The Patriot Post® · Why God Matters

By Burt Prelutsky ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/50498-why-god-matters-2017-08-07

I have often confessed that I am not religious. At the same time, I have no use for atheists. That may seem like a contradiction, but it isn’t. Even if I don’t find myself believing the various things that devout Catholics, Jews and Protestants, are called upon to believe, doesn’t mean I side with those whose religion demands that they not only turn their backs on other religions, but that they deny the existence of God.

There are other things I accept on faith, which means I can’t explain them, things like microwave ovens, how babies learn to speak the language of their parents even when their parents speak really difficult languages like Japanese and Finnish and how someone figured out how to produce clocks to replace sundials, so that people could tell time at night.

But I believe there is far more proof of God’s existence than there is of, say, Nancy Pelosi’s. I have a reasonably healthy ego, but I do not think anything approaching Intelligent Design could ever be seriously attributed to me. I have a hard time writing a few articles every week without also inventing oxygen, coming up with the life cycle of every creature on earth, dreaming up the oceans and mountains and the notion of good and evil.

These days, people are in awe of the fact that someone spotted four average-looking English kids and envisioned the Beatles. But anyone who spends even a little time thinking about the circumstances that brought Madison, Washington, Adams, Franklin, Jefferson and the other Founders together, so that they could create the United States of America out of whole cloth, and not recognize the hand of God, is either lying or is simply unwilling to acknowledge the miracle that is America. The term “divine intervention” came into being to describe just such events.

The reason we need God is because without His rules, we are required to rely on those concocted by men. Besides, those who don’t believe in Him are free to believe in all sorts of foolishness, including fascism, Nazism, socialism and communism, isms leading inevitably to the deification of people like Mussolini, Hitler, Castro, Mao and Stalin. It even leads some nincompoops, such as Barack Obama, to conclude that they themselves are God.


Like Donald Trump, I have lost all confidence in China. I suspect that getting North Korea to cooperate with us in bringing China to its senses is just as likely as getting China to bring North Korea to its senses.

I continue to believe that assassinating Kim Jong-un is our best option. Now all we need is to arrange for a cyclone to get Dorothy’s house to land on his head the way it landed on the Wicked Witch of the East.


By the time you read this, little Charlie Gard will be dead. I never believed he had any chance to lead anything like a normal life. But I am nevertheless angry with England’s medical establishment for not allowing his parents to bring their baby boy to America for experimental treatment.

They weren’t asking the English taxpayer to pick up the expenses. But now, until the day they die, Mr. and Mrs. Gard will believe their son might have had a fighting chance if the authorities hadn’t fought them for eight long months.

I don’t believe the authorities set out to be villains. Perhaps they believed that they were doing the right thing, that the experiments were doomed to failure and that Charlie would have suffered even more pain than he did in his short life if he’d been handed off to American doctors.

But what about the pain they caused his parents, making them jump through hoops in one court after another?

I don’t have a lot of rules, but one near the top of my list is that in disputes between loving parents and bureaucrats over a child’s welfare, the parents always get the last word. And they shouldn’t have to spend eight months getting it.


A writer at the Daily Beast named Ira Madison III called Trump’s new press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders a “butch queen,” which apparently is the impolite term for an unattractive male transvestite.

Liberals, who always claim to be tolerant, especially when it comes to race, looks and sexual proclivity, are always reluctant to call out their own for engaging in ad hominem attacks on their political opponents.

Nobody on the left stepped up to defend Sanders or to condemn Madison, just as they didn’t when liberals were calling Clarence Thomas an Uncle Tom or Condoleezza Rice an Aunt Jemima.

Neither did they condemn Saturday Night Live for portraying Kellyanne Conway, a mother of four, as a “Fatal Attraction” psychotic.

For that matter, how many Democrats chastised Hillary Clinton for labeling half of Americans “deplorables” simply because they didn’t want to see her back in the White House?


Conservatives object to transgender bathrooms and locker-rooms because we recognize that it’s merely another attempt by the Left to engage in identity politics. We recognize that it’s goofy, but until I heard from Dr. Michelle Cretella, a pediatrician, I hadn’t realized how abusive it is to America’s children.

Transgenderism has taken the nation by storm. Like every other stupid fad, millions of liberals immediately glommed onto it, convinced that it would be cool to be involved. But inasmuch as we are adults and can’t be forced to deny our gender, these neurotic parents decided to make guinea pigs of their own kids. After all, until one reaches puberty, kids are very open to suggestion. So, let us say that a parent who was dying to have a daughter wound up with a boy, and without thinking he or she is doing anything evil or even self-serving, subtly suggests to the child that girls have it much better than boys. More treats, more toys, more fun, more love!

Before you know it, the kid is undergoing chemical blockers, sex-cross hormone injections and, ultimately, transformative surgery, all before the age of 11.

Aside from having their tender psyches mangled in the process, they wind up sterile.

It just goes to show that sometimes, authorities should have the last word. But only when dealing with parents who are patently insane.


Karl Boeckmann, a friend of mine who proves that a guy can spend his entire life in the car business and retain his soul, sent me the following notions that apparently emerged from the mind of comedian Steven Wright.

  1. Borrow money from pessimists. They don’t expect it back.

  2. 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.

  3. 82.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

  4. A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.

  5. A clear conscience, on the other hand, is usually the sure sign of a bad memory.

  6. All those who believe in psychokinesis raise my hand.

  7. The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

  8. Hard work pays off in the future, laziness pays off now.

  9. If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

  10. Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

  11. When everything is coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.

  12. I intend to live forever. So far, so good.

  13. If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?

  14. My mechanic told me “I couldn’t fix your brakes, so I made your horn louder.”

  15. A conclusion is where you got tired of thinking.

  16. Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

  17. The sooner you fall behind, the more time you’ll have to catch up.

  18. If your car could travel at the speed of light, would your headlights work?


And from Joe Neuner, the pride of Olathe, Kansas, comes the following kneeslapper.

A woman entered a drug store, approached the pharmacist and announced: “I’d like to buy some cyanide.”

“Why in the world do you need cyanide?”

“I need it so I can poison my husband.”

The pharmacist was knocked back on his heels. “Are you insane? I can’t sell you cyanide so you can commit murder. We’d both go to jail. Why don’t you just get a divorce?”

The woman reached into her purse and pulled out a photo of her husband in bed with the pharmacist’s wife.

The pharmacist looked at the photo for a few seconds, then looked up and said, “You didn’t tell me you had a prescription.”