"God to most people means a grouchy old man sitting on a cloud, counting all the kids who are masturbating so he can put them in hell later on."

Robert Anton Wilson: DOUBT:

"...although I don't be­lieve in anything too fervently, I do tend to believe in some kind of mind behind the cosmos. I don't like calling it God, because God to most people means a grouchy old man sitting on a cloud, counting all the kids who are masturbating so he can put them in hell later on. That's so ridiculous that I can't use the word at all. But I don't believe that everything happened by acci­dent. I just can't believe that - to use a metaphor adapted from Arthur Koestler - if you keep throwing junk over a wall for seven million years, you'll get a 747 jet in full working order. I can't believe that; I think there's intelligence somewhere in evolution.

...I don't like the terms "good" and "evil" at all. They invoke too much sub­jectivity disguised as objectivity. I would rather talk about kindness and cruelty. They're a little more clear-cut and specif­ic about what you're talking about. You get shady areas, you get some ambiguity, but by and large, when you say you're in favor of kindness and against cruelty, you're setting up a standard. When you say you're for good and against evil, you're like the cler­gyman in the story about Cal Coolidge. After church somebody asked him, “What was the sermon on, Cal?" "He was against sin." It's easy to be against sin and evil; what the hell do you mean? I'm against cruelty. That's more clear.

Kinney: Do you think there's any source of malevolence or cruelty larger than hu­manity itself- say, built into the universe as a force or a seductive tendency?

Wilson: I don't believe in that; I find that very dubious...  I'm more inclined to look at it in the Buddhist way: it's more igno­rance than malignancy. As a matter of fact, Ezra Pound got around to that at the end of his life after raving and ranting about conspiracies for so many years; toward the end of the Cantos he keeps repeating"Nicht Basheit - Drurmrheit": "not evil - stupidity." Which was his ultimate judgment on what was wrong.

...I'm astounded by the extent to which people are governed by almost meaningless slogans that are repeated over and over again. They don't seem to have much content at all, but you just keep hearing them over and over again, like "the liberal media." You break down what's in most of the media, and how the hell it could possibly be considered liberal is beyond my comprehension.

And yet I know what they're getting at, the people who talk that way. What they're talking about is that the media tends to be liberal on one issue and one issue only, and that's sexual morality. And to these people that's the most important issue. So therefore the defining characteristic of the media is liberalism. Never mind the fact that the media is conservative on almost all economic and political ideas..."