Ranting

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
 
You'll have to forgive me if I'm a bit curt, as I recently saw something that took my breath away.  Not only did I see it, I was informed of it.  What that means is that the information had access to both eyes and both ears--more than enough openings through which to screw my helpless brain.
 
Now, you may be wondering why I would want to pass these horrific realizations onto you.  A nice answer would be so that you don't make the same mistakes I did, but that would be a lie.  In all honesty, I intend to simply share the pain with as many of you as possible.  I went through this; now you have to too.
 
What I saw called itself Creation Science, which brightened my day.  "Science!" I thought.  What a credible word.  Reputable, too.  No honest man would go around tacking that word onto something without just cause--I mean, look at how trustworthy Scientology is.
 
"Ah," I thought.  "To call it science, they must be using the scientific method."  I knew, on some deep level, I was deluding myself with such hope.
 
Their sign read "Young Earth," which kept me positive.  A planet in its prime!  What's not to like?  Oh, and look!  A sculpture of a man and a woman wearing nothing but fig leaves.  Who doesn't love art?
 
I entered a tour of their museum, and what wonders I witnessed may never be fully comprehended without actually having been there.  There stood before me a great many moving models, programmed by wizards in the field of animatronics.  Well educated, learned men took time out of their busy days to help construct this place.  There just had to be something to it.
 
There was what one would expect in a museum--dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes, cavemen, cavewomen, cavechildren playing with cavetoys.  The usual.  Something soon stood out, though.  "My," I thought.  "That velociraptor is mighty close to those cavechildren.  And what's that around its neck?  Is it snared in a vine of some kind?" I prayed trivially.  The tour guide then cleared things up, and it was far worse than I could ever have feared...
 
"No," I thought.  "It can't be."  But it was.  There was a leash around the dinosaur's neck.
 
I'm going to stop here and let that sink in.
 
I found myself frozen in time.  I couldn't breath.  I couldn't think.  He had paralyzed me.  He had physically stunned my body through sheer stupidity alone--or maybe I just didn't want to move.
 
The guide went on with the six-day creation of the earth, then Adam, Eve, and Noah's ark--as if the stories had been tested, proven, and written in stone.  As he kept talking, I understood the concept of hell.  I honestly feared I would be stuck there, with him continually violating my mind, and that I would just whither away forever.
 
My body went to war with my brain.  Deep instinct urged me to strangle the life from this person while screaming "Get your genes out of my species!"  Luckily, my brain intervened.  It said to me: "Easy now.  There must be something rational to this.  He can't just be pulling these claims out of the air," but I was deaf to those thoughts.  I was numb and apart from the world I had once known.
 
The tour went on, and I was left just standing at that one exhibit, a dribbling mumbling mess.
 
I awoke three weeks later in a ditch wondering, for the thousandth time, "Who would actually pay that man to say such things? And to speak in a way as if he actually believed them?"  Then the realization jerked me back into coherence.  "The government, that's who."
 
Now, I'm no conspiracy theorist; I'm a skeptic, tried and true, and these are my findings.  Clearly, the entire ordeal was an experiment crafted through the ranks of our very own homeland security.  In hindsight, it all makes perfect sense.  Properly harnessed, this ability could halt riots and end wars.  "Would they use this for good?" one might ask.
 
No.
 
To give you some perspective of the level of force we're dealing with, the potential power of blatant stupidity trapped in one such statement is mathematically greater than that of a hydrogen bomb.  I tell you now, they are forming a weapon the likes of which we've never before encountered.  You have been warned.
 
There are lingering effects, as well.  To this day, I can't listen to a sermon.  I can hear one, sure, but the minute my ears attempt decoding all that drivel into a form I can understand, I immediately jam pens into them.
 
Have you ever seen those old arcade side-scrolling hooting games where there are just waves of bullets flying everywhere?  Literally hundreds of projectiles fill the screen and you just have to focus on not getting hit by one.  That's how a sermon strikes.
 
They'll begin with just a few inconsistencies, but the learning curve soon skyrockets.  Eventually, in a single paragraph, they've launched a flurry of fallacies so monstrous in volume that you just have to try your hardest to get out of their way.  The amount of retardation they assault you with at once is just too overwhelming for human reflexes to deal with.
 
I first began to question authority at the age of nine, for that was when I grasped--among other things--the concept of conspiracy.  I didn't know what the word was, but I sure as hell got the idea.  It happened when I was sitting in a spooky old church surrounded by spooky old people, which smelled like garbage and feces respectively.
 
I realized if my family could fool me about Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny, surely a weird group of this size could fool me into believing even stranger things.  But for what purpose?  It followed that Christmas and Easter could reward me for how well I was doing, but what did I get from going to church every Sunday, wearing itchy clothes, sleeping in pews, and stuffing myself on graham crackers and grape juice?
 
I turned to my mother and couldn't help but ask: "Is all this just another trick?"
 
"Trick?  Sweety, if you don't buy into this, you'll be tortured and burned for all eternity in a lake of searing flames that do not consume, and will experience pain the likes of which no man can comprehend...
 
...Why are you crying, sweetheart?"
 
I was crying because it wasn't a trick after all.  They each honestly believed the words leaving their mouths in this place.  Even I, at such an age, knew magic wasn't real.  These adults, though, still believed ladies were getting sawed in half and rabbits were being pulled out of hats.  With that understanding, my world became a tragedy.
 
It was at that point I knew I wouldn't be religious for very long.  Still, my mother told me to pray, and pray I did.  What that means is I spent all my time talking to nothing while skeptically suspecting a cosmic something might talk back.  Much to my dismay, it didn't.
 
I was told that God answers prayers with "Yes," "No," or "Wait."  Ah, then I saw the mix-up! I suddenly realized these people had God confused with a magic eight ball.
 
It's a perfectly understandable mistake.
 
I mean, they share the same degree of accuracy.  Hell, an eight ball actually gives more reliable, concrete answers, when you think about it.  No matter how much you shake down God, he's always stuck on "Wait."  If you got an eight ball that defective, you'd ask for your money back.

I believe nonsense is a large, very important piece of what made me who I am today, and what continues to bombard our world, so let's delve a little deeper, shall we?

(Continued)