Reign of the Magic Badger

The bear my mother received for Christmas contains a belly full of lavender and various strange ingredients designed to retain both heat and cold. It can be used as a kind of mild ice pack to sooth aches and pains, but its chief purpose is to provide a gentle warmth and heady scent that lulls the owner to sleep, and never mind that lavender is a hellish scent that is like having your nose bitten off by an old woman.

The trouble comes when you heat up the bear. To do so you have to microwave it for three minutes; watching this poor creature gently rotating, a blank expression on its furry face as it slowly cooks before your eyes... it can break the hardest of hearts. For the sadistic parent, this is a godsend; buy this thing for your children, set up a video camera and you will be able to record for posterity the very moment they lose their innocence forever and turn to injecting heroin directly into each other's eyeballs.

We personify the strangest things. Our minds are hardwired to detect faces in the most mundane object... there are more foods with images of Jesus on them nowadays than ones without. Eating a bag of peanuts is like chewing your way through the entire Bible, with a small Koran chaser. Hmm... A somewhat pantheist concept, all in all. God is in everything, and if your appetite is ruined, then what the hell. You can always stick it behind velvet ropes and charge an entrance fee, or sell it on Ebay for hundreds of pounds.

Those people need to be stopped. The sooner people understand that there is a good reason that modern miracles are restricted to weird sensory perception and lazy conjuring tricks, the better. Or is our faith being tested? God could project images of the future onto the side of Mt Everest, but he chooses to pull rabbits out of a top hat sitting on a conveniently hutch-shaped table. It seems to be the way dieties works in most religions. The proof of his existence is that you cannot technically disprove something that by its very nature is beyond science...

Which is why I now announce the existence of Tom the Magic Badger. He cannot be seen, smelled, tasted, touched or found in the stylings of a pork scratching. Unlike ghosts and Bigfoot, Tom cannot be caught on camera by people with shaky video cameras with no focusing capability. Tom is not made up of protons and electrons, but magic dust. But if you disbelieve in him and fail to give money to the new organisation I have built in his honour, he will cause...oh, I don't know...he will cause it to rain on the very day you forgot to take your umbrella to work. Eat that, you swine!

So go on, disprove Tom the Magic Badger. I can wait, say, the next two thousand years for an answer...

Ah, but we are wading here into the nature of belief, and it is a tedious swamp of irreconcilable arguments that should not concern us. All we need to know is that belief is a vital part of our history - our cultural and societal advancement would have been much slower without it - and as long as we believe in ensuring that the sum total of our acts is good, why make it any more complicated?

Yup, having taken a well-worn potshot, I cloak myself with an excuse and wander off into the evening. Who knows, maybe tonight I'll locate a salted pretzel in the shape of the Buddha and make my fortune... And if you argue, I'll string you up for blasphemy. Deal?