Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for August 13, 2016

Mulligan? Whats that?

I don’t think I can deal with the whole Big Bang thing.

good luck, Pig, finding the Creator’s address as well as have the right amount of postage

In the Douglas Adams novel Life, the Universe and Everything, it’s revealed that God’s final message to the universe — rendered in flaming letters on a distant planet — is, “We apologise for the inconvenience.”

Don’t blame the golf course designer for what the players did.

What we need is a second Big Bang.

Dear God, hope you get the letter and

I pray you can make it better down here

I don’t mean a big reduction in the price of beer

But all the people that you made in your image

See them starving on their feet

‘Cause they don’t get enough to eat from God

Pig looks like he’s been cupping.

I think He’s the one giving the mulligan………

Pigs on drugs again

You’re going straight to hell for this, Pig.

From our side of the ocean we usually prefer to sit back, enjoy our popcorn and observe the convulsions that the question arouses in the US.

I guess we have used up our nth. mulligan alright, by now. Some cockroaches will manage the place better than we did and I feel delight over that thought.

Pig it all depends on your point of view……………and remember it is all part of the plan :-)

The human condition has steadily and dramatically improved over the millennia. THAT"S how bad it is. Send in the giant meteor.

@whiteheron, I don’t think you can blame “the poor tools” for mosquitoes, fleas, lice, malaria, polio, measles (and a thousand other infectious bacteria and viruses), tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, tidal waves, famines, droughts, or “nature red in tooth and claw”, with horrible, bloody, violent suffering of animals out in the wild every day. Nature is cruel. If the “Creator of the Universe” is all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful, I don’t think he or she did a very good job, based on all the suffering I see in the world, not caused by humans. That “creator” seems to me to be either inept or a sadist. My conclusion: There is no such thing as a creator. The universe, the “cosmos” as Carl Sagan put it, “is all there ever was, all there will ever be.” As finite humans, we should do what we can to spread joy and ease pain, and appreciate to the fullest our brief time to be alive.

@ belgarathmth,

You forget the other quote from Sagan: “Nature is as we find it.” Nature is neither cruel nor kind; it is what it is. Animals and plants evolved to be efficient procreators; that’s all there is to it.

So, you really shouldn’t posit the existence or non-existence of a creator based on what evolution has wrought.

Sure you want a mulligan? A Do-Over that major will erase you.

How come whenever Rat or Pig are writing something, they get ink all over themselves?

Though if we want to get meta in this discussion, isn’t Pearl’s Before Swine,as a work of fiction, a universe in and of itself? I know that other works of fiction ( Peanuts, , Marvel Comics, DC, Star Wars, Stark Trek, LOTR come to mind) are called “Universes.” Thus, the creators of those stories would be the creators of those universes.

Therefore, Pig is addressing his letter to Stephan Pastis.

Pig has obviously not seen the Creator’s last message to the Universe:WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE

h/t to Douglas Adams

Funny how people rail at God to stop the evil everyone does… then go postal if he were to suggest one adjustment to THEIR lives… #fixothersnotme

It wuz perfect when it left the showroom.User error is therefore the cause of any subsequent problems.

Rather than us give the creator a “Mulligan”. perhaps we ought to worry that he or she will give the human race some sort of cosmic wedgie….

We already had the Mulligan.

Um, wouldn’t a mulligan mean blowing it all up (and, of course us is part of it all) and starting over?

And if Pig is willing to blow everyone up to make what in his opinion is a better world, he is a suicide bomber terrorist.

@ belgarathmth & markjoseph125Our life on Earth is a test. We are here to learn and experience things.Think over Bilan’s golf course analogy. Don’t the best golf courses have sand traps and other hazards? How much would we learn if everything was easy?I heard a talk once, where the speaker told how there had been a tree in her yard when she was a child where she would find butterfly cocoons with the butterflies emerging in the spring. She told how she would “help” the emerging butterflies by making the hole larger so it would be easier for them to get out of the cocoons. She also told how those butterflies that she “helped” never could fly well and that she later learned that the butterflies need the tight squeeze when they emerge from their cocoons to push blood throughout their wings so they can expand properly.If God prevented us from experiencing illness and natural disasters, we would have no incentive to improve ourselves or our circumstances. Do you really want God to micromanage everything you think, do or experience?

Right.

xxx

Our life on Earth is a test.Do you have any evidence for this statement? If not, the rest of your post is just gibberish.

Pig is awfully arrogant, it seems to me. Maybe Creator will sizzle him with a lightning bolt. Hmm, bacon!

The Mulligan:

One version has it that one day after hitting a poor tee shot, David Mulligan re-teed and shot again. He called it a “correction shot,” but his friends thought it more fitting to name the practice after him. Mulligan then brought the concept from Canada to the famous U.S. golf club Winged Foot.

Message from 2020: I agree with pig.