A Blasphemer Writes

Ah, schadenfreude …
A guy got on the train this morning at Ipswich and was struggling up the aisle, looking desperately for a seat.
Big guy. Smart business suit, briefcase, laptop bag, newspaper under one arm, coffee in one hand.
He suddenly rears back and lets rip with an enormous sneeze, at the same time raising his hand politely to cover his mouth.
As a result, he sneezes into his latte and sprays three rows of seats, then drops it and it spills coffee all the way down his front, at which point he tries to catch the falling cup and drops the rest of his stuff before falling flat on his arse as the train lurches into motion.

True!
I make no apology for laughing so hard I nearly wet myself. The rest of the carriage found it pretty funny, too - even those poor sods who got sprayed with coffee and sneeze.

Shadenfreude is the most basic form of humour; laughing at the misfortunes of others.
No matter how much we like to think of ourselves as enlightened, caring, civilised beings we still laugh like the pack of fuckwit chimps we really are when someone walks smack into a lamp post or Wily E. Coyote blows himself up with his own Acme dynamite.

Schadenfreude does of course carry with it an element of "there but for the grace of God go I".
But you shouldn't be thanking God for letting you off, you should be thinking "Holy fuck! What kind of sicko deity does that to somebody?"
Some twisted old git of a God sitting at a wall of CCTV screens, seeing this poor bastard and hitting the "SMITE" button, then sitting back and giggling at His own cleverness.
Twat!

If it turns out there IS an afterlife I'm going to track down that old fucker and kick His arse so hard!
Then we'll see who's laughing.
If Robyn and Shan are right and He is up there, glaring down at me, then all I can say is "Your aim is off. You'll have to do better than that, beardy."

That's the trouble with religion: we've made our Gods in our own image so when Hans Moleman gets smacked in the nuts with a football our Gods find it just as funny as we do.
Actually, that explains just about all of the Old Testament …

Our ancestors were simply too crap to think up a decent God.
Sigh.
The Greeks imagined a bunch of layabouts bickering amongst themselves and shagging anything that moved.
The Hebrews gave us a bullying big brother, "Don't you mess with MY God! He's bigger than yours and He'll thump you!"
The Hindus … well, that's just weird, but at least it showed a bit of imagination.
The Japanese had eight million of the little fuckers scurrying about. "Everything has a spirit so treat it with respect or it might bite your ass".
The Buddhists dispensed with a God altogether, but replaced it with the silly idea that if you behave yourself you might get reborn as a bald bloke in an orange bedsheet … or an ant.

Religion … almost as funny as schadenfreude.
God walking into a lamp post. Now THAT would be funny!