Beep-Boop-Bang-Splat

If we, as a civilization, could agree to a limit of the total worth of any single human to, say, a hundred million dollars, tops, I think this would be a much happier world.

Or one with a zillion new tax shelters.

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Really clever humans, the kind who spend their entire lives studying such things, estimate that there are between 100 billion and 2 trillion galaxies in the known universe. In addition, they believe our Milky Way galaxy is composed of between 100 billion and 400 billion stars. If you multiply the greatest estimated number of galaxies by the greatest number of estimated stars per galaxy (and, for argument's sake, I'm considering the Milky Way to be an average-sized galaxy) you get a number so incomprehensibly large it doesn't have a name, just a mathematical notation: 8e+23.

What I'm getting at is that there is no god.

Modern science has yet to determine how our universe got here, or why, but it clearly wasn't at the modest whim of an all powerful being, especially one whom we're told carefully notates every single action we humans make and will punish us severely for transgressing the rules, including but not limited to snacking on fried shrimp.

I feel safe in saying that any entity that could create such a massive structure as our universe would have no interest in something as relatively insignificant as we humans.

So could we please stop pretending our moral codes regarding murder and greed are god-given rather than ideas that simply evolved over the eons between the peoples of advancing civilizations? People who decided that dying of old age was preferable to succumbing to random assault, and that being able to keep what little one has acquired over a lifetime without fear of it walking off when one's attention was momentarily diverted was a pretty spiffy notion. In theory, anyway.

The problem is, assigning such moral laws to Divine Beings invites the noses of the unscrupulous under the philosophical tent, each who interpret "the rules" in their own way. Then, before you know it, you have holy men and priests and rabbis and popes and conservatives and, ultimately, Republicans claiming God is their BFF, so you better watch it, buddy.

And ultimately-ultimately you get hypocrites like Trump, who believes that anyone who follows "the rules" are gullible sheep waiting to be fleeced and all you gotta do is used the magic word: Gawd.

The world is full of such men but, worse, it's full of gullible suckers who fall for it because they think "the rules" were dictated to us by the Big Guy himself. It seems the least we can to save them from themselves is to get them to read more than one book. (If they've read it at all.)

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Today's Retread-O-Matic comic is from August 5, 2018. I drew this way before "artificial intelligence" reached reached peak buzz-hood. This was a dark joke in 2016 but it's now a fairly accurate illustration of MAGA's Trump-driven mass psychosis.

- Lefty