Quotes from Ian Gurvitz

The main thing wrong with religion is that people have gotten it wrong. The goal is to understand religion as it should be understood, as traditions, myths, symbols, and practices intended to lead one to a deeper, more profound experience of human life. The desire for this knowledge is hard wired in us. That won't disappear. Unless of course we wipe each other out in the next holy war, in which case we've successfully screwed ourselves.

Donald Trump is Dumbfuckistan incarnate. Just as Sarah Palin was its head cheerleader, Trump is its star quarterback. It was hardly surprising that she showed up in Iowa to endorse him, delivering a speech that made her sound like a drunken stroke victim. They made quite a pair, standing on stage: the unstoppable farce meets the unshameable object. Trump

But, at the end of the day, the problem isn't money, lies, propaganda, negative ads, dirty tricks, decentralized news, talking points, or trumped up investigations. The problem is that they work on us. And they work because we're uncritical, uneducated, and uninformed. A smarter electorate would be more skeptical of the lies. In fact, the incendiary tone and hyperbolic rhetoric in the message would instantly lead one to question the content. And

From the moralizing of the Christian right to the cruelty and misogyny of Sharia Law, the result is a perverted understanding of our basic, biological nature, particularly when it comes to our urge to procreate. You could call it Religion's Unholy Trinity: Sex, Homosexuality, and Abortion. Sex

Sexual taboos are man's invention. Sexual repression and misogyny are the result of a paternalistic society with a fundamental disconnect from its own basic nature. From angry, gynophobic mullahs hell-bent on covering women up to their eyeballs, to the denizens of Vatican City, who look and dress like a bunch of drag queens, some truly perverted individuals have been allowed to make the sex rules for everyone else. Marriage

The moment you fall to your knees in front of a cross, thinking you're praying to some God, you're missing the point. The idea is to look through the symbol to the meaning behind it. Or, as Zen Buddhists put it: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." T

The right question is: where is the meaning in life? Meaning is a man-made concept. It's something we infer from those experiences that are self-evidently good, and stem from a feeling of joy and wonder. Meaning is not something that occurs in the future. It exists in the here and now, within the fact that our lives are finite. F

Take 100 terminally ill patients. Then take 100 prayer circles around them, days and weeks of praying non-stop. Then 99 of those patients die anyway. But one survives. Do we ever hear the stories of all the failed prayer attempts? No. The only story that appears in the media is the one about the miracle survivor, the healing power of prayer, and the angels who were looking over them. But what about all the patients who just died? Were the angels too busy, or just apathetic? It

We accept gravity, aerodynamics, photosynthesis, thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, sexual reproduction, rain, thunder, earthquakes, volcanoes, and tidal waves, all based on science. But when it comes to the origin and nature of life itself we take leave of our senses for a trip into the supernatural. We literally lose our minds. Even

The world came into existence and evolved over billions of years. If conditions hadn't been right for life to occur, we simply wouldn't exist. Our world is a reflection of who we are and how we evolved. The mistake is finding ourselves alive on Earth and assuming we were meant to be here, instead of merely appreciating the fact that we are. We can appreciate our reality without assuming our necessity. T

But as a boomer with Beatles music in my DNA and Lennon songs in my head, every so often I stop and think about the music he might have created over the last 35 years. Then I think of that sad, twisted prick in prison and wish that every morning you could queue up outside his cell, and when he stuck his head out to get his breakfast, you could step up and punch him in the face. I'd wait in that line. But, I wouldn't shoot him, because violence doesn't solve anything. Though

And Texas. Well, as they say: "everything's bigger in Texas." Including the depth and breath of their stupidity. If, during a drought, your governor appeals to the citizenry to pray for rain, and a mob doesn't show up to physically remove him from office for being too goddamn dumb to govern, you leave yourself open to ridicule. As you do if you try to put creationism on equal footing with evolution in your school textbooks.