The Forza Guy's God

I've been frequenting a Forza coffeeshop in Lakewood lately, and this morning I had the best conversation with The World's Friendliest Barista. I walked in this morning, and was greeted with the usual friendly Tamil-accented "Hello, how are you!" He asked if my brother was not coming in today, and I told him "no, he's got church", so that's how we ended up talking a little bit about our own beliefs.

Then I told him about a really funny yo mama joke that I saw on a friend's gchat status (Your mom goes to college) to see if he thought it was funny*, only in his culture, they don't have yo mama jokes, so that kinda failed, jokewise. Instead he went back to the whole God thing (possibly I was the only one who left it in the first place):

"When people look for God,", he said, "they try this god and that god, they go to temple, church, read the Koran, the Bible,...they going down every route looking for God. But when you are trying to find your mom, you don't go to this woman and that woman asking "Are you my mom?". You know who she is, and you just go straight to her and say, "This is my mom". In this world, the first person you know is your mom. It's your mom who tells you who your dad is and then who is your brother and sister, and what is a tree."

"So what you're saying is everything you know you can trace back to your mom as the original source."

"Yes, yes! I don't know about God, I only believe my mom."

"That's the best thing I've ever heard! All truth leads to mom!"

See why I like this Forza guy? I can't say I agree with his mom-centric philosophy. As I told him, parents are generally wiser than their kids due to experience, but they're not necessarily always right. The world changes, you know? But still it's not every day that you hear of a guy who looks to his mother as his god-figure. What a lucky woman, I thought. And what a lucky woman his wife is too.

As I listened to his "Are you my mom? Are you my mom?" speech, I was hilariously reminded of that kid's book where the bird hatches from an abandoned egg and goes around asking "Are you my mother? Are you my mother?" to a dog, a cow, a plane, and everything that moves basically. In the natural world, the instinct for animals- well birds anyway- is to accept the first thing they see moving as their mother. The sensory stimulus is stamped into their brain as soon as they hatch, and you can read here about how the makers of Winged Migration took advantage of this natural "imprinting" to succeed in strapping cameras to the ducks' heads for filming.

*This morning, I related this joke to James, and I was surprised at his lukewarm response.

"I don't get it. Why is that funny?"

And well, you know what happens when you try to explain a joke...

Folks, is it not funny?