Epistle to the Thuddites

Epistle to the Thuddites
A friend of many years recently asked me a fateful question, to wit: ``Who or what is Eris?'' The following rant (in which I changed the friend's name to something a little more general) poured out of my fingers.

My Dear but Deluded Thuddite Friend,
      Eris, my beamish boy, also known as Discordia (the former name being Greek, the latter being Roman), is the Goddess of Chaos and Confusion and the Head Boss-Lady In Charge of the Universe at Large.
      She put the universe together about 5 and a half months ago and then added some interesting stuff to make it look older. Just to make sure no one could place it exactly, She made sure that the universe appears to be a different age depending on what you observe. If you observe the Bible, it's only a few thousand years old. A quick gander at the Vedas (and the nifty bell [which is purported to be 6 million years old] that some of Ghandi's contemporaries found while mining) will indicate to anyone with half a brain (and not an ounce more) that people have been about for at least 87 trillion years and have been abstaining from sex for most of that time in order to reach enlightenment (saving semen, they will inform you, is good for the noodle. Not bad for the spaghetti, either). Someone foolish enough to look at physics will think the universe is a few billion years old.
      Of course, She left enough evidence around to make sure that everyone can figure out that there is a colossal Joke afoot.
      The Bible teaches that you can't be free-willed unless you can choose to do the wrong thing, and hence sin has to exist. It then mentions this perfect, free-willed god guy and hopes no one will notice.
      The Vedas are a little more subtle in that there aren't any flat-out contradictions. However, the whole thing looks like it was made up on the fly by RACTER, the computer program that wrote ``The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed.''
      Even people who look at physics can figure out that Eris is running the show, because every subatomic particle that ever was conspires to keep you in the dark (and will break any other law of physics or causality to do it).
      She keeps all the religions in place to make sure the confusion stays nice and high, and grants miracles to random people now and again to make sure everyone thinks that they are part of the Right Faith. The only religion that DOESN'T experience lots of miracles, in fact, is Discordianism. This proves conclusively that we're the only religion that IS right. You see, we don't think that anyone is Right, including us. Since we aren't going to start thinking we're right no matter what She does, She doesn't bother with the miracles. Well, not the big, loud Lady-of-Fatima ones, anyway. She has granted me any number of blessings, which I accept with a conspiratorial wink.
      I tell people about them, mainly because they won't accept them as blessings (one such blessing [which I've received multiple times, Hail Eris] is to have a piece of profoundly buggy code work flawlessly until I put it into real production, whereupon it crashes like a 1939 economy. Now, the code shouldn't have ever worked, but the Lady granted me a blessing and allowed it to work on FlukePower®. Of course, the blessing has to wear off SOMETIME. Once, She really saved my ass with one of these blessings. You see, I wrote a program to create new user accounts in batch, and used it to make some 300 new accounts at the end of the summer. I ran a tiny batch afterwards, which was to create only 8 accounts. Every one of those 8 came up with bad usernames because of a nasty bug I left in the code. This code should never have worked at all, and very well should have created all 300 of those usernames incorrectly. I would have spent weeks untangling the resulting mess. The code worked, though, and for that I am eternally grateful) for the most part (the sentence started way back at the top of the paragraph; the rest was a parenthetical comment gone crazy). That way, Her secret is safe with us.
      For yet more info on Eris and Discordianism, you should read the Principia Discordia, written by Malaclypse the Younger and Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst.
      I hope this was informative and enjoyable.

May the Madness always find you,: Episkopos Aloysius Thudthwacker,; Keeper of the Truth,; Founder of the Order of the Blunted Sword,; Self-Important World Jester,; Irreverend,; Priest of Spode,; and Many Other Things Besides