Mood:
caffeinatedNow Playing: Depeche Mode Personal Jesus (remix)
Dear Reader: This blog may offend you deeply, and for that I am sorry. Read on if you wish.
I’m in a hotel in Amsterdam, and someone has left a CD in the player. It ranges 20 years and an array of genres. Songs I love, songs I didn’t know by artists I like, and songs I didn’t know, by artists I didn’t know, but that it turns out I like too.
When I decided to write this, I had no idea that the song just starting was a remix of Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode. Spookey, eh?
Sure. But meaningless.
I am sitting in this hotel doing nothing today. I tried texting and phoning people, but no one wanted to hang. I read the blog of a guy from work. Two entries struck me as having resonance with each other. I doubt he intended this at the time. The first was more directly about what I’ll be talking about in this entry. It’s about our ability – need even – to imperfectly represent an infinitely complex world, and our endless efforts to try to get our outside world to match as closely and have as many relationships as possible with our inside worlds.
The second kicked off a bunch of thoughts in me about the nature of thought and communication. How can we convey so much in a few words? Such intense understanding and fluid communication as we see in poetry and other great writing? Because we are in fact not saying it, but simply cross-referencing an experience that the other person also has. The skill is a stroke of luck that we can select, and find pleasure in doing so, the words that will stimulate the relevant feelings in the audience. It’s like some sort of encryption, or lock and key system, where we both have the safe full of goodies in our minds, but you can’t access yours until I duplicate my key and give it to you. The experience, or even the idea, isn’t shared, but two actually separate ideas/experiences trigger each other such that a comparable feeling is felt by two distinct individuals. The actual exchange is infinitesimal compared to the result that it kicks off.
As so many things tend to, this brought me to thinking of a girl. This one is one that I recently (a few years ago) nearly fell for. If you’ve read the comments I wrote on my colleagues’ blog, no, not that girl. I wasn’t into this girl until after highschool. Anyway, since I was originally into this girl, she has become quite religious (by my extremely strict standards), and we’ve had endless argument about inherent meaning in things. Endless, that is, until I ended it by “agreeing to disagree”. Or in other words, by me agreeing to think she was just crazy. I still love her as a dear friend, and respect her as an intellectual and as a person, but just less than I would otherwise. She’s lucky she’s got a good religion with tonnes of value above and beyond the theological aspects. If she was into one of the really dumb ones we’d have a serious problem.
Now, I have other friends who believe in God, or are somewhat or somehow religious, but this person hit a triple whammy of: a) I give a shit what she thinks (and still do) b) she takes it pretty damn seriously c) she invests a huge amount of her time into persuing her faith. Eventually it hurt our relationship because we both felt so strongly that it was difficult for us (i.e., me) to refrain from going 20 rounds about it every single time we sat down to talk. It causes me pain that she is sleeping with the enemy.
God is my sworn enemy because I really object to the idea that everything around me has meaning.
But why “object”, Noz?
It’s just a bit too convenient. As organisms, we’re hard-wired to find meaning in everything anyway, and what everyone is saying is, luckily, everything doeshave meaning! Everything has a purpose! Phew! Doesn’t that work well for us? It sure does. I see belief in God like finding a wallet full of money on a deserted beach when you’re dying broke and thinking it was left there for you. What really makes my skin crawl is that there are so many people who would think exactly that. It was left there for them. “I had a great need, it was unexpectedly satisfied in way that is beyond my insight, QED, there is a god.” I can’t avoid the conclusion that the wallet was found because broke people have nothing better to do than wander around lonely beaches, n’est-ce pa?
But seriously, we take our internal world and we project it outwards; we take complex and/or meaningless phenomenon, mark it up with all sorts of meaningful information and tuck it safely away for cross-referencing later based on what it means to us. Such is the human. All things we do are like this, and this behaviour (would) perfectly and seamlessly explain(s) our having created a god. Simultaneous with our continually learning to master and understand the stuff that previously we were told only god was able to understand and control, this implies to me there’s a damn good chance we made the whole thing up. God seems to be beating a steady retreat everyday as people look at all our different behaviours, and all the other times and ways we make junk up to make ourselves feel more safe and less alone, and realise that god fits the modus operandi of an imaginary friend – perfectly.
But still, Noz, why “object”?
Because, we’re supposed to grow out of having imaginary friends, and move on to real ones. Because we’re not supposed to wage wars over whose imaginary friend is the biggest and best on the block. Because when thinking about a problem, as a real person, I object to having to review the opinions of imaginary people. Because everything having anthropocentric meaning seems to me a childish and needless get-out-plan to avoid embracing a world that wasn’t designed for the joy and proliferation of little ol’ you. Because I love the world as it is, and don’t need nor like to attribute all its wonders and joys to something that’s supposedly even bigger and better than the precious, gorgeous and fulfilling world already around me. And more pettily, because it just irks me all to shit when two adults are having a perfectly good discussion and one retreats back into the middle ages, taps their nose, winks, and instantly imbues everything they say with some 3rd party authority that can never be questioned. Everything they say suddenly means more.
So anyway, I’m thinking about all this after I read these two blogs by this guy who wrote them about unrelated subjects he’s never discussed with me even once, all because I happen to be bored and whiling away a Sunday on my PC. Coincidently, on the side of his blog are links to a photo sharing website. I see a neat photo on his area and clicking on it leads me to what’s called a “pool”. A photo pool is where all sorts of people throw in photos about a certain topic. This particular pool is on the subject of “pareidolia”. “What in sweet, sweet, fuck does that mean? “ Noz asks himself, blithely…. A quick Google later and I find:
“pareidolia (payr.eye.DOH.lee.uh) n. The erroneous or fanciful perception of a pattern or meaning in something that is actually ambiguous or random. ”
I.e., The meaning in the inkblots, the animal shapes in the clouds, the man in the moon, the fate in the tea leaves, orrr…. The Judeo-Christian god…? WOW! A whole word dedicated to explaining our tendency to take crap that means nothing, and make it mean something. Why do we do this? Because the meaning is there? Because if you are looking at a fire hydrant, or an electric outlet, or the spots on a potato from the right angle, you can see a real face that’s actually there in front of your eyes, not one that your mind is synthesizing from within its own bank of images and symbols? Because if in 1978, 8000 people did a pilgrimage to see Jesus’ face in the bottom of Mario Rubio’s tortilla pan, they can’t all be idiots? Because someone somewhere actually finds Paris Hilton physically attractive and isn’t just swept up in the hype?
Or is it just because it’s a basic primitive instinct we all share to see what we know, and see what we want to see. Maybe there’s a simpler explanation as to why so much of the time God appears to those that need him most: Because the ones who really want him will create him no matter what anyone says, and no one can really stop anyone else from putting together the puzzles pieces however they want.
So, the CD, no one getting back to me, the two random blogs, my friend of the endless war, the photo site, the photo pool… All these things seem to be falling into places so oddly today, with no logical reason that they should be such. It’s so eerie. And so, the epiphany hits me: God is trying to convince me he doesn’t exist.
Tra-LA!
I have to see this as a sort of personal victory. Two possibilities: 1) God doesn’t exist and this is all just random crap 2) God exists and he’s so sick of my shit that he’s actually wilfully steering me as far from him as he can. Either sick of me or scared he’s going to have to put up with me sitting next to him for all eternity poking him with a stick going, “Is that really you? I don’t know if I buy it…”
I have to end now with my usual disclaimer to separate myself from all the other atheists who somehow think “science” has shown them there’s no god, or those with even more preposterous nonsensical reasonings like, “If there’s a god, then why do bad things happen to good people?”. Nothing has shown me there’s no god. That’s impossible. God is by his very nature un-findable by humans (again, convenient, eh?). So I have only as much evidence against god as any theist has for him: none. BUT, what I do have is humans. I have lots of them, and I have lots opportunity to study, how, when, and why – currently and historically – they manipulate facts for their own comfort. Who do I find smiling back at me like the kid with hand-in-cookie-jar when I chase down the winding roads of man’s self-indulgent make-believe? You guessed it: Santa Claus in a white robe.
See now, to prevent coming across as a bitter and shallow individual that feels life is "meaningless", or is counter-implying that it somehow has less value that these people think, I'll have to do a similar monologue on the wonders of the world, and it's many beautiful mysteries. I'll - when I get to it - dive into the many great other reasons we have to do everything that small-minded theists say we're supposed to do because if not, god will spank us, and large-minded theists think were put there for us to do for some reason that will get cleared up later... Like when we're all getting rewarded for doing things we don't understand.
“Feeling unknown
And you’re all alone
Flesh and bone
By the telephone
Lift up the receiver
I’ll make you a believer”
As always - response posting's invited: how to post. Or email to noznoznoz@hotmail.com with subject line "Waiting for Blogot"
