Brace yourself, it’s time for my self-esteem calisthenics routine. Call this an inventory of personal assets if it makes you feel better.

First off, I am really, really intelligent. IQ through the roof. Never had to study in school and got straight A’s anyway. Never sweated a test. Never worried about my grades. Took high grades and high academic achievement for granted because they were just so easy for me,

Funny how it’s only been in the last few years that it’s occurred to me that this IQ of mine might actually be good for something. Might even make me special.

You know, in a good way. For once.

But it’s more than IQ. I see into things. Over the decades. I have honed my mind’s eye into a finely machined engine for separating truth from fiction and reality from illusion and getting directly to the heart of things that baffle most people.

This gives me a perspective that is broad, deep, and wide, while also being almost breathtakingly clear and high resolution,.

I see things. I know things. I’ve been to the place where all things come together.

Hell, I live there. Heck of a view.

I am also a genuinely nice person. I care about people and want them to be happy. Even when I at my most coldly pragmatic or brutally pragmatic, the end goal is always human happiness and the greatest good.

And I am very sensitive. I feel what others feel. I understand where they are coming from. I know what makes them tick. I understand them better than they understand themselves, more often than not.

I get people.

And that makes me very sympathetic towards them, I have seen what fragile, flawed, and vulnerable creatures we all are. Even the most confident and high performing people are just blind monkeys stumbling through life groping for meaning or at least something we can hold on to for support.

And I’m funny. Really, really funny. I have been obsessed with comedy for as long as I can remember and all that comedy I soaked up from sitcoms, cartoons, standup specials, and everywhere else I could find it all went into my understanding of what made things funny.

Add my people-pleasing nature and my loving the spotlight and over the years I unconsciously trained myself to be one funny, funny guy.

Both in person and in print.

Still working on being hilarious telepathically.

And I am, quite frankly, adorable. I have a silly, goofy kind of charm and an instinct for what I can get away with in my pursuit of positive reactions that more or less makes me a living teddy bear, with the soft and cuddly nature to prove it.

Because I’m also very sweet, with a gentle affectionate nature and a soft, loving touch. In my perfect world, I would spend all day doing nice things for people.

And I am not just saying that. That’s my dream.

Time to pause for breath. Will continue to inflate my flaccid ego later.

More after the break.

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Blueprint for a new religion : Part one – Deletions

The world desperately needs not just a new religion but a new kind of religion. One that takes as its first task the discarding and deletion of the loads and loads of antiquated bullshit world religions have accumulated over the generations but have been unable to cast off due to this useless crap being preserved as “tradition”.

This means a return to principles. Principles outrank rules every single time. The whole point of rules is to express principles, but all too often people cling to rules as that is much easier than applying principles.

But the principles are what is important and if the rules conflict with the principles, it is the rules that must go.

At the risk of sounding Jewish, one might call it keeping the spirit of the law from getting smothered by the letter of the law.

All religions have the same basic principle : be nice to one another. And yet, what a bewildering mishmash of high test bullshit we have spun in order to distance ourselves from having to do that one simple thing.

Ergo, the first step in creating a new religion is to purge all the bullshit rules from the premises with all due haste.

Ask yourself : does this rule have anything to do with being nice to one another?

If the answer is “no”, then bin it.

All the messed up rules about sex, for instance. Absolute garbage and a senseless impediment to human happiness.

There is exactly one rule fox sex :consent. Everything with, nothing without. So bid a very unfond farewell to rules about orifices, gender combinations, specific acts, times of the month, and what you use to prevent conception while still having fun.

Ditto with dietary restrictions. These are invariably relics of the time before refrigeration and make absolutely no sense now. Begone, then,

Boom go most of the rituals, too. Too often, performing rituals is used as a substitute for performing moral acts.

In our new religion, then, there is to be only one way to be a good person, and that is to do good things. Period.

The rituals that remain after the purge will be the ones that still have deep and sacred meaning to people. I suspect that will be the ones that connect people to the sacred inside us all, but I will let the polls decide, as it were.

There will also be absolutely no intercessionaries. Nor shall there be special buildings or other places that are necessary to connect with that sacred place in our hearts.

There shall be no sacred bottlenecks with the priest class exacting a heavy price for permission to walk through the sacred turnstiles.

Nor shall there be a clearly human holy figurehead who acts like a petty, jealous, peevish earthly ruler by deciding by decree who does or does not warrant entry into the good part of the afterlife

There shall also be no afterlife.

But I have run out of space. More on this tomorrow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.