2.4K views Sep 2009
Comedian Patton Oswalt riffs on religion as a tool for civilization, imagining rival faiths waging wars over heavenly desserts like sky cake, pie, and cookies.
0:02 And I- I'm an atheist, and I love religion. I really do. And I don't love religion in a snarky, mean-spirited way. 0:09 I- I unabashedly, sincerely love that we have religion, because if we didn't, we wouldn't be here right now, being all postmodern and ironic. 0:19 There'd be no civilization. If no one invented religion, we'd be fucked right now, because at the dawn of man, civilization was the biggest and the strongest, and that's as far as we were going to go. 0:30 It was whoever was the biggest, fucked, killed, ate anything they wanted. 0:34 That was it. Civilization was a huge psychopath with a club going, I'm going to have rape for dinner. 0:40 That was it. That's as far as we were going to go. And then one of my ancestors, some weakling, 0:48 said, look, there's no way I can beat that guy, but what if I trick him into thinking that if he doesn't kill and rape people while he's down here, when he dies, there's a magic city in the clouds, 1:04 and he can go up and have all the cake he wants. 1:09 Now, that's not a very well-formed plan, but he went and told the big psycho, and the psycho heard that and said, yeah, I like cake. 1:16 Boom, there you go. That was the beginning of civilization. Now we can work on fire and writing and agriculture. 1:23 That's religion. It's the old sky cake dodge. It worked. 1:29 But, and by the way, things were great for a while, but then what was happening was that shit was going on all over the planet. 1:36 They would just use different desserts. They would tell them about sky cookies or sky pie or sky baklava. 1:42 So as each of these civilizations grew, they'd build ships, they'd go visit each other, and the one guy would walk off the boat and go, hey, did you hear the good news about the sky baklava? 1:51 And the first guy went, it's cake, motherfucker, you're dead. 1:55 And then, oh my God, there were the dessert wars. It was a nightmare. 2:00 They were just killing people. It got so bad that every now and then some dude would show up and go, hey, I got good news. 2:06 There's cake and pie and cookies and for everyone, we can all share. 2:10 And people said, nail him to a fucking cross. 2:13 It is only cake. Oh my God. The only way sky cake tastes good is if up in the sky, the sky cookie and sky pie people can't have the sky pie. 2:27 That's the only way sky cake tastes good. 2:32 I did not spend my life not raping and killing people to not go up in the sky and have cake. 2:43 Sky cake! 2:55 So the next time you see some douchebags in front of an abortion clinic or trying to ban a Harry Potter novel, just say, oh, Skycake, 3:06 why are you so delicious? 
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