. This is in the realm of possibility, but it doesn’t seem to be something conceivable unless God’s inability to do good resulted from his inability to do anything. That is, the hypothesis that God is omnipotent and morally perfect because it is not logically possible for him to do anything seems to be the most elegant solution.

Such a solution also explains God’s transcendance. If God cannot do anything, then naturally he transcends us. Thus, nothing is not just the answer to the question, What is greater than God? It also answers the question, What is God? God can be legitimately interpreted as nothing. Nothingness transcends human existence, just as God does. Nothingness can do no evil, just like God. Nothingness is omnipotent, just like God. And if nothingness is God, this seems to make sense of the implications of other faiths, as well. Certain varieties of Buddhists, for instance, see death as being returned to God, to becoming part of that absolute, and if God is nothingness, then it certainly seems true that death would entail a return to this. We cease to exist and become part of nonexistence, just like God.

In this sense, sophisticated theologians seem little more than atheists in disguise. The transcendant, omnipotent God they worship has all the qualities of nothingness. Even worse than applying lipstick to a pig, theologians thus seem to be attempting to apply lipstick to nothingness, commenting on its beauty and power like mock pastors. If you approach a person saying nothing and also a person mumbling nonsensical non-words, and then ask both what they are saying, both will reply that they are saying nothing. I find this example analogous to the distinction between atheists and the more liberal variety of theologian. The atheist is the person saying nothing, and the theologian is mumbling nonsense—and in turn saying nothing, as well. Hence, I worship nothing, in the sense that I do not worship, whereas the theologian worships nothing, too, but in the sense that they go through the motions of worship directed at nothing in particular, toward some unknowable, transcendant nothing.

This explains why criticizing atheists for not addressing deeper theology is nonsense. Most of us are not concerned with the deistic, nothingness deities that theologians posit that hide their God’s flaws in incomprehensibility and the unknowable. For all intents and purposes, such theologians are simply confused atheists, dressing nonexistence up like a God. Atheists are more concerned about the gods of the masses—the God that can talk to people and do things in the world, the God that fundamentalists think can invade their bodies and cause them to behave like imbeciles, and the God that mobilizes the religious to deride women and homosexuals or attempt to pass ridiculous religious legislation. We can overlook the theologians because we both agree that God has all the qualities of nothing. The difference is that we rightly point out that God is, in fact, nothing.