journal features

gods

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2012.07.05

Kenny constantly asks me to draw things for him. Tonight was no exception. Looking at the piece of paper that he was offering me, I saw a place where some scribbled lines already suggested a shape. That of the "Flying Spaghetti Monster", a faux God created by some people in the US (if I recall correctly) during the debate a few years (again!) about teaching creationism as an alternative to evolution theory. I fleshed out the drawing, and tried to explain to Kenny what the concept of a god was. I then drew a bunch of other gods for him, showing him Jesus on the cross, Allah riding up to heaven on what I think a griffin is supposed to look like, and Buddha sitting in a badly-rendered lotus position. Then I threw in Anansi, Odin & Thor, Nanabush, Raven. (Hmm. No females in there, and only two gender-neutral characters. I guess that's humans for you.)

He liked FSM best. That could be the result of bias. Maybe.

rand()m quote

Society is indeed a contract... [the state] is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

—Edmund Burke