If God did this, he's evil, so you better pray it's your fault

Here's a meme that made me laugh.

The ultra-religious in my life certainly won’t like hearing this, but if God is as they claim, he’s evil.

I don’t have a dog in the fight, of course, nor do I believe God or the concept of God is evil. I think whatever they worship is something more akin to the final boss in a Shin Megami Tensei game, a Lovecraftian horror covered in giant eyeballs with crazy slimy tentacles. Each of those tentacles are shoved right up their metaphorical buttholes and hooked to their brains, causing them to spout the absolute worst bullshit imaginable.

The people I grew up loving and admiring can’t be monsters, right? That can’t happen, can it?

The fact of the matter is, these people (said in a Triple H-like you people tone) didn’t just wake up one day and decide to be awful. There was a process getting there, a long, slow process that rots your brain from the inside out. See, it starts with a series of tubes and those series of tubes carry a lot of data, and that data isn’t always useful. Sometimes, that data is information made up to cause rage, an addicting kind of rage that keeps its victims watching, so someone elsewhere can extract endless amounts of cash thanks to the advertising.

The problem with this information as that nobody ever wants to admit their favorite information is the bad information, the one that’s the root cause. Nobody wants to say that their brain has been rotted by a YouTube channel, or Infowars or Fox News or Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children, or places like the Occupy Democrats Facebook page and the hilariously shameless neoconservatives pretending the world is ok on The View or CNN.

It’s easy to get carried away. I removed Facebook and TikTok and everything else from my phone because I’m specifically the type of person that gets carried away. I’m extremely prone to hyperfixations, like Persona 5 or Pokémon or my current obsession, mindlessly grinding away at MLB the Show’s Diamond Dynasty mode while I listen to an audiobook of Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan. When I go back and look at the hours on these things as a 30-year-old man with a journalism career, a journalism career that is also one of these hyperfixations, I feel shame. It’s a lot of time spent, and none of it is particularly productive. I could’ve been cleaning or working a second job, or doing whatever else people consider good.

I just don’t see how that’s any different from people scrolling endlessly on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, or losing a night watching the endless loop of videos on YouTube. I don’t know how we fix it. I think it has to start with parenting, and getting us away children away from their little handheld screens. But you know what? I don’t have kids. It’s really easy for me to tell other parents how they should handle kids because I don’t have to handle kids. When my brother leaves my niece here with me, my only job is to play with her so she’s worn out when he comes back.

Until then, we’re going to deal with the dumbest version of America while the people with their eyes open (or the people who are too busy to fall into the miserable digital trap set for us) watch the slow collapse of the lives around them.

This wasn’t meant to be depressing. I initially wanted to make fun of the guys that think the Left is the reason women won’t sleep with them, but I got carried away. Just be glad I actually workshopped and outlined this idea for a blog. I usually just sit down and write stream of consciousness.