One of my favourite Bill Hicks lines goes like this:

“You’re looking at me like a dog that’s just been shown a card trick.”

I guess he used it when he felt like the audience didn’t get him. Ha ha! Stupid dog, doesn’t even know what cards or numbers or spades or diamonds are. You could draw symbols of cats or bones on the cards in a vain attempt to connect, but it’s just not relevant to the dog.

But let’s unpack the idea a little bit. What does the dog feel when the cards are held out for him? Probably the blissful ignorance I feel most of the time. Holy cow, if we’re not being shown the biggest card trick of all time, every waking moment!

Okay, maybe we’ve figured out what that ball of fire in the sky is, and we can use words like “singularity”, but these ideas are probably the human equivalent of a dog sniffing at playing cards, thinking: “can I eat these?”

The universe is the card trick, we don’t know what the cards are or why we’re being shown them. “Why?” is probably not the point, or even the appropriate language for the trick. Maybe when you are stirred by art, or experience things that can’t be explained by science yet, you get a glimpse into the meaning of the trick, then the door slams shut and the cards lose their meaning as soon as you start trying to construct one.

So let’s all try to be The Wisest Dog In The World; but unlike the dog who doesn’t even know to be baffled by Bill Hicks’ card trick, maybe we can at least have the insight to know that we’re dogs and being baffled is probably the right jumping-off point.

I found this Onion op-ed by a dog most informative.

Here’s a song featuring religion. It’s not an anti-people-with-faith song, it’s an anti-concentrating-unaccountable-power-in-the-hands-of-a-few-people song.