What is "Purpose?"

Dear Internet Diary,

Since we were talking yesterday about how some religious people believe that godlessness leads to purposelesness, and purposlessness leads to, I don't know, behaving like a teenager, I thought I'd explain what purpose is .

Purpose to them, I suppose, is something God gave us as well as the reason He made each and every one of us in the first place. God took a purpose out of His magic bag and tucked it into our little clay hearts. This purpose is hidden inside out hearts until we believe in God. When we believe, our eyes and ears then melt, causing them to see and hear things that live in a magical place called Happy Land. Happy Land exists in a realm above the clouds. Well, it did, until we invented supersonic jets and rockets. Then it went to secondary school and learned about dimensions, and decided to move into one of them that we haven't "discovered" yet.

When our eyes and noses melt, we finally hear God who has been shouting at us from the moment daddy's sperm conquered mommy's egg. God gave us defective melted ears so that his shouting would sound like a "still, small voice," so that we would have to strain to hear it and therefore think it was really important, since Modern Science can't explain why we heard it. Anyway, what has Modern Science ever done for us?

For the most part, God is yelling to us to believe in him more than we did before. In order to do this, we have to learn to look the part by glazing our eyes over and smiling beatifically. It's best to get a biker tatoo in a partly visible spot, so that anyone listening will know you've done a lot of hard living, and that you are a recovering narcotics addict. When it comes to prosthelytizing and preaching about morality, who better to listen to than someone who's lost 75% of his brain cells to hard liquor? No quicker way to the really good religious visions than hallucinogens.

If your melted ears listen really well, you can hear the purpose God has for you in His Plan. It's called a "calling." It used to mean, exclusively, that you were meant to be a priest or a nun. Nowadays it means pretty much anything, especially if it involved a multi-level marketing scheme involving a product Jesus often bought in the Holy Land.

Every true believer knows that his Ultimate Purpose, the bigger one found behind the first one, is to go to Happy Land to meet Jesus. Once there, your purpose is to run the thrill rides and midway games, sell cotton candy and clean up vomit.

It is obvious that without such high purposes, our society would crumble. While it is true that atheists have a purposes, until they stop stubbornly denying God, they will not hear His piteous shouts. It brings a tear to my eye to think of poor God shouting as loud as he can in the ears of the wicked, only to be ignored in favor of trivial, sinful secular values such as independence, freedom, love, and...(shudder) The World.

Thanks for listening, diary.