How to live wretched and small | By Mark Morford

There are a number of things you can do. You can walk around the streets looking as though you just smelled something disgusting, your face a permanent rictus of distress and revulsion aimed at a world that seems to be closing in around you, a mile-deep locust swarm of sex and debauchery, strange drugs and tight yoga pants, expensive artisanal coffee and gay people smooching in the street.

You can cling to musty dogma, to strict, outdated codes of conduct and belief, all dictated by very scared, very dead old men who lived many hundreds of years ago and in such a state of abject misunderstanding of the world, and God, and sex, and women, and love, and spirit, and life itself, they might as well have written a big, terrible book about it.

Oh wait, they did. Here is the Bible, a numbingly tedious tome written (and re-re-rewritten) by multiple paranoid power-mongers obsessed with genealogy, real estate, women, weird curses, genitalia, shellfish, the blood of sacrificial animals and how to appease a schizophrenic deity who loves you like sunshine one day and covers your body in painful, oozing boils the next.

The Bible! Don’t forget the parts about rape, incest and the chopping off of hands! And the infanticide! And the slavery! And the murder! And the crappy family planning!