On The Origin of Feces

Charles Darwin: Look: if you’re a guy, then the only thing that matters in life is the mating. For millions of years you have evolved to put your prong in a moist warm place and leave your seed there, then move on. The marrying, the dating, the art, the music, the jobs, all that stuff, that’s just secondary to the mating. Those are the things you need to do in order to get to the mating. It’s different for women because they have evolved to carry a baby in their belly and breastfeed it long after you have gone. They’ve got investment. And if they choose to use the modern science of pills and prophylactics to keep from filling their evolutionary role, then that’s their business. But that doesn’t change your business, my male friends, which is the mating. You need to leave your seed, even if the recipient has created a chemical cocktail in her nether parts designed to destroy it. That’s her problem. Not yours. So if you aren’t doing the mating on a regular basis, then your life is without purpose or point. You might as well kill yourself now, and release the seawater inside you so that it may be used by someone who will actually satisfy his evolutionary prerogative.

O’Brien: I was wondering what my life was all about. Thanks for cluing me in. The meaning of life is the mating. Well, then. Who knew?

Charles Darwin: Don’t misquote me, O’Brien. I never mentioned life having meaning. Life has no meaning. It has purpose. And that purpose is the spreading of the genetic material. Also known as the mating.

O’Brien: Does pleasuring one’s self to pictures of moist warm places count?

Charles Darwin: No. The LORD was right to punish Onan for spilling his seed. The pleasuring of the self is not the mating. It is the wasting.

The LORD: That’s right. Ka-POW! Consider yourself smited.

Charles Darwin: Consider . . . if you had a choice: would you live in a little ragged hut by yourself with just enough food to live on and get to have your way with three different women every day, or have a nice house in the suburbs with a wife and three kids and a pension and get laid once a month? Be honest with yourselves now. Tap that lizard brain.

O’Brien: Honestly? I think if I lived in the ragged little hut, I’d get sick of the women after a couple of days and want to look at online porn by myself, so I’m going to have to pick the suburbs option. And I suspect I’m not alone.

Zorax, Master of the Obvious: Whether life has meaning or life has purpose is a meaningless distinction. Life simply is. And let me tell you all, especially you, Charles Darwin: the mating is over-rated, and O’Brien has touched on an essential truth with his choice. You can live a long and satisfying life without the mating, especially in an era of unlimited pornography on demand, all the time. No, the truest, deepest pleasure in life comes from the shitting. Nothing satisfies more than a good, solid bowel movement. Any one of us can go without the mating indefinitely. But see what happens if you try to go without the shitting. Everything you work for and achieve in life is not about the mating, because we have evolved to the point where we’re selfish pigs who don’t actually care about our spawn, but is instead about the shitting. You have arrived as a human when you have a nice, clean, private, sanitary place to deposit your feces, unrushed, unmolested, unwatched. So forget the mating, and embrace the shitting. This is what gives life its focus, meaning and purpose. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a bran muffin explosion in my immediate future. Is there any of the mating in yours? I didn’t think so. QED. Zorax, out.

Charles Darwin: Yeah, that’s what I meant to say. Survival of the Shittest. On The Origin of Feces. Right. I stand corrected. Darwin, out.

The LORD: “Darwin, out?” Oh, you jest, Charlie. You’re a funny little man. I’ma send Lucifer down to stick a fork in you to see if you’re done yet, and I suspect he’ll find you need at least another 50,000 years of broiling. Then we can talk about “out.”

Charles Darwin: Shit.

The Flaming-Bag-of-Poop-Maker: Charles Darwin vs The LORD

For the uneducated man one of the most convincing of all “proofs” for the existence of a God is the watchmaker argument. It was presented by William Paley in Natural Theology, and the opening passage begins like this (Paley, 1802): “In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there.” Further down Paley continues: “Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.”

Charles Darwin (in Hell): As Paley notes, there is indeed a reason for the complexity of everything in nature, and that reason is merely survival of the fittest. A tree exhibits all its idiosyncrasies as a result of those particular traits’ abilities to ensure the tree will receive adequate sunlight, water, and minerals. The “guiding hand” or “watchmaker” in this respect is simply nature. Cruel, heartless nature. That lets the weak die off and the strong feed on its bones. That punishes the sick and the poor and rewards the rich and powerful for their blameless fates. I guess what I’m trying to get at here is, if that’s what God is, then I can’t see how it is a benevolent force or one worthy of admiration at all. Especially since He’s had me cooking down here in this flaming sarcophagus for a century and half now.

The LORD: Don’t make me punish you and your followers up on Earth again, Charles. I could turn New York into a red state too, you know. Or I could make it so that when your fans get home tonight, instead of finding a rock or a watch sitting on their doorsteps, they will find a big flaming bag of dog poop. Then they will truly know who the Flaming-Bag-of-Poop-Maker is.

Sandy Twistedpanties: Aaaah, you ain’t so big, The LORD. Anybody could be the Flaming-Bag-of-Poop-Maker. In fact, I’ve been leaving flaming bags of poop in front of every church, temple, and mosque for years. Those bastards get everything tax free. The hell with that! Step in the poop, you!

The LORD: But who makes the poop that you put in your bags, Sandy? Well, yeah, dogs do. But then who makes the dogs? That would be me: The LORD. I am the one true maker of poop.

Guy Who Blocks The Flow: Someone told me once that Buddha was the one true maker of poop.

Buddha (in Hell): Nah brah, that’s The LORD. Srsly.

Guy Who Blocks The Flow: Buddha? In Hell? Really?

Buddha (in Hell): Yeah, it’s not too bad, really. The LORD set me and my followers up real nice down here. There’s a cow in every garage, for starters.

The LORD: Hey, no problem, Buddha. I’m all about equal opportunity when it comes to eternal damnation.

Sandy Twistedpanties: Aw, c’mon, The LORD. Dogs make the dogs that make the poop! Everyone knows that!

The LORD: But who made the dogs that make the dogs that make the poop, Sandy? Well, yeah, they were wolves long ago. But I made the wolves. And the single-celled organisms that they descended from. But that last point is just between us here on Upstate Ether, okay? If anyone from a red state asks, then tell them I invented all of those things over the course of a week some six thousand years ago. And I invented all living creatures with poop in their colons, so as to avoid any “which came first: the food or the poop?” debates. And now, if you will excuse me, I’ve got to get down to Washington, DC. I’ve got some cabinet and Supreme Court positions I’ve got to fill.

Charles Darwin (in Hell): I’ve got to respectfully disagree, The LORD. A combination of amino acids and outlandish weather and geological conditions made that one-celled ancestor of wolves all those years ago, and then natural selection took it from there. All you did was take credit for it. And send me to Hell for calling you out about it. I’ve got to say that I certainly don’t think I deserve a conscious eternity in this flaming coffin just for following the scientific method to its logical conclusion.

The LORD: Charlie, Charlie, Charlie . . . how many times do we have to go through this? Who made the amino acids and outlandish weather, Charlie? That would be me. But, oh, let’s see, I’m thinking you want to cite the prevailing scientific theory, something along these lines: that all the matter in the entire universe existed in a space smaller than a helium atom until a big bang blew it all up and created everything, all in matter of milliseconds. Suuuuuuuure, that’s real believable. Your astrophysicists don’t use scientific method. They make leaps of faith, and bad ones at that. I think it makes more sense to just suck it up and say “And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of The LORD moved upon the face of the waters. And The LORD said, let there be light: and there was light. And The LORD saw the light, and it was good, fo’ shizzle!” That makes just as much sense to most folks as the Big Bang theory does. Now, excuse me while I go put together an extra big bag of flaming poop for Sandy Twistedpanties’ porch, and appoint Pat Robertson as attorney general. ‘ta!

Buddha (in Hell): You cows stay away from Charles Darwin, please. He is unclean and untouchable.

Charles Darwin (in Hell): That hurts, Buddha. That really hurts.