Dear St. Eutychus…

Dear Yute,

  I hope you don’t mind the salutation.  I just like to have nicknames for everyone.  Easier to keep straight.  To be honest, though, I’m not sure I remember who you are.  Are you the one who gave half his cloak to a poor widow?  Or the patron saint of stomach aches?  Or just one of those tedious, “I got eaten by lions” type of saints?  I know you’re not the patron saint of beer brewers; that’s good old Boniface of Mainz.  One of only three I actually approved.

  Well, it doesn’t really matter.  I’ll just assume there was a perfectly valid reason to canonize you.  The Pope owed you money or you poked a hundred children without the church having to bail you out; whatever.

  I’ve dropped you this postcard not to find out who you are or what you did, but to congratulate you on an excellent bit of writing.  Your “Five Things That Would Make Atheists Seem Nicer” is a masterpiece of reasoned discourse and I couldn’t agree with you more.

  For starters, that bit about how smug they are?  Ha!  Don’t I know it.  For instance, I’ll be having a few drinks with some of My Chosen Atheists and it’ll be PZ’s roundand I’ll say, “Hey!  It’s your round.  Where’s My beer,” and he’ll be all, “You don’t exist.  People would think I was crazy if I spent money on a figment of someone else’s imagination.”  You know.  Then he’ll smirk in that smug, atheist way of his and I’ll end up paying not only for My own booze, but everyone else’s when My round comes up.  I try using their argument against them, but Dawkins always brings up Pascal and convinces me that, just in case I do exist, it wouldn’t be fair for Me to skip My round.  It’s almost like they’re taking the piss, you know?  It really chaps My Holy Fundament.

  And that second point of yours?  I’m always telling My Chosen People to relax and not be so paranoid.  Not every single bit of evangelism is about them.  Hell, some of it’s directed at different types of filthy, Gawdless sinners who are most probably going to spend all of eternity roasting in GitmoHell.  I mean, Hippy Jesus!  Get over yourselves, right?  You brand-loyalists have got plenty of other people to pester, like Druids and Muslims and fags.

  My favorite advice was your heartfelt urge for atheists to believe whatever you tell them, through the use of a subtle and complex argument about a hypothetical deity who meddles in people’s lives and communicates through a book of crazy stories and contradictory commandments.  Oh, snap!  That ought to shut ’em up.  of course, I don’t know any deities like that and I’ve pretty much met them all, but that’s not the point, is it?  The point is, they haven’t met all the deities, so what the hell do they know?  If they just agree with everything you say, they’ll certainly seem nicer.

  Obviously, they won’t be nicer.  A leopard can’t change his shorts, am I right?  Well, evolutionarily he can, but you and I don’t believe in that hogwash, do we?  never seen a dog have kittens, eh?

  Which reminds Me, your advice about the so-called “scientific method” is sure to make those filthy commies My Chosen People seem nicer.  If they’d just admit that their proven method of looking at the universe is a) not what they say it is, but what you say it is and b) wrong, wrong, wrong, abused by them and wrong, then they’d be able to successfully wear the facade of niceness.

  And then there’s the way My very own Chosen Atheists are always making Me out to be some sort of simplistic, two-dimensional absentee-landlord who never heals amputees.  I can’t recall, right off the top of My head, why I don’t call people on the phone or heal amputated legs or any of that sort of thing, but if they’d just ask you, or any other of My brand-loyalists, then I’m sure accepting whatever answer they get would make them seem almost human.  Then they’d stop with all the straw man nonsense.  ‘Cause, boy, do I hate straw men.  Just ask ray Bolger.  I smote the hell out of his bladder after I saw The Wizard of Oz.

  So, keep up the good work and do whatever it is that saints do, and if you ever need Me… well, you’re shit out of luck, actually.  I’m on vacation.  But remember, I loooooove you more than anything in the entire universe and, um, “a sparrow doesn’t fall” and all that stuff… as far as you know.

Wish You Were Here,

~Gawd