Rationality is taking some hits. There is actually a movement afoot to pass legislation in lots of states that will declare that a human life starts at conception, not at birth like our stupid ancestors
thought. These folks want to amend state constitutions to fix it so that such a law could not be found to be un-constitutional because it would be right there in their constitutions. Sneaky, huh?

This movement is sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church and the Fundangelicals to whom they have sold their agenda. These religious groups defend their unconstitutional schemes by denouncing the idea of separation of religion and government. What the Church says must of course win. That’s how god wants it.

How shall we fix the birth date, and hence the birthday, of those persons who will be conceived after the amendment is passed? There will be a bunch of them, in that many contraceptives will simultaneously be banned. And how will we correct the birth dates and birthdays of those born before the corrective change got passed? In that the number of days between conception and birth can vary widely, there must be some way we can make things as accurate as they were under the old system of saying a child was born after it was out of the mother’s birth canal, the cord had been cut, and the baby took its first breath. Far too simplistic for the new morality.

Birth certificates and tombstones must all be altered to reflect the new reality. But should nine months worth of additional days of life be added, or should it not more correctly be that the actual number of days to be added are the number of days since the person became a person by becoming a fertilized egg?

To be sure, there may be minor problems. Clever lawyers might argue, if a person is charged with drinking, or for driving a car while a year under the legal age for such, that the defendant is actually nine months older than their stated age as mandated by the new amendment to their state’s constitution. Surly this must be a valid defense for anyone whose live birth birthday is after March 31st under the old system.

How many lecherous dirty old men can escape justice by arguing in court that the girl was actually not seventeen but eighteen, after the days of gestation that preceded her live birth are added to her pre-constitutional amendment birth date to produce her true age?

The same will of course apply to the voting age, the draft age, and lots of other things the religiofanatics have not thought about. Like retirement age, the age for Social Security eligibility, and so forth. And of course application of the death penalty.

Readers are encouraged to suggest their own realizations of other effects the change will have.

Here is a little test to see just how much anyone actually believes this nonsensical idea of the onset of personhood. For the purpose of this exercise, please assume all of the following to be true:
1) You are a visitor in a hospital for some lawful reason;
2) A fire breaks out in the hospital;
3) You have these options, and no others:
a) You can do nothing and leave;
b) You can save 147 frozen human embryos.
or
c) You can save one living human baby.
Those are the facts for this inquiry into your morality and mental health.

Assuming you do not cowardly flee, which do you save—the 145 embryos or the baby?

Edwin Kagin
© 2012.

Today I walk through autumn leaves
Holding the five year girl child’s hand
Who, without warning, stops and thrusts
Questions at me I once asked
Questions that were satisfied
By maiden aunts and Sunday saints
Whose answers that I soon forgot
They still believe and can recall.

Questions that were asked again
When thoughts ran like young stallions run
Over hurdles that can’t be crossed
And spring back strong like new bent bows
Eager to feel the morning wind
Smooth and stroke their strong hot sides
As they rip holes with their hard hoofs
Into the soft turf of the mind.

But scholars pull the English grass
That plugs the cracks in Roman roads
Pompeii’s relics are admired
By cuff linked men who softly ask
Why such a culture had to fall
Beaks and claws of mocking birds
Can pluck the eyes from a dead king
And so pubescent moderns scorn
Ancestral portraits in the hall
For what good can the dead past bring.

Questions that will still invade
Twilight thoughts before sleep draws
Unconscious mind to other things
Where logic seldom pushes hard
Whisper softer every year
And tinny answers echo down
The catacombs where childhood lies
So soft the sound had grown by now
It might have vanished in a while
But now it screams at me again
In the smiling questions of a child.

Whatever I might tell her now
Will never do when snow is cold
And summer seems too hot to run
When girl skin sags and breasts break down
As years forget the nipple’s thrust
And flesh looks like a bombed out town.

Last winter’s dead
And springtime myths can be retold
The tiny hand tugs at my sleeve
It’s good to know there’s nothing old.

Edwin Kagin (c) 2012

President
America First Widget Company
666 Downhill Trace
New Sperm Bank, China

My dear friends and fellow patriotic saved:

Barack Hussein Obama is an illegal alien who atheists got elected President of our United States.

Hussein is the follower of the false religion of Mohammedism, just like our good Christian President George W. Bush told us. Worse yet, he is also probably an atheist.

B. Hussein was not born in the USA but in some African country or worse. His father was a Negro who, like many men of his kind, wanted a white woman. He got one, copulated with her, and produced B. Hussein in some wild non-American briar patch.

Hussein faked his birth papers to fool people into thinking he is a good and proper American. Well, let me tell you. He ain’t.

He is so bad that he has rigged this year, when he is running to get re-elected, for our American calendar to have one more day than it should. He hopes good Christian people will miss Election Day, but the enemies of God, the Nothing Worshippers, will all be there you can be dog tooten certain.

He wants to sell out our country by forcing all of us to have health insurance. Damn Socialist! Good Americans can pay for their own heart transplants and brain surgery.

And he supports birth control and abortions. Unbelievable. He is even opposed to the rights of the unconceived! Baby killer! His motto is “Wrap that pecker before you deck her.” Wish his daddy had.

BHO thinks illegal aliens are just fine. Well, I reckon so since he are one.

And now he has come out supporting the rights of perverts of the same sex to get married to one another. AIDS is God’s punishment visited upon them. We must not interfere with God’s divine justice by even thinking “rubber.” And we need rubber for other things. Do you think rubber grows on trees?

This foreign born heathen also wants to stop our efforts to get smut out of the Internet and to hamstring our resolve to monitor our citizens to be sure they are not practicing unlawful birth control, or engaging in immoral activities like oral sex while their sins are being protected from official scrutiny by liberal ideas of privacy.

If he keeps this up, all of our children will be born naked.

We want to get government off our backs! And to stop the atheist notion that the government and the laws of God should be separate. Where the hell do they think we got our ideas for good government in the first place?

Why should loyal Americans oppose those things???

As that soon-to-be Saint, Mother Teresa, taught us, suffering is good for us. God wants us to suffer. And God wants us to “subdue the Earth.” Every inch of it. Damn tree huggers. And to pump oil where God put it, “Drill baby, drill.”

Hussein wants to prevent our obedience to God’s will.

President Negro wants to teach the lies of science in schools instead of God’s truths of the Bible. He wants us to think humans came from non-humans.

He wants to kick God out of our schools and out of our Military.

And that is our so-called President.

We need to fix this!

How much more of it can you stand?

He needs to be put out of the White House and to be put out picking cotton.

Americans can’t find jobs, and it is all his fault. He says he wants people to “Buy American.”

Communist bastard.

Well, at least we know what we did was a good American thing.

We moved our business to China.

Yours in Christ,

Adolphus Weltschmerz

President
America First Widget Company
A division of Widgets International

© 2012 by Edwin Kagin.

“May I have your zip code?”

“No.”

The adolescent at the checkout counter stopped in mid gum chew. She probably thought I had not heard her or had not understood her.

“May I have your zip code, please.” she said louder.

“No,” I said.

She seemingly had never heard that word used in this context before.

There was a period of silence. Faint stirrings and murmurings arose from the sheep in the line behind me. “He said No” was whispered.

Incredulous at the answer, the female adolescent nearly stopped breathing as she stared at me, her world forever changed.

“We have to have your zip code,” she said.

“No you don’t I said.”

She seemed unable to speak further, so I compassionately explained that neither she nor her employer needed my zip code in order to sell me the widget that had an advertised price on the shelf of $6.66. I had it in hand with me at the counter and, after showing it to her, had tendered a $10.00 bill. This I explained was a completed contract, all of the lawful elements, of offer, acceptance, and consideration having been fulfilled in textbook fashion. The sign on the widget was the offer; my bringing it to the counter was the acceptance; my tender of the $10.00 was the consideration. All that remained was for the adolescent to give me my change, after subtracting the offered price and any applicable sales tax. I could, I told her, then lawfully leave with my widget.

Someone in the line said in a loud stage voice that I was holding up the line.

“No,” I said, “The store is holding up the line by trying to enforce this absurd policy.”

The store manager was called. A similar dialogue followed with him. His show stopper was, “We have to have your zip code to sell you the widget.”

I produced a pad of paper and pencil and asked him his name. “Why do you want that?” he asked.

To put on the lawsuit I will be filing tomorrow morning against you and your company for breach of contract.

They let me leave with the contracted for widget and with my change.

Without obtaining my zip code.

I guess my daddy the preacher was right when he opined that I am just a natural born troublemaker.

Edwin

Edwin Kagin © 2012.

Dear Concerned Student,

Your correspondent is not god. God could not be kicked out of schools or anywhere else. Like an 800 pound gorilla, god can stay anywhere he/she wants.

The real problem is because our nation has put god’s name on the money and in the pledge in violation of the Third Commandment (Second, if you are Roman Catholic). Don’t know what that is? Look it up. And tell us please why you want the Ten Commandments posted everywhere if you don’t know what they are.

Also, maybe because we go to church on the first day of the week instead of on the seventh day of the week as god ordered in the Fourth Commandment (Third, if you are Roman Catholic).

Or, maybe because we make and worship graven images as god condemned in the Second Command (deleted if you are Roman Catholic and like to make and worship graven images).

Or maybe it is because we pray in public after Jesus condemned such practices in Matthew 6: 6.

Jesus warned that anyone who ignored his teachings would be like one who built their house upon the sand.

Or maybe it is because people have been taken in by Satan who wants to make sure every product of conception is born, as unwanted unloved children will grow up to commit crimes and do violent things and thereby help get more people to Satan’s place.

And maybe it is also because we do not want children or anyone else to understand how the world really works and therefore we teach and support myths and ignorant beliefs instead of teaching such things as have been learned and then trying as hard as we can to find out information about things we do not know.

All of this, and more, is set forth in the book, “Baubles of Blasphemy,” by

Edwin Kagin

Pity little Jack and Jill

And their lives so very tragic

For everything—both good and ill

These two ascribed to magic.

If times were good, if things went bad

If the kids were well or sick

On their knees they fell to pray

And god’s great boots to lick.

For they only lived to seek

Reward on Judgment Day

They thought it was God’s plan you see

That things were all that way.

Obedience was their only goal

Service their only aim

Whatever God might will to be

Their faith remained the same.

They lived in groveling platitudes

In whining faith they died

Not knowing that in living life

They hadn’t even tried

To touch the magic life contains

When minds are free to see

That what there is is all there is

That now is eternity.

Edwin Kagin

Among the absurdities embraced by some of the Fundangelical persuasion, perhaps none is more delightful than their project to have people “adopt” frozen embryos, which they are please to call “snowflake children.” No kidding.

This could bring about the highest ends of the Fundangelical movement–lots of children without the need for the sinful act of sex. Just like the BVM. Well, sorta like the BVM.

Anyhow, to aid in this most worthy of efforts, I present herewith my suggested commercial, which can be sung to the tune of “I’m a Little Teapot.” If you don’t know it, ask your parents.

Here is the blasphemy:

I’m a Little Snowflake Child

I ‘m a little sinless snowflake child
A godly girl can have me without being wild;
Please be my mommy and make me smile
Virgin birth a darling little snowflake child.

Edwin Kagin (c)

RESPONSE TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN WATCHMAKER POEM

Now most people know that watches in pockets,

Are made of different stuff than eyes in eye sockets.

A watch doesn’t have wings, or flippers, or feet,

A watch isn’t something another watch might just eat.

A watch doesn’t live in a nest, cave, or hive,

And that is because a watch isn’t alive.

If you can get that small detail resolved,

You can see why it’s dumb to say life hasn’t evolved.

And pretend that making a watch for a wrist,

Is just like making an arm or a fist.

And pretend people were made and clearly designed,

Because life is complex and sometimes refined.

Life didn’t happen by magic or plan,

Like thinking some dirt was turned into a man.

And some folks believe, and this is no fib,

That the first woman was made from first dirt man’s rib.

Evolution happened and it isn’t true,

That people were made by some god from some goo.

Let’s say that you took about ten quillion rabbits,

All alike in their looks, and their hops, and their habits.

And that about half were colored bright snerfell,

And that about half were colored dark murfell.

And if they made babies those snerfells and murfells,

Some of those babies would be colored snerfell.

And some of those babies would be colored murfell,

And some of those babies would be in between.

In some brand new colors no rabbit had seen,

Maybe some would be colored a pleasing snerplean.

Or maybe some awful disgusting murgreen,

And some might be lovely and some quite obscene.

And if the rabbits thus colored should make some more rabbits,

With only those rabbits with their color habits.

A new color for rabbits would finally evolve,

And the colors they started out with would dissolve.

And be completely replaced after enough time,

With snerplean or murgreen not made out of slime.

And enough time and enough rabbit ranges,

Could make in those rabbits amazing new changes.

Until they perhaps were no longer rabbits,

But maybe some new type of postrabbitodabits.

A new kind of life we could not invent in our mind,

As new as a timepiece some watchmaker might wind.

But made from the life force creationists mock,

Who think life is something as dead as a clock.

So don’t be confused by people who lie,

Who think truth is found in a book from the sky.

If it weren’t for science we wish they could see,

We would all have to use candles to watch the T.V.

Edwin Kagin

Good evening sinners.

At High School graduations throughout our country, it is customary for older people to tell younger people what the older people were told by older people, who are now probably dead people, at their own High School baccalaureates and graduations. This is usually some sad, emotional, and boring commentary on how the world and the future is yours, how you are the future, that we are leaving it to you, and that the speaker’s generation messed up the world, but the future if still full of limitless possibilities, and that it is up to you to straighten it all out for the generations to come, and that with hard work, faith, and god’s help it can all be done. There, I have just summarized every known High School graduation speech. When you are old you can tell the same rubbish to a new generation of bright eyed graduates ready to go forth into the world to breed, grow old, and die.

The problem with all of these far too long and whining baccalaureate and graduation speeches, or sermons, is that they usually call for more of what has caused the problems complained of. The baccalaureate talks are the worst. That is where educated adults, who should know better, pray to invisible imaginary friends for wished-for things that never happen.

What is wonderful and different tonight is that this is an Atheist Baccalaureate. And it may be the first such in the history of the United States. So you will go down in history. Some will say you will go to in Hell.

As Atheists, you know that the world is not run by magic and magical thinking. Atheists do not bring up their children in a land of make believe.

We have tried to teach you the principals of reason, critical thinking, logical fallacy, ethical behavior, and the methods of science and evidence. We want you to know that there is a big difference between Righteousness and Self-Righteousness.

We want you to know and understand the difference between belief and proof; between faith and fact. We want you to know that you are part of a great historic tradition of bringing light unto darkness; that there is a difference between that which is ethical and that which is expedient; a difference between being truly moral and being a follower of religious rules. We want you to know that science is based on facts, not on fairy tales. That evolution is a fact and that “Creationism” is a fairy tale. That there is a difference between coincidence and causation. A difference between potential and actual. That an egg is not a chicken and that an acorn is not an oak tree.

At this rite of passage, we want you, our children who are our future, to understand that what happens to each of us and to our world is based on cause and effect—not on faith and miracles. We want you to know that behavior has consequences. If you run on a wet trail you can slip and be hurt. If you let fools be your rulers, you will be ruled by fools.

We want you to live—not for life after death, but for life before death. We all share the mystery of having been born human. As humans, we are many races, many nations, and many religions. We can learn to live together or we can destroy ourselves. No god is going to save us. We must save ourselves.

For your own safety’s sake, we have tried to help you learn to distinguish between logic and fallacy; between science and superstition; between real and pretend; between the wonder of discovery and magical thinking. We want you to know the difference between doing and dogma; between imagination and mythology. And we want you to understand that learning never ends. We want you to know, as many do not, that life does not stop with High School graduation. None of us know the limits of what you may yet learn and what you may yet become. There will also be some pain and some disappointments. It is all part of the deal. We did not make the rules.

Most importantly, we want to help you, our children who are now young adults, to be competent. You will be competent when you can survive, thrive, create, empathize, and interact justly with others, free of pain, fear, and guilt—without gods, without religion, and without us. If you can achieve, as we know you can, self-reliant adulthood, you will not need the gods or the religion, and you will not miss them. If we have done it right, you will not need us either. But perhaps you will miss us.

There is one thing we want. We want you, and your children, and your children’s children, to be able to live in a world where it is okay not to believe in god. To do otherwise is to defile the graves of our martyrs.

May your future be better than your past, and may that measure of peace, justice, harmony and understanding denied religion and its deities be attained by you as mortals through the use of your minds, and may reason, science, curiosity, and discovery replace the fear, the guilt, the pain, and the ignorance of trembling in terror before capricious gods.

by Edwin Kagin

TRINITY SQUARE PERPETUAL EMBRYO CARE

IS NOW ACCEPTING RESERVATIONS

FOR ITS

THREE YARDS TIMES THREE YARDS MEMORIAL GARDEN

EMBRYO REST HAVEN

11, 664 GRAVESITES, A FULL ONE INCH SQUARE EACH, ARE RESERVED

MACROSCOPIC CASKETS OR URNS AND TINY HEADSTONES ARE AVAILABLE FOR PRESERVING YOUR MICROSCOPIC LOSS
MAGNIFYING GLASS INCLUDED AT NO EXTRA CHARGE

WE DO OUR BEST TO GIVE YOUR EMBRYO REST

UNTIL THE TRUMPET SHALL SOUND AND THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED

“SLEEP TIGHT UNTIL ETERNITY LITTLE ONE”

SHOW YOU CARE

DIRECT INQUIRIES TO:

EDWIN KAGIN