George Carlin

I received one of those sappy e-mails from a friend that pretends to be from George Carlin.
Titled A Wonderful Message Fron George Carlin - A Paradox of Our Time.
Arghhhhhh.........
It's not his and I'll rain on everybody's feel good parade just this once (HA!).
I wish people would stop passing those. First if you are any fan of GC you know right off they aren't his. Second they insult a guy who while being a comedian is one of the best social commentators of the last 50 years. Of course GC really doesn't give a shit about most things, but he does about his writing.......

DON'T BLAME ME
Floating around the Internet these days, posted and e-mailed back and forth, are a number of writings attributed to me, and I want people to know they're not mine. Don't blame me.

Some are essay-length, some are just short lists of one and two-line jokes, but if they're flyin' around the Internet, they're probably not mine. Occasionally, a couple of jokes on a long list might have come from me, but not often. And because most of this stuff is really lame, it's embarrassing to see my name on it.

snip....
http://www.georgecarlin.com/home/dontblame.html

and here's a very good one on Snopes about it and why it keeps getting passed around

We like pieces such as "The Paradox of Our Time" because they summarize all the problems of modern society into a neat laundry list of "What Has Gone Wrong" while presenting possible solutions by way of juxtaposition. The pairing of "We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values," for example, implies that increased affluence is responsible for a decline in morality and carries the underlying implication that if we turn our backs on the almighty dollar, our kids will no longer murder one another.

Clear-cut cause-and-effect pairings provide far more comfort than does accepting the harsh reality that we live in a world of no assurances at all, a world where bad things can happen at any moment, to anyone, for no discernable (and thus no preventable) reason. Our ancestors coped with that feeling of powerlessness by inventing myths about petty, lust-filled, vengeful gods who, even if they were capricious in their actions and insensible to the human misery their warring caused, were at least tangible entities who could be identified as the cause of otherwise unfathomable catastrophes. Our sophistication has loosed us from our belief in those myths, leaving us vulnerable to a sense of a world careening out of control.

snip...........
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/paradox.asp

BTW the real author of The Paradox of Our Time is known. A little bit about him from the Snopes piece

Those intent upon taking inspiration from "Paradox" should consider the following: during Bob Moorehead's tenure as pastor of Overlake Christian Church, seventeen members of his congregation reported that he had sexually assaulted them. These allegations, which surfaced in 1997, prompted his resignation in 1998. After a year of publicly supporting Moorehead the church elders withdrew their support, their own investigation into the charges having led them to conclude their pastor had indeed been guilty of molesting a number of male churchgoers.
snip..........

Hmmm....... paradox indeed.