I'm responding to some of what Francis had to say in his book. His words will be in Italics, mine will not be. Here we go.
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My daughter has just turned six. Some time over the next year or so, she will discover that her parents are weird. We’re weird because we go to church.
Awww cry me a river. What a baby.
This means—well, as she gets older there’ll be voices telling her what it means, getting louder and louder until by the time she’s a teenager they’ll be shouting right in her ear.
What voices? Who is yelling in her ear? Like - who does that really? Seriously. What nonsense. This translates to "I'm worried my kid will be told the truth about things"
It means that we believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities. It means that we don’t believe in dinosaurs.
Glad you can admit your faults - not sure about the dinosaur bit, but there are some nitwits who do not believe in that, its not MY fault your religion has a bunch of nitwits in it, go fix your own church's. Perhaps, just maybe the system you have is flawed and broken.
It means that we’re dogmatic. That we’re self-righteous. That we fetishize pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we promise the oppressed pie in the sky when they die. That we’re bleeding hearts who don’t understand the wealth-creating powers of the market. That we’re too stupid to understand the irrationality of our creeds. That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures, full of meaningless distinctions, on the marshmallow foundations of a fantasy.
Identifying the problem is a good step to take, but why are you telling me this- seems like something you should be working with a therapist with.
That we uphold the nuclear family, with all its micro-tyrannies and imprisoning stereotypes. That we’re the hairshirted enemies of the ordinary family pleasures of parenthood, shopping, sex and car ownership. That we’re savagely judgmental. That we’d free murderers to kill again. That we think everyone who disagrees with us is going to roast for all eternity. That we’re as bad as Muslims. That we’re worse than Muslims, because Muslims are primitives who can’t be expected to know any better.
I am pretty sure few would call Christens worse then those of the Muslim faith, but hey if you want to flog yourself go ahead flog away! You whiny bleep you.
That we’re better than Muslims, but only because we’ve lost the courage of our convictions. That we’re infantile and can’t do without an illusory daddy in the sky. That we destroy the spontaneity and hopefulness of children by implanting a sick mythology in your minds. That we oppose freedom, human rights, gay rights, individual moral autonomy, a woman’s right to choose, stem cell research, the use of condoms in fighting AIDS, the teaching of evolutionary biology. Modernity. Progress.
Again, you found part of the problem, but what are you doing to fix this? Oh sorry your not done with your Self-flagellation yet, please - go on.
That we think everyone should be cowering before authority. That we sanctify the idea of hierarchy. That we get all snooty and yuck-no-thanks about transsexuals, but think it’s perfectly normal for middle-aged men to wear purple dresses. That we cover up child abuse, because we care more about power than justice.
Wait are you Catholic? Because they are in fact covering up things - or were, they might still be. Oh no your still flogging yourself with your pretend martyrdom go on then get it out.
That we’re the villains in history, on the wrong side of every struggle for human liberty. That if we sometimes seem to have been on the right side of one of said struggles, we weren’t really; or the struggle wasn’t about what it appeared to be about; or we didn’t really do the right thing for the reasons we said we did. That we’ve provided pious cover stories for racism, imperialism, wars of conquest, slavery, exploitation. That we’ve manufactured imaginary causes for real people to kill each other. That we’re stuck in the past.
Are you don-
That we destroy tribal cultures. That we think the world’s going to end. That we want to help the world to end. That we teach people to hate their own natural selves.
Oh my word please get to the point.
That we want people to be afraid. That we want people to be ashamed. That we have an imaginary friend; that we believe in a sky pixie; that we prostrate ourselves before a god who has the reality status of Santa Claus. That we prefer scripture to novels, preaching to storytelling, certainty to doubt, faith to reason, law to mercy, primary colors to shades, censorship to debate, silence to eloquence, death to life.
Bleeping bleep! Are you done yet?!
But hey, that’s not the bad news. Those are the objections of people who care enough about religion to object to it—or to rent a set of recreational objections from Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.
Woe! Woe to you - you pour blithering baby!
As accusations, they may be a hodge-podge, a mish-mash of truths and half-truths and untruths plucked from radically different parts of Christian history and the Christian world, with the part continually taken for the whole (if the part is damaging) or the whole for the part (if it’s flattering)—but at least they assume there’s a thing called religion there which looms with enough definition and significance to be detested.
You are the one who made the strawman, why are you so upset with it?
In fact there’s something truly devoted about the way that Dawkinsites manage to extract a stimulating hobby from the thought of other people’s belief.
Some religious people like to try to put there imagined opponent onto the same level as they play from, saying that we have more faith then they, calling evolution (or other science) faith beliefs, and then this silliness of treating Dawkins as a pope-type figure. Dude, I know of Dawkins though some lectures I've heard but I do not use anything he says for MY arguments - at least not in the way your silly dumb word "Dawkinsites" suggests - my word - your desperate!
The ones in this country must be envious of the intensity of the anti-religious struggle in the United States; yet some of them even contrive to feel oppressed by the Church of England, which is not easy to do. It must take a deft delicacy at operating on a tiny scale, like doing needlepoint, or playing Subbuteo, or fitting a whole model-railway layout into an attaché case.
What the bleep are you talking about? Like honestly - this is is pure martyrdom wish thinking here. Most of America, sadly, is still pretty pro religion. Would this nitwit vote for an open atheist? Its really hard for open atheists to achieve political stance in the west - STILL.
No: the really painful message our daughter will receive is that we’re embarrassing.
Well, now you have a whole book explaining why that is true! So, at least you've given the world ammo to use on you... woops.
For most people who aren’t New Atheists, or old atheists, and have no passion invested in the subject, either negative or positive, believers aren’t weird because we’re wicked. We’re weird because we’re inexplicable; because, when there’s no necessity for it that anyone sensible can see, we’ve committed ourselves to a set of awkward and absurd attitudes which obtrude, which stick out against the background of modern life, and not in some important or respect-worthy or principled way either; more in the way that some particularly styleless piece of dressing does, which makes the onlooker wince and look away and wonder if some degree of cerebral deficiency is involved.
Again, it seems you have identified the problem...
Believers are people with pudding-bowl haircuts, wearing anoraks in August, and chunky-knit sweaters the color of vomit. Or, to pull it back from the metaphor of clothing to the bits of behavior that the judgment is really based on, believers are people who try to insert Jee-zus into conversations at parties; who put themselves down, with writhings of unease, for perfectly normal human behavior; who are constantly trying to create a solemn hush that invites a fart, a hiccup, a bit of subversion.
Cry me a river.
Believers are people who, on the rare occasions when you have to listen to them, like at a funeral or a wedding, seize the opportunity to pour the liquidized content of a primary-school nativity play into your earhole, apparently not noticing that childhood is over. And as well as being childish, and abject, and solemn, and awkward, we voluntarily associate ourselves with an old-fashioned mildewed orthodoxy, an Authority with all its authority gone. Nothing is so sad—sad from the style point of view—as the mainstream taste of the day before yesterday. If we couldn’t help ourselves, if we absolutely had to go shopping in the general area of woo-hoo and The-Force-Is-Strong-In-You-Young-Skywalker, we could at least have picked something new and colorful, something with a bit of gap-year spiritual zing to it, possibly involving chanting and spa therapies. Instead of which, we chose old buildings that smell of dead flowers, and groups of pensioners laboriously grinding their way through “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” Rebel cool? Not so much.
What reality does this nitwit live in?!
And worst, as I said before, there is no reason for it. No obvious lack that this sad stuff could be an attempt to supply, however cack-handed. Most people don’t have a God-shaped space in their minds, waiting to be filled, or the New Atheist counterpart, a lack-of-God-shaped space, filled with the swirly, pungent vapors of polemic.
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Question marks - I need more question marks! I'm all out of them! The universe does not have enough for this! WHAT THE BLEEP ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT?!
Most people’s lives provide them with a full range of loves and hates and joys and despairs, and a moral framework by which to understand them, and a place for awe and transcendence, without any need for religion.
Really? Based on what study or - wait no I'm being silly again he is just pulling this out of the ass of the construct strawman he made to self flog himself in oh pity me martyrdom.
Believers are the people touting a solution without a problem, and an embarrassing solution too, a really damp-palmed, wide-smiling, can’t-dance solution. In an anorak.
Yep. You are. So what are you going to do to fix that?
And so what goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be guessed at—if for some reason you wanted to guess at it—it appears to be a kind of anxious pretending, a kind of continual, nervous resistance to reality.
This isn't how I viewed myself when I was a believer, I think there is something wrong with this guy, like deep in his brain - like not the religious stuff, but the core of himself. I just - wow. SMH.
It looks as if, to a believer, things can never be allowed just to be what they are. They always have to be translated, moralized—given an unnecessary and rather sentimental extra meaning. A sunset can’t just be part of the mixed magnificence and cruelty and indifference of the world; it has to be a blessing.
For some this might be true. CLEARLY your not one of THOSE types of believers 🙄
A meal has to be a present you’re grateful for, even if it came from Tesco and the ingredients cost you £7.38. Sex can’t be the spectrum of experiences you get used to as an adult, from occasional earthquake through to mild companionable buzz; it has to be, oh dear oh dear, a special thing that happens when mummies and daddies love each other very much.
Sex can only be in marriage though right? Also only between man and woman right? I really wish you would get off your high strawhorse and tell us what you ACTUALLY believe, but that would take courage of conviction, something I doubt you really have.
Presumably, all of these specific little refusals of common sense
Twice I've told people that this dumb phrase isn't a thing! Here & Here!
GAH don't get me started...
reflect our great big central failure of realism, our embarrassing trouble with the distinction, basic to adulthood, between stuff that exists and stuff that is made up. We don’t seem to get it that the magic in Harry Potter, the rings and swords and elves in fantasy novels, the power-ups in video games, the ghouls and ghosts of Halloween, are all, like, just for fun. We try to take them seriously; or rather, we take our own particular subsection of them seriously. We commit the bizarre category error of claiming that our goblins, ghouls, Flying Spaghetti Monsters are really there, off the page and away from the rendering programs in the CGI studio. Star Trek fans and vampire wannabes have nothing on us. We actually get down and worship. We get down on our actual knees, bowing and scraping in front of the empty space where we insist our Spaghetti Monster can be found. No wonder that we work so hard to fend off common sense. Our fingers must be in our ears all the time—lalalala, I can’t hear you—just to keep out the plain sound of the real world.
Yes, well once again you have found the problem...
The funny thing is that to me it’s exactly the other way around. In my experience, it’s belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. It’s belief which demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending.
Of course to YOU its the other way around - to you it makes sense to believe in what you believe in, to YOU its not wacky, weird, and strange. To YOU its fine. To YOU its normal. Perhaps you wish people would just see it the way you do, I mean after reading though your silly self-flogging and martyrdom wish fulfillment here that you constructed a strawaman of, its seems clear to me that you think that others think of you in this way - and that you do not like that, not a bit.
You're tired of being clumped in with the nonsense that other people of faith have - but that is YOUR issue to deal with - that religion is the CAUSE of much of the nonsense is ITS FAULT. So, flip it around - I'M NOT CRAZY - YOUR THE CRAZY ONE. Everything makes MORE sense when you look at it THIS WAY. Now, I have ZERO idea what the bleep you mean when you say "common sense" as I said in the above videos- its not even a thing.
But as far as dispensing with illusion - ha - yeah sure. Okay, lets start with the illusion of martyrdom you have been dragging out - if we dispensed with that nonsense we would have had a much shorter intro into your book. Just be like "I believe in (X), and I think people think I believe in (Z), and that upsets me." - there you go, much better. But no - you made a whole huge - giant strawman of woes, you didn't tell any reader what you really believe in - let alone why. All we know is you are upset at what people might be telling your daughter latter in life - no idea what people since you will be around religious people - so if anything your daughter will not come to question how werid the stuff you do is - I wish I knew what stuff you DO but you didn't bother to tell us. But hey, just because you are not dispensing with illusion yourself doesn't mean its a good idea to do so. What about the illusion of Christianity? Its myth - you couldn't accept that, you wouldn't - so what aspect of the religion, of the FAITH are you willing to give up? Hmmm. I wonder, I do wonder.
Pretending that might as well be systematic, it’s so thoroughly incentivized by our culture. Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London. I know, I know, that’s an utterance by the hardcore hobbyists of unbelief, the people who care enough to be in a state of negative excitement about religion, but in this particular case they’re pretty much stating the ordinary wisdom of everyday disbelief. (Rather than, for example, rabbiting on about orbital teapots.)
This shows that lack of respect he has for Russell's teapot, and comes as little of surprise that he doesn't care about it, has no response to it, and just seems to dislike it in general. The bus sign is for closeted atheists, or those on the verge of going over. Its a reminder also - that religion does not get a monopoly on signs. I saw one during a drive - big yellow sign that just said "Jesus saves."
That was it - no number, no church - just that. So - we can do it as well.
The atheist bus says, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” All right then: which word here is the questionable one, the aggressive one, the one that parts company with actual recognizable human experience so fast it doesn’t even have time to wave goodbye?
Its an ATHIEST bus? No the SIGN is from atheist's ... anyway now what is your beef with the slogan/advertisement or whatever you want to call it?
It isn’t “probably.” New Atheists aren’t claiming anything outrageous when they say that there probably isn’t a God. In fact they aren’t claiming anything substantial at all, because really, how the fuck would they know?
Now, now - you will make baby Jesus cry with that sort of foul language. You are okay with the word "probably" but you also are not okay with it. What is your argument?
It’s as much of a guess for them as it is for me. No, the word that offends against realism here is “enjoy.” I’m sorry—enjoy your life? Enjoy your life? I’m not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion.
Wow this really got to you didn't it? It really stung. It burns deep, the wound this caused. Let me apply some more salt into that for you - yes ENJOY - because and I know its hard to get because you are still in it - but, Christianity makes you WORRY. Did you sin just now?
Do you need to ask forgiveness? Maybe you have like a super mega light and fluffy Christen faith (it kinda sounds like you do) but others do have a lot, A LOT of worry in there. The pulpit loves guilt tripping people as well. So - yeah, enjoy. Don't worry, be happy.
The only things in the world that are designed to elicit enjoyment and only enjoyment are products, and your life is not a product;
Again, I must wonder what the bleep reality this guy lives in - the only things that you are to enjoy are PRODUCTS? Uhhh. No. You can enjoy a sunset. You can enjoy many free things. You said it yourself - its an emotion. But sure, why not - pretend its something you only get from a product. Then say your life is not a product. Well - but your life IS a product. A product of biology - see that equivocation I did just then? Also I swear its like you do not even read your own holy book:
1 Corinthians 6:19-20
"Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies."
You are, in fact, a product.
Acts 20:28
"And now beware! Be sure that you feed and shepherd God's flock--the church, purchased with his blood--for the Holy Spirit is holding you responsible as overseers."
You are, in fact, a product.
Colossians 1:14
"Who purchased our freedom and forgave our sins."
1 Cor 7:23a (Liv) You have been bought and paid for by Christ, so you belong to him.
1 Cor 6:19 (Phi) You are not the owner of your own body.
1 Cor 6:19b-20a (NIV) You are not your own; you were bought with a price.
1 Cor 6:19b-20a (Jer) You are not your own property; you have been bought and paid for.
You are, in fact, a product.
Enjoy your PRODUCT life, because you were BOUGHT by Jesus's blood.
But that is only a real problem if the bible is true. Good news - it is not true. So just relax - you don't have to get all so wound up and upset at the fact that there is no god, chill man - have fun.
you cannot expect to unwrap it, and place it in an advantageous corner of your Docklands flat, and admire the way the halogen spots on your lighting track gleam on its sleek sides. Only sometimes, when you’re being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to what’s happening to you where you’ll gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, you’ll be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion and the rest.
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH.
It makes no more sense to say that you should feel the single emotion of enjoyment about your life than to say that you should spend it entirely in a state of fear, or of hopping-from-foot-to-foot anticipation.
Okay I think this guy proved the many worlds theory because clearly he is from a universe that uses language in some way that we do not here. I mean, really like - you do not GET what this is saying - like really you can't enjoy things unless they are a product - HUH?
It doesn't make sense TO YOU, it makes perfect sense to me - because ya know, I'm not being super mega analytical about the word "Enjoy" like you seem to be trying to do - actually your not really even trying to be analytical about it, your just saying you don't understand, and hey far be it from me to stop your appeal to personal incredulity from not making sense of a slogan of all things. My word this one REALLY bothered you!
Life just isn’t unanimous like that. To say that life is to be enjoyed ( just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colors should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare.
... Its... its a slogan - it didn't say that it should JUST be enjoyed - like... what? Huh?
This really is a bizarre category error.
Your face is a really bizarre category error!
But not necessarily an innocent one. Not necessarily a piece of fluffy pretending that does no harm. The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren’t being “worried” by us believers and our hellfire preaching.
No, you thick wall of human. Its saying that YOU - yes, YOU can enjoy things without worrying about what God thinks about things - BECAUSE - there is no God. Geez your oblivious!
Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What’s so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks?
Your construct strawman is a very strange creature, I do not think I've seen one this strange in a long, long time. Its - almost impressive in how absurd it is.
Well, in the first place, it buys a bill of goods, sight unseen, from modern marketing. Given that human life isn’t and can’t be made up of enjoyment, it is in effect accepting a picture of human life in which the pieces of living where easy enjoyment is more likely become the only pieces that are visible. You’d think, if you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single between twenty and thirty-five, with excellent muscle definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income.
Why are you trying to (and doing a crap job of) analyzing a slogan?? Could you get on track again, do you even have a track - or an argument? At all? Even a little?
Clearly, there are exceptions, such as the lovey-dovey silver-agers who consume Viagra and go on Saga cruises, and the wisecracking moppets who promote breakfast cereal, but the center of gravity of the human race, our default condition, is to be young, buff and available.
And you’d think the same thing if you got your information exclusively from the atheist bus, with the minor difference that, in this case, the man from the Gold Blend couple has a tiny wrinkle of concern on his handsome forehead, caused by the troublesome thought of God’s possible existence: a wrinkle about to be removed by one magic application of Reason™.
Uh no man, I'm pretty sure you are the only one to draw such an absurd conclusion from a slogan. Also - I love that you trademarked reason - then gave it a capital R. Ah how many times I've seen theists put a capital on Truth. TRUTH! Look - reason is good, but your idea of "Reason" is bad. But to try to reason with you about reason would just be unreasonable.
These plastic beings don’t need anything that they can’t get by going shopping. But suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on your heart would be to tell the funniest, sharpest-tongued person you know about it: but that person no longer inhabits the creature who will meet you when you unlock the door.
I ... am at a loss for words now. I mean, talk about red herring! Now your summoning more pretend people to interact with the slogan so you can complain about it more. Like, okay I get it you don't like the slogan. Please move on. Oh no, he has more to say about this. So much more to say...
Respite care would help, but nothing will restore your sweetheart, your true love, your darling, your joy. Or suppose you’re that boy in the wheelchair, the one with the spasming corkscrew limbs and the funny-looking head. You’ve never been able to talk, but one of your hands has been enough under your control to tap out messages. Now the electrical storm in your nervous system is spreading there too, and your fingers tap more errors than readable words. Soon your narrow channel to the world will close altogether, and you’ll be left all alone in the hulk of your body. Research into the genetics of your disease may abolish it altogether in later generations, but it won’t rescue you.
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Or suppose you’re that skanky-looking woman in the doorway, the one with the rat’s nest of dreadlocks. Two days ago you skedaddled from rehab. The first couple of hits were great: your tolerance had gone right down, over two weeks of abstinence and square meals, and the rush of bliss was the way it used to be when you began. But now you’re back in the grind, and the news is trickling through you that you’ve fucked up big time. Always before you’ve had this story you tell yourself about getting clean, but now you see it isn’t true, now you know you haven’t the strength. Social services will be keeping your little boy. And in about half an hour you’ll be giving someone a blowjob for a fiver behind the bus station. Better drugs policy might help, but it won’t ease the need, and the shame over the need, and the need to wipe away the shame.
Please stop. Please make him stop. If I could build a time machine, I would go to whenever he started writing this book, before 2013 - somehow I would find him, because that is a thing you can do easy when you have a time machine. Anyway I would be like "NO STOP." and bop him on the head with a cardboard pipe - BOP! Then I would keep doing that until he stopped writing this. I'm pretty sure that would work.
So when the atheist bus comes by, and tells you that there’s probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it’s true, is that anyone who isn’t enjoying themselves is entirely on their own.
That is what it means TO YOU. Like - no one else has spent this much time hating a slogan so much. Its.. .amazing really. I want to find out who made that and write them a love letter now.
The three of you are, for instance; you’re all three locked in your unshareable situations, banged up for good in cells no other human being can enter. What the atheist bus says is: there’s no help coming. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think there’s any help coming, in one large and important sense of the term.
Look, you made up three people to be reading that slogan, we do not know enough about your made up people to know how they would react to the slogan. For all I know, the kid in the wheel chair breaths out a sign of relief because his parents told him the rock music he loves so much was a product of the devil, and that he would have to give up the only thing that brings him any joy or be condemned by god - now , he doesn't know that is not in the bible, his parents do believe it, and the church he is dragged to believes it and preaches it - but now he sees the slogan and thinks to himself, "Huh, I never thought about it, maybe there is no god... and if so I can enjoy this music I love, and I don't have to worry about being judged!" then he smiles, puts on his headphones and plays some of that rock and roll music as he rolls into the bus.
(I'm adding that the three are waiting for the bus to make this make more narrative sense)
The woman with the deranged lover - she reads this, and realizes that her being a closeted homosexual is not needed - if there is no God, she can be open about this - and because she can be open about this - she can let go of the one who she thought she was stuck with, because that crazy lover no one payed attention to, she had been telling people she was helping the crazy woman as a cover, you see - because she thought they all believed in the God she was raised to believe in - a fag-hatting god. She has been afraid all this time that she would be going to hell, but she found some love - although that love was vile, she saw that as part of God's just punishment upon her. Yet now, reading this slogan, it melts from her, the fear, the self-loathing, the ever-judging-eyes of others, all that slips away as she lets out a breath of air - and with it, knows that she will be leaving that lover today, that she will be coming out to everyone - tonight - and that she will be going to that gay bar she knew about but didn't dare visit - because God would judge her, but there might not be a god - and now she can in fact, enjoy her life.
The drug addicted woman, she reads this and starts to cry. She had sold her life out years ago because she had been molested by a pastor, all this time she has been convinced that she had to punish herself - that god was going to send her to hell for letting her body be defiled, that she was no longer pure - these thoughts had led her to drugs, but now - seeing this sign - it all became so clear, the priest used and abused her, using the pretend idea of god to justify it, and - now that she reads this - she finds that she can get help, she is okay, she will be - now she can get real help- at last, because there most likely is not a god, and she can enjoy her life now.
Yeah, so that was easy, I made your pretend people do other things... see because they do not really exist I can have them do and feel all sorts of things. Now - I suspect very strongly, that your whole bit here was inspired when you waited for a bus, looked around and saw these people, judged them and wrote a story for them in your head, then got REALLY mad when you saw the bus slogan, and started writing down all this nonsense on the bus ride.
I don’t believe anything is going to happen which will materially alter the position these three people find themselves in.
Those people were not real people - even if you did as I suggest, base them off of people you saw I think your confusing your CHARACTERS with real humans - you lost yourself in your own writing there.
But let’s be clear about the emotional logic of the bus’s message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation, on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation. St Augustine called this kind of thing “cruel optimism” fifteen hundred years ago, and it’s still cruel.
When did Augustine say that - what book, when? Where? Citation? Nah. Screw it, trust this guy who made up three people to complain about a bus slogan, sure- I'm SURE 🙄 Augustine was talking about SLOGANS back in his day, the bus slogans back then must really have annoyed him as well.
Oh bleep there is more... bleep.
BLEEP .... NOoooooooooo.....
