I am Anthony DeNozo from the CBS television show NCIS. Except in the dream, I look like me. The cast of NCIS just keeps calling me "Tony."
I am supposed to be a stand-in for a mob stool pidgeon in some kind of sting operation, so I am supposed to pretend to hide out in this safehouse and wait for the mob to kidnap me. Catch is, I have to be naked. I'm not sure why I need to be naked, but the sting operation won't succeed and the mob won't buy my identity if I am not thoroughly naked when they arrive to abduct me.
So I am waiting around naked, assuming this very humiliated pose. Agent Gibbs is hiding around a corner waiting to shoot the mob dude who comes to get me. Some guy does eventually arrive. He looks like an extra from a Sonny Chiba movie. White guy with moppy hair and a mustache in a Johnny Cash-style black cowboy get up. Some mob enforcer.
Anyway, the guy actually succeeds in kidnapping me, much to Agent Gibbs chagrin (I am imagining this part, but vividly, based on the show). I think before the mob guy does this, he tortures me or kicks me in the balls or something. I have a distinct memory of something particularly gruesome and painful happening to my naked body.
When I wake up, I am tied to a bed in a small unfamiliar room. My arms are free but I can't move anything else and I can't free myself. I look at my palms. They are covered with blood--in the dream I recognize this as an irrational proxy stigmata. The words "I bear the stigmata" keep running through my head. I find myself deeply horrified.
Next, something invisible, heavy, and very alive tries to sit on my chest and suffocate me. I can't breathe. I can see the thing, strangely, even though it is invisible. I can see it with a sense that is not sight.
It has no head when it looks at me.
I am moaning or gagging and I wake up, still moaning rather fearfully.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Dream Grimoire
Dream one -
I am hanging out with some 'friends.' These are people who do not exist in real life, but my brain has invented them solely for this dream. They are a couple--the girl actually kind of reminds me of the girl who used to live upstairs from my apartment. I never actually spoke to her. The guy, her boyfriend in the dream, is indistinct. We are sitting around their apartment.
They introduce me to their cat. He is a smallish, dark grey male kitten. I can't remember his name. Something like Ivan or James Joyce or Oppenheimer. The kitten and I lock eyes upon being introduced. He has very big green eyes. We stare at each other for a very very long moment. The couple resumes their conversation with each other, ignoring us. Myself and this strange kitten just sit there and stare into each other's eyes, transfixed, for several seconds, the kitten with an almost searching expression, like he is trying to decide something about me. The air becomes pregnant with meaning and I finally whisper "you can talk, can't you?"
The kitten replies, in the voice of young child voice actor, "yeah, I can. Don't tell anybody."
The kitten and I start talking. What about, I can't really remember. Possibly he told me about the secrets that lie in the hearts of dead stars, or the wisdom found just within the event horizon of a black hole, or what it was that laughed in the moment before the Big Bang...
At one point he tries to swallow a telephone or a vacuum cleaner. I tell him "no no, you can't eat that," and pull it out of his mouth, the elongated appliance emerging from his throat like the lamp coming out of Mary Poppins's hand bag. As I slowly pull the object out of the kitten's gaping mouth, I can see all the way inside his body--he is pale pink and hollow and ribbed on the inside just like the whale from Pinocchio. I can see all the way to the back of his body. Some light is shining into him from his butthole.
The kitten and I talk some more. I wake up. It's about 4:30am and I can't get back to sleep right away.
Dream two -
I am at a bonfire or some kind of outdoor party at night. It must be summer. The location is in some small, rundown back street in some small rundown town--it reminds me of a shabby, Chesterfield Township version of Harsen's Island--some place on a waterfront but populated by seedy bungalows, trailer homes, and bait-and-tackle shops that triple as diners and bars.
In my company is a polyglot crew--people from real life--Joey Gunnells, Aaron Aitken, Tony Khaled, possibly Luke Larson--scrubby, unchanged versions of minor characters from high school--Chris Ponton, Tim Papiez, maybe an Ebel (Greg or Ryan, I can't tell in the dream)--and a confusion of redneck/trailer trash types who don't exist outside of this dream.
We're all hanging out and talking. Joe is sitting in the bed of an orange pickup with Papiez and Ponton. He is smoking and expounding upon some subject at length. He is wearing his leather jacket. I keep yelling at Joe, "Why are you smoking? My god, don't you know you're hanging out with Chris Ponton of Vaseline-in-the-hair fame!"
Tony Khaled comes up and starts confronting me. He's pushing me and complaining, in that awkward sort-of-joking way of his, that I think I'm too good for him. He has a cigarette tucked behind his ear, and another one somehow tucked under his dyed black bangs. He is smoking a third. I don't actually answer him, or respond. I merely grin as he shoves me around, half-friendly, half-bullying.
The party tapers off into various conversations that I am not following. Some of the redneck kids are standing behind me. They are talking over a kid sleeping on a bail of hay. One of the redneck kids, a tall boy with longish blonde hair, reaches down and puts his hand on the sleeping kid's face. He starts crushing the kid's face with his bare hand until the kid's head caves in and his eyeballs smoosh out of the sockets and blood starts gushing out his ruptured skull. I stare at this. The redneck kids kind of laugh.
I turn back to the party and after some more conversation one of the redneck kids his crushing someone else's face, maybe Ponton's or Tim Papiez's. The crushee is kind of standing there letting it happen, his head collapsing in a kind of 80's Italian horror movie slow-motion. The lethargic implosion of this random minor high school character's face looks like a cheap foam latex practical effect, which is what makes it all the more gruesome and unnerving.
Now everyone starts noticing what's happening.
Someone yells something at the redneck kids about their band sucking. Someone else says something about them becoming a better band when they take peoples' souls. Suddenly a bunch of really weird-looking rednecks pop out. They have big, colorless moon-faces, stand taller and bigger than everyone else, and they look ready to take souls. Souls for their band to become better.
Mayhem erupts.
A youngish trailer-trash kid appears out of nowhere and wraps his arms around my ribcage. He starts to squeeze. I tell him to please stop squeezing me. It actually hurts. It hurts a lot. He doesn't stop but starts walking down the dirt street, holding me in the air while he squeezes my ribs. I feel like I am suffocating. It really hurts in the dream. I tell him to stop, but he won't. I tell him his band sucks, and he lets up a bit. "Our band won't suck...after we suck out your souls." He grins, his little boy face innocent-looking under his lank, moppy bangs.
As he drags me down the dusty street, chaos all around us, I grab a random farm implement and jab him with it. It breaks. I grab another out of a rack that just happens to be next to us. It looks like an enormous rusty scalpel blade attached to a long wooden handle. Just as the boy starts to squeeze my ribs again, I bring the implement down on him and chop his arms off cleanly in two or three easy slashes. Then I am running away.
My alarm wakes me up at 9am.
I am hanging out with some 'friends.' These are people who do not exist in real life, but my brain has invented them solely for this dream. They are a couple--the girl actually kind of reminds me of the girl who used to live upstairs from my apartment. I never actually spoke to her. The guy, her boyfriend in the dream, is indistinct. We are sitting around their apartment.
They introduce me to their cat. He is a smallish, dark grey male kitten. I can't remember his name. Something like Ivan or James Joyce or Oppenheimer. The kitten and I lock eyes upon being introduced. He has very big green eyes. We stare at each other for a very very long moment. The couple resumes their conversation with each other, ignoring us. Myself and this strange kitten just sit there and stare into each other's eyes, transfixed, for several seconds, the kitten with an almost searching expression, like he is trying to decide something about me. The air becomes pregnant with meaning and I finally whisper "you can talk, can't you?"
The kitten replies, in the voice of young child voice actor, "yeah, I can. Don't tell anybody."
The kitten and I start talking. What about, I can't really remember. Possibly he told me about the secrets that lie in the hearts of dead stars, or the wisdom found just within the event horizon of a black hole, or what it was that laughed in the moment before the Big Bang...
At one point he tries to swallow a telephone or a vacuum cleaner. I tell him "no no, you can't eat that," and pull it out of his mouth, the elongated appliance emerging from his throat like the lamp coming out of Mary Poppins's hand bag. As I slowly pull the object out of the kitten's gaping mouth, I can see all the way inside his body--he is pale pink and hollow and ribbed on the inside just like the whale from Pinocchio. I can see all the way to the back of his body. Some light is shining into him from his butthole.
The kitten and I talk some more. I wake up. It's about 4:30am and I can't get back to sleep right away.
Dream two -
I am at a bonfire or some kind of outdoor party at night. It must be summer. The location is in some small, rundown back street in some small rundown town--it reminds me of a shabby, Chesterfield Township version of Harsen's Island--some place on a waterfront but populated by seedy bungalows, trailer homes, and bait-and-tackle shops that triple as diners and bars.
In my company is a polyglot crew--people from real life--Joey Gunnells, Aaron Aitken, Tony Khaled, possibly Luke Larson--scrubby, unchanged versions of minor characters from high school--Chris Ponton, Tim Papiez, maybe an Ebel (Greg or Ryan, I can't tell in the dream)--and a confusion of redneck/trailer trash types who don't exist outside of this dream.
We're all hanging out and talking. Joe is sitting in the bed of an orange pickup with Papiez and Ponton. He is smoking and expounding upon some subject at length. He is wearing his leather jacket. I keep yelling at Joe, "Why are you smoking? My god, don't you know you're hanging out with Chris Ponton of Vaseline-in-the-hair fame!"
Tony Khaled comes up and starts confronting me. He's pushing me and complaining, in that awkward sort-of-joking way of his, that I think I'm too good for him. He has a cigarette tucked behind his ear, and another one somehow tucked under his dyed black bangs. He is smoking a third. I don't actually answer him, or respond. I merely grin as he shoves me around, half-friendly, half-bullying.
The party tapers off into various conversations that I am not following. Some of the redneck kids are standing behind me. They are talking over a kid sleeping on a bail of hay. One of the redneck kids, a tall boy with longish blonde hair, reaches down and puts his hand on the sleeping kid's face. He starts crushing the kid's face with his bare hand until the kid's head caves in and his eyeballs smoosh out of the sockets and blood starts gushing out his ruptured skull. I stare at this. The redneck kids kind of laugh.
I turn back to the party and after some more conversation one of the redneck kids his crushing someone else's face, maybe Ponton's or Tim Papiez's. The crushee is kind of standing there letting it happen, his head collapsing in a kind of 80's Italian horror movie slow-motion. The lethargic implosion of this random minor high school character's face looks like a cheap foam latex practical effect, which is what makes it all the more gruesome and unnerving.
Now everyone starts noticing what's happening.
Someone yells something at the redneck kids about their band sucking. Someone else says something about them becoming a better band when they take peoples' souls. Suddenly a bunch of really weird-looking rednecks pop out. They have big, colorless moon-faces, stand taller and bigger than everyone else, and they look ready to take souls. Souls for their band to become better.
Mayhem erupts.
A youngish trailer-trash kid appears out of nowhere and wraps his arms around my ribcage. He starts to squeeze. I tell him to please stop squeezing me. It actually hurts. It hurts a lot. He doesn't stop but starts walking down the dirt street, holding me in the air while he squeezes my ribs. I feel like I am suffocating. It really hurts in the dream. I tell him to stop, but he won't. I tell him his band sucks, and he lets up a bit. "Our band won't suck...after we suck out your souls." He grins, his little boy face innocent-looking under his lank, moppy bangs.
As he drags me down the dusty street, chaos all around us, I grab a random farm implement and jab him with it. It breaks. I grab another out of a rack that just happens to be next to us. It looks like an enormous rusty scalpel blade attached to a long wooden handle. Just as the boy starts to squeeze my ribs again, I bring the implement down on him and chop his arms off cleanly in two or three easy slashes. Then I am running away.
My alarm wakes me up at 9am.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Simplicity Denied
I was just reading an article in Rolling Stone about the teabaggers. It had some interesting insights into the ideology (idiot-ology?) of that particular group of angry white people, and I think it spelled out something that is kind of consistent between the tea party nuttiness and most right-wing Christian conservative thought--an overwhelming desire for simplicity. There is present a cry or a longing for easy answers, a need for the world's problems to be spelled out in few words and the solutions in even less. This whole movement is formed by a group of people who yearn to see the world in the lowest possible resolution.
The seduction of easy answers to the tangled problems of an increasingly complicated world is kind of easy to understand, I guess. Hell, just me sitting here saying that the tea party movement and hardcore christian conservatism is motivated largely by the need for simplicity and easy answers is itself an easy answer, and the satisfaction I'm getting from thinking I've 'figured it out' is pretty blatant.
I don't know if it's the answer, but I think it definitely forms a big part of what motivates most of these people. It's an interesting thought exercise in a way because it predicts some of the weirdness that has resulted from the largely incoherent ideology of the tea party on the one hand and the largely retarded ideology of christian conservatives on the other. The idea is this: because the world isn't simple, trying to picture it in simple terms forces you to believe some weird things in order to keep your initial premise intact. As you go on and you experience or discover or are forced to acknowledge more facts or situations that utterly contradict your worldview, you have to keep twisting the minutae of your ideology in order to compensate. Eventually what you're left with is a worldview that no longer retains any of its original simplicity and is now also totally divorced from reality. You end up becoming a kook.
The Creation Museum might be a great example of this, with its human-riding-vegetarian-dinosaur displays. The basic premise - the world is only 6,000 years old - is pretty simple, but trying to force that notion to accomodate the enormous mountain of scientific fact which contradicts it puts you in a position where your rationalizations get weirder and weirder. Even if you judiciously ignore one or more piles of facts, a lot of twisted intellectual compensations still have to be grafted in there. To the point where maybe you build a whole 'museum' as a way to try and solidify your massive pile of patently stupid rationalizations. Just the one little belief in a simple 'literal biblical creation' becomes contingent on believing so many other completely ridiculous things that the mental contortions completely tear your brain out of its moorings.
The problem is, lots of people are having no problem doing this.
The seduction of easy answers to the tangled problems of an increasingly complicated world is kind of easy to understand, I guess. Hell, just me sitting here saying that the tea party movement and hardcore christian conservatism is motivated largely by the need for simplicity and easy answers is itself an easy answer, and the satisfaction I'm getting from thinking I've 'figured it out' is pretty blatant.
I don't know if it's the answer, but I think it definitely forms a big part of what motivates most of these people. It's an interesting thought exercise in a way because it predicts some of the weirdness that has resulted from the largely incoherent ideology of the tea party on the one hand and the largely retarded ideology of christian conservatives on the other. The idea is this: because the world isn't simple, trying to picture it in simple terms forces you to believe some weird things in order to keep your initial premise intact. As you go on and you experience or discover or are forced to acknowledge more facts or situations that utterly contradict your worldview, you have to keep twisting the minutae of your ideology in order to compensate. Eventually what you're left with is a worldview that no longer retains any of its original simplicity and is now also totally divorced from reality. You end up becoming a kook.
The Creation Museum might be a great example of this, with its human-riding-vegetarian-dinosaur displays. The basic premise - the world is only 6,000 years old - is pretty simple, but trying to force that notion to accomodate the enormous mountain of scientific fact which contradicts it puts you in a position where your rationalizations get weirder and weirder. Even if you judiciously ignore one or more piles of facts, a lot of twisted intellectual compensations still have to be grafted in there. To the point where maybe you build a whole 'museum' as a way to try and solidify your massive pile of patently stupid rationalizations. Just the one little belief in a simple 'literal biblical creation' becomes contingent on believing so many other completely ridiculous things that the mental contortions completely tear your brain out of its moorings.
The problem is, lots of people are having no problem doing this.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Proving negatives?
Apologetics: n. process by which the religious make up excuses for still believing in their religion when there are absolutely no good reasons at all to still believe in it. Typically, these excuses range from bad to piss fucking poor to completely ridiculous lies.
Talking to the religious can be an interesting excercise in teasing out tangled lines of thought.
For example, when someone asks me why I don't believe in god, it seems they're actually asking me two questions at once and I'm sometimes not sure which one they want me to answer.
The first question they're asking is 'why don't you believe in an omnipotent mammalian creator spirit that is the author of the cosmos?'
My answer to that is simple: because there isn't one.
This simple, direct, and rather self-evident answer usually flusters the religious.
The following dialogue may result:
"But you don't know that for sure."
"I don't have to. I don't know for sure that unicorns don't exist and I have no problem disbelieving in them and no one else would object to my disbelief. The reason is because there aren't any unicorns."
"You can't compare god and unicorns."
"Sure I can. There really isn't any difference between an omnipotent mammalian creator spirit and an imaginary white horse with a narwhal horn sticking out of its forehead. In fact, at least the unicorn has a real life counterpart which is easy to visualize--a horse. The point is, you can't really give your 'god' privileged status as an intellectual artifact just because you've chosen to believe in it. In reality, both god and unicorns are human inventions and because neither are real, they are most definitely comparable as non-existant things. But I'll try to make this a little easier to understand. I don't have to know for sure that Zeus doesn't exist to disbelieve in him. Why? Because there is no such person. And you would not object to that reasoning. I disbelieve in your Abrahamic mammalian creator spirit for same exact reason you don't believe in Zeus, Aphrodite, Hades or any Greek god."
"Okay, but you still don't know for sure."
"Like I said, I don't have to. Until someone can show me some evidence that your creator spirit is real or that unicorns are real or that Zeus is really hanging out on Mt. Olympus, I don't have to believe in any of those things because all we really know them as is human fabrications. If you want me to withhold my disbelief, you have to show me some evidence. I don't have to prove something doesn't exist. That's ridiculous. It's a complete mistake in thinking, and a totally counterproductive exercise. Every human being who has ever lived could each spend their entire lives trying to prove the nonexistence of a single nonexistant thing and still never be able to. It's a metaphysical goose-chase. Instead, if I am confronted with an intellectual invention, like gods, who are very very unlikely to exist based on what we know about the world, I look for some evidence to support the claims of those who posit their existence. When no evidence is forthcoming, I conclude that these very unlikely ideas must not be real. Quite simple. It works for unicorns, it works for leprechauns, it works for pink elephants, it works for fairies, it works for Quetzocuatl, Horus, and Asshurbanipal, it works for Ahura-Mazda, it works for Santa Claus, it works for King Kong, it works for Zeus, and it works for your mammalian creator god."
"Yeah...but...we don't know everything about the universe..."
"But we know some things. And those things don't really seem to support your claim that a mammalian creator spirit is behind the cosmos. Yes, there are gaps in our knowledge. Those gaps represent things we don't know, as you said. Unfortunately, when we don't know something, we just don't know. We can guess, or speculate, or hypothesize, but even then only if there is some evidence off of which to base our guesses, speculations, or hypotheses. When it comes to what we don't know, we just don't know. We can't really say anything valuable about what we don't know. So, you can't fill in the gaps in our knowledge with wishful thinking about a creator intelligence that made you specially. You can't fill in the gaps with anything. The gaps stay gaps until we know what fills them. Until then, you can't take something we don't fully understand, claim with certainty that we'll never understand it, and then claim that your imaginary mammal deity is behind it. Why? For precisely the same reason you were trying to claim that I couldn't fully disprove the existence of your god earlier--because you don't know. In point of fact, you don't know for sure any more than I do."
"But god works in mysterious ways."
"That's a copout and you know it. Saying god works in mysterious ways is essentially the same thing as saying the universe is godless and indifferent to human beings. From what we humans can tell, a universe without a god seems to behave in the exact same way as a universe run by a god whose plan is mysterious and incomprehensible. If the outcomes are the same, why posit the extra object for which we have no evidence? If god's existence is such that his role in the universe is reduced to something we can neither experience, measure, or observe, then what use is the god as an idea? We simply don't need the god. We have no evidence for the god. So, we can safely set the idea aside. Quite simple. There isn't a god. The universe works exactly the way we would expect a universe to work if there was no god running it. The incomprehensible plan idea is like a retrofit of some earlier notion of monotheism in order to fit that observed behavior of the universe. It's a copout."
"Yeah, well...you can't know everything. You have to come to god through faith."
Here is the point where we can discern the second question the religious person was actually asking.
That second question is 'why don't you believe in the god of my particular religion?'
That question, I think, is a little more complicated. I mean, aside from the fact that I already don't believe in any gods, why I find a particular system of belief objectionable is multi-faceted. My reasons for finding Christianity utterly worthless as a mental construct are somewhat different than my reasons for rejecting Islam as a complete pile of human thought-garbage. The same goes for Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or whatever.
The fact remains, I don't believe in any gods. But each religion has its own different pile of extraneous brain-excrement that they have fastened onto to the more-or-less easily dismissed concept of a universal creator intelligence. For each set of ridiculous truth-claims each religion makes I have my own moral, political, philosophical, and scientific objections. That conversation gets a little longer.
The idea of faith, however, is the most distressing. From what I've gathered in my experience as a living human part of a large human society, the notion that believing in something unquestioningly with no evidence is one of the highest human virtues is pretty disgusting. Far from being a virtue, I would say the human capacity for completely unwarranted assent to the ridiculous claims of others, made from totally unearned positions of authority, is one of the worst flaws in our psychological makeup that can be acknowledged. It goes entirely against every rational thought process we have at our disposal. I'm talking about our capacities for reason, skepticism, systematic questioning, curiosity--all traits which have allowed us to become not only more knowledgeable about the cosmos and more advanced and sophisticated technologically and culturally, but traits that have allowed us to achieve the mental and social progress necessary for more progressive, more ethical, and more just treatment of other human beings, politically, and economically.
And I might point out that even with the progress we've made since the stone age, we still have a very very long way to go as a species. So the idea of faith, which contradicts and often renders null those important human traits, bothers me a bit.
Faith is not a virtue to be lauded but a chink in our mental armor which can be exploited--a mental weakness by which people are manipulated for the agendas of others at best and turned to totally corrupt fanatical shitbags at worst.
I've come to despise the entire idea of faith because of what it does to people. It's a poison, something that seeps into and rots out every functional mental process in a person, something that eventually destroys the basis for all of their reasoning. In my opinion, without a strong, implicit rational basis for our behavior, morality becomes an arbitrary construct--something that can manipulated and rearranged at whim by whatever demagogue or power freak controls the faith that has its intellectual tentacles around the notion of morality. When the use of objective, rational thought becomes unfashionable for analyzing the world; when the need for employing systematic and rigorous scientific-questioning is contradicted; when our natural skepticism becomes unneccesary for decision-making--then faith becomes a basis for knowing the supposed basic truths of the universe; then faith becomes the basis for acknowledging the rights of other human beings--and then the entire implicit notion of cooperation, compassion, and justice becomes extraneous and arbitrary. Those ideas become things that come from outside of us, and as such, become subject to manipulation.
If morality comes out of a stupid sacred book instead from a rational standpoint inside of us, what's to stop faith-muddled fanatics from changing the book to fit their bizarre prejudices? The prevailing morality will change as often as the book is reprinted, and that is something we have in fact seen if you look at any biblical history. The book itself doesn't even need to change one iota, all people have to do is make claims about what the book actually means and there you go, the result is the same--morality has been manipulated to fit the xenophobic agenda of some spiritual oligarchy--once again, something we have seen historically.
I think this trend has had a pretty disturbing effect--it seems like in a lot of faith-communities, the entire notion of fact-based-discourse is reviled. Facts have become the enemy of the religious, even where the facts don't necessarily condemn their religious beliefs. Facts have become the philosophical problem of the apologists because in any situation facts can snag their attempts to manipulate not just morality but reality. So all facts should be regarded with contempt, just in case some aspect of reality needs to be manipulated in order to goad the faith constituency. This is, of course, already a problem in media and politics to a degree, but I think it has taken on its most comprehensive, sophisticated, and virulent cast with the evangelical and fundamental religions. As religious zealouts, spiritual leaders, and evangelizing public figureheads have inserted themselves deeper and deeper into media, politics, education, and the public eye, there emerges a pretty frightening likelihood of further poisoning and degrading the intellectual discourse at ALL levels in our society.
And I mean our global society.
And that is pretty fucking gross.
Talking to the religious can be an interesting excercise in teasing out tangled lines of thought.
For example, when someone asks me why I don't believe in god, it seems they're actually asking me two questions at once and I'm sometimes not sure which one they want me to answer.
The first question they're asking is 'why don't you believe in an omnipotent mammalian creator spirit that is the author of the cosmos?'
My answer to that is simple: because there isn't one.
This simple, direct, and rather self-evident answer usually flusters the religious.
The following dialogue may result:
"But you don't know that for sure."
"I don't have to. I don't know for sure that unicorns don't exist and I have no problem disbelieving in them and no one else would object to my disbelief. The reason is because there aren't any unicorns."
"You can't compare god and unicorns."
"Sure I can. There really isn't any difference between an omnipotent mammalian creator spirit and an imaginary white horse with a narwhal horn sticking out of its forehead. In fact, at least the unicorn has a real life counterpart which is easy to visualize--a horse. The point is, you can't really give your 'god' privileged status as an intellectual artifact just because you've chosen to believe in it. In reality, both god and unicorns are human inventions and because neither are real, they are most definitely comparable as non-existant things. But I'll try to make this a little easier to understand. I don't have to know for sure that Zeus doesn't exist to disbelieve in him. Why? Because there is no such person. And you would not object to that reasoning. I disbelieve in your Abrahamic mammalian creator spirit for same exact reason you don't believe in Zeus, Aphrodite, Hades or any Greek god."
"Okay, but you still don't know for sure."
"Like I said, I don't have to. Until someone can show me some evidence that your creator spirit is real or that unicorns are real or that Zeus is really hanging out on Mt. Olympus, I don't have to believe in any of those things because all we really know them as is human fabrications. If you want me to withhold my disbelief, you have to show me some evidence. I don't have to prove something doesn't exist. That's ridiculous. It's a complete mistake in thinking, and a totally counterproductive exercise. Every human being who has ever lived could each spend their entire lives trying to prove the nonexistence of a single nonexistant thing and still never be able to. It's a metaphysical goose-chase. Instead, if I am confronted with an intellectual invention, like gods, who are very very unlikely to exist based on what we know about the world, I look for some evidence to support the claims of those who posit their existence. When no evidence is forthcoming, I conclude that these very unlikely ideas must not be real. Quite simple. It works for unicorns, it works for leprechauns, it works for pink elephants, it works for fairies, it works for Quetzocuatl, Horus, and Asshurbanipal, it works for Ahura-Mazda, it works for Santa Claus, it works for King Kong, it works for Zeus, and it works for your mammalian creator god."
"Yeah...but...we don't know everything about the universe..."
"But we know some things. And those things don't really seem to support your claim that a mammalian creator spirit is behind the cosmos. Yes, there are gaps in our knowledge. Those gaps represent things we don't know, as you said. Unfortunately, when we don't know something, we just don't know. We can guess, or speculate, or hypothesize, but even then only if there is some evidence off of which to base our guesses, speculations, or hypotheses. When it comes to what we don't know, we just don't know. We can't really say anything valuable about what we don't know. So, you can't fill in the gaps in our knowledge with wishful thinking about a creator intelligence that made you specially. You can't fill in the gaps with anything. The gaps stay gaps until we know what fills them. Until then, you can't take something we don't fully understand, claim with certainty that we'll never understand it, and then claim that your imaginary mammal deity is behind it. Why? For precisely the same reason you were trying to claim that I couldn't fully disprove the existence of your god earlier--because you don't know. In point of fact, you don't know for sure any more than I do."
"But god works in mysterious ways."
"That's a copout and you know it. Saying god works in mysterious ways is essentially the same thing as saying the universe is godless and indifferent to human beings. From what we humans can tell, a universe without a god seems to behave in the exact same way as a universe run by a god whose plan is mysterious and incomprehensible. If the outcomes are the same, why posit the extra object for which we have no evidence? If god's existence is such that his role in the universe is reduced to something we can neither experience, measure, or observe, then what use is the god as an idea? We simply don't need the god. We have no evidence for the god. So, we can safely set the idea aside. Quite simple. There isn't a god. The universe works exactly the way we would expect a universe to work if there was no god running it. The incomprehensible plan idea is like a retrofit of some earlier notion of monotheism in order to fit that observed behavior of the universe. It's a copout."
"Yeah, well...you can't know everything. You have to come to god through faith."
Here is the point where we can discern the second question the religious person was actually asking.
That second question is 'why don't you believe in the god of my particular religion?'
That question, I think, is a little more complicated. I mean, aside from the fact that I already don't believe in any gods, why I find a particular system of belief objectionable is multi-faceted. My reasons for finding Christianity utterly worthless as a mental construct are somewhat different than my reasons for rejecting Islam as a complete pile of human thought-garbage. The same goes for Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or whatever.
The fact remains, I don't believe in any gods. But each religion has its own different pile of extraneous brain-excrement that they have fastened onto to the more-or-less easily dismissed concept of a universal creator intelligence. For each set of ridiculous truth-claims each religion makes I have my own moral, political, philosophical, and scientific objections. That conversation gets a little longer.
The idea of faith, however, is the most distressing. From what I've gathered in my experience as a living human part of a large human society, the notion that believing in something unquestioningly with no evidence is one of the highest human virtues is pretty disgusting. Far from being a virtue, I would say the human capacity for completely unwarranted assent to the ridiculous claims of others, made from totally unearned positions of authority, is one of the worst flaws in our psychological makeup that can be acknowledged. It goes entirely against every rational thought process we have at our disposal. I'm talking about our capacities for reason, skepticism, systematic questioning, curiosity--all traits which have allowed us to become not only more knowledgeable about the cosmos and more advanced and sophisticated technologically and culturally, but traits that have allowed us to achieve the mental and social progress necessary for more progressive, more ethical, and more just treatment of other human beings, politically, and economically.
And I might point out that even with the progress we've made since the stone age, we still have a very very long way to go as a species. So the idea of faith, which contradicts and often renders null those important human traits, bothers me a bit.
Faith is not a virtue to be lauded but a chink in our mental armor which can be exploited--a mental weakness by which people are manipulated for the agendas of others at best and turned to totally corrupt fanatical shitbags at worst.
I've come to despise the entire idea of faith because of what it does to people. It's a poison, something that seeps into and rots out every functional mental process in a person, something that eventually destroys the basis for all of their reasoning. In my opinion, without a strong, implicit rational basis for our behavior, morality becomes an arbitrary construct--something that can manipulated and rearranged at whim by whatever demagogue or power freak controls the faith that has its intellectual tentacles around the notion of morality. When the use of objective, rational thought becomes unfashionable for analyzing the world; when the need for employing systematic and rigorous scientific-questioning is contradicted; when our natural skepticism becomes unneccesary for decision-making--then faith becomes a basis for knowing the supposed basic truths of the universe; then faith becomes the basis for acknowledging the rights of other human beings--and then the entire implicit notion of cooperation, compassion, and justice becomes extraneous and arbitrary. Those ideas become things that come from outside of us, and as such, become subject to manipulation.
If morality comes out of a stupid sacred book instead from a rational standpoint inside of us, what's to stop faith-muddled fanatics from changing the book to fit their bizarre prejudices? The prevailing morality will change as often as the book is reprinted, and that is something we have in fact seen if you look at any biblical history. The book itself doesn't even need to change one iota, all people have to do is make claims about what the book actually means and there you go, the result is the same--morality has been manipulated to fit the xenophobic agenda of some spiritual oligarchy--once again, something we have seen historically.
I think this trend has had a pretty disturbing effect--it seems like in a lot of faith-communities, the entire notion of fact-based-discourse is reviled. Facts have become the enemy of the religious, even where the facts don't necessarily condemn their religious beliefs. Facts have become the philosophical problem of the apologists because in any situation facts can snag their attempts to manipulate not just morality but reality. So all facts should be regarded with contempt, just in case some aspect of reality needs to be manipulated in order to goad the faith constituency. This is, of course, already a problem in media and politics to a degree, but I think it has taken on its most comprehensive, sophisticated, and virulent cast with the evangelical and fundamental religions. As religious zealouts, spiritual leaders, and evangelizing public figureheads have inserted themselves deeper and deeper into media, politics, education, and the public eye, there emerges a pretty frightening likelihood of further poisoning and degrading the intellectual discourse at ALL levels in our society.
And I mean our global society.
And that is pretty fucking gross.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Ruminations, obscenities
I think it's funny that real life has a lot more in common with the Christian concept of hell than it does with the Christian concept of heaven.
Tells you something about Christians.
So, a Christian is supposed to, by analogy, be able to understand something about hell. However, they don't really know as much about heaven, because there is no analogy in real life. Suffering, people understand. Eternal bliss? Not as much.
So here's what it boils down to: people can conceptualize hell better than heaven. Therefore, what must the operating factor be in motivating people? Heaven? Or Hell?
Obviously it's the punishment that motivates. One only needs consult a Calvinist. One only needs to read or research any revivalist teachings. One only needs to sit and listen to Pat Robertson talk on a Sunday afternoon.
Fear of hell. Not desire for heaven.
So, the punishment more than the reward.
Punishment.
A religion based on punishment. Fear. Threats. Suffering.
Not a big huge surprise, or even a real original line of thought on my part, but I thought I'd detail it out since this stuff tends to come to me in the shower.
The Abrahamic faiths are one long legacy of religions that treat people like dogs.
Tells you something about Christians.
So, a Christian is supposed to, by analogy, be able to understand something about hell. However, they don't really know as much about heaven, because there is no analogy in real life. Suffering, people understand. Eternal bliss? Not as much.
So here's what it boils down to: people can conceptualize hell better than heaven. Therefore, what must the operating factor be in motivating people? Heaven? Or Hell?
Obviously it's the punishment that motivates. One only needs consult a Calvinist. One only needs to read or research any revivalist teachings. One only needs to sit and listen to Pat Robertson talk on a Sunday afternoon.
Fear of hell. Not desire for heaven.
So, the punishment more than the reward.
Punishment.
A religion based on punishment. Fear. Threats. Suffering.
Not a big huge surprise, or even a real original line of thought on my part, but I thought I'd detail it out since this stuff tends to come to me in the shower.
The Abrahamic faiths are one long legacy of religions that treat people like dogs.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Things in my life that have devolved into utter abstractions
1. Women - Beyond my ability to comprehend. They are like a physics equation with underiveable constants and unquantifiable unknowns. Only soluable to men who are better at guessing or luckier than I am.
2. Morality - Contrary to popular religious thought, religion's focus on an absolute and yet totally abritrary moral code has disintegrated the concept of moral behavior into an utterly unconvincing chimera. To my mind, without an intrinsic, human basis for ethics, morality becomes much the same as theology--a fancy construct with no foundation in reality. The religious have turned moral thought into a worthless academic exercise. The only answer is to regard morality with the utmost ambivalence and relativism. We call this a teachable moment.
3. Popular music - I can't figure out which parts, if any, are supposed to be interesting. The idea of popular music being either 'popular' or 'music' is something of a philosophical conundrum--a question without any real answer that probably only makes you more unhappy for having attempted contemplation.
2. Morality - Contrary to popular religious thought, religion's focus on an absolute and yet totally abritrary moral code has disintegrated the concept of moral behavior into an utterly unconvincing chimera. To my mind, without an intrinsic, human basis for ethics, morality becomes much the same as theology--a fancy construct with no foundation in reality. The religious have turned moral thought into a worthless academic exercise. The only answer is to regard morality with the utmost ambivalence and relativism. We call this a teachable moment.
3. Popular music - I can't figure out which parts, if any, are supposed to be interesting. The idea of popular music being either 'popular' or 'music' is something of a philosophical conundrum--a question without any real answer that probably only makes you more unhappy for having attempted contemplation.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Centipede that walks like a man
The two men are talking, oblivious. Spearle sits across from them while their voices lurch and strut, the snaky threads of an argument. The sound is like two phlegmy hagfish debating ownership of a rotting carcass.
He who produces the most mucus wins said argument.
The bar is smokey, and crowded. The clientele are quiet. The dark, chill air is hushed with muted talk of quiet money. Very very quiet money.
This is a quiet bar.
Spearle stares at his beer and listens to the conversation with little interest. The older of the talking pair, a balding man with a patchy beard named Asaph, is still slowly pronouncing his estimation of the relative worth of Spearle's offer. By Spearle's count, he has repeated the same line of thought three times in the past ten minutes, each time producing different numbers. The younger one, Wade, seems alternately anxious and bored. He vacillates between sharp, coughed disagreement with Asaph and almost baffled indifference.
Asaph's eyes drift lazily around the bar as he mutters. Spearle keeps his gaze on his beer, waiting patiently and without thought.
This is all academic.
This is all necessary, and yet totally unnecessary.
He flicks his eyes at Wade. The younger man sports a bewildering mustache. He wears the air of a coma patient recently awakened to find the entire world resurfaced with mohair yarn. He seems surprised and slightly irritated by everything that is transpiring.
Wade cuts into Asaph's monologue with a sour comment. Asaph's eyes momentarily focus. Without turning, he congeals his voice into a thicker spill of glutinous speculation, smothering the younger man's acid tone. Wade bites his interjection off. His viscid locution flowing momentarily to a halt, Asaph sets his gaze on Spearle, waiting.
Spearle continues staring at his beer.
"I think you're full of shit. Did you fucking hear me?"
Spearle finally looks up at Asaph. The two lock eyes momentarily. Spearle's clouded gaze imparts no meaning to the speaker. Neither acknowledgement nor ignorance.
"When did I ask whether you believe me?"
"No way...what you're saying is fucking horseshit."
"Did I ask if you believed me?"
"Look..."
"Did I ask if you believed me?"
"No, but..."
"I don't give a fuck if you believe me. That's not what I asked."
"Yeah, hey...."
"What did I ask?"
"..."
Wade watches the exchange anxiously. His boredom is frothing over into frustration.
"What did I ask?"
"You asked how much."
"Yes. How much?"
"Look, even if you had...like...captured...Chuck Lister...I mean, seriously...Do you know how that fucking sounds? I mean, do you know how that fucking sounds? But even if you did have the guy, no way Grissholm is gonna pay for him. No way those fucking guys will pay what you're asking."
Wade cuts in, "They'll chop your fucking balls off instead."
"Yeah, no shit."
"They'll fucking find you and they'll chop your fucking balls off."
"Plus, if DeBoyo finds out you're trying to sell his brother to the Lord, he'll fucking go nuts."
"Yeah. And then he'll find you and cut your nuts off, too."
Spearle relaxes. He takes one pull from his beer.
"So, let's just put this out there. No one will pay for Chuck Lister. Not Grissholm, not DeBoyo, not anyone. They'll just come and cut my balls off instead?"
"Yeah, dumbass, so I wouldn't go around telling people what you just told us."
"They'll find me?"
"Yeah they'll fucking find you."
"You're sure?"
"Fuck yeah I'm sure. Sure as shit stinks, I'm sure."
"How?"
"How what?"
"How will they find me?"
"Fuck if I know. They just will."
"Right."
Asaph thumps the table hard with his gaunt fist. One or two eyes shift briefly in the direction of their booth. No one actually looks.
"What the fuck is your problem, dude? I'm telling you this bullshit is gonna get your ass fucking dead. This is fucking bullshit. If you have a fucking deathwish, go somewhere else and fucking die. Get the fuck out of my face with this fucking crap. What the fuck? I mean, seriously, what in the fuck, dude?"
Spearle looks at Asaph, then at Wade. Maybe he smiles a little. The two won't be sure afterwards, but then, they'll never mention it to each other either.
"So you're sure they'll come after me and they'll know where to find me?"
"This conversation is fucking over."
Wade and Asaph slide out of the booth like meat rigged to a conveyer. Asaph throws a couple wadded bills on the scarred tabletop. The finish is scuffed. Spearle's unemptied beer stands sentinel over the soggy lumps of cash.
The two leave without saying anything. Spearle downs his beer, pays the tab, and strolls out into the dank evening.
He who produces the most mucus wins said argument.
The bar is smokey, and crowded. The clientele are quiet. The dark, chill air is hushed with muted talk of quiet money. Very very quiet money.
This is a quiet bar.
Spearle stares at his beer and listens to the conversation with little interest. The older of the talking pair, a balding man with a patchy beard named Asaph, is still slowly pronouncing his estimation of the relative worth of Spearle's offer. By Spearle's count, he has repeated the same line of thought three times in the past ten minutes, each time producing different numbers. The younger one, Wade, seems alternately anxious and bored. He vacillates between sharp, coughed disagreement with Asaph and almost baffled indifference.
Asaph's eyes drift lazily around the bar as he mutters. Spearle keeps his gaze on his beer, waiting patiently and without thought.
This is all academic.
This is all necessary, and yet totally unnecessary.
He flicks his eyes at Wade. The younger man sports a bewildering mustache. He wears the air of a coma patient recently awakened to find the entire world resurfaced with mohair yarn. He seems surprised and slightly irritated by everything that is transpiring.
Wade cuts into Asaph's monologue with a sour comment. Asaph's eyes momentarily focus. Without turning, he congeals his voice into a thicker spill of glutinous speculation, smothering the younger man's acid tone. Wade bites his interjection off. His viscid locution flowing momentarily to a halt, Asaph sets his gaze on Spearle, waiting.
Spearle continues staring at his beer.
"I think you're full of shit. Did you fucking hear me?"
Spearle finally looks up at Asaph. The two lock eyes momentarily. Spearle's clouded gaze imparts no meaning to the speaker. Neither acknowledgement nor ignorance.
"When did I ask whether you believe me?"
"No way...what you're saying is fucking horseshit."
"Did I ask if you believed me?"
"Look..."
"Did I ask if you believed me?"
"No, but..."
"I don't give a fuck if you believe me. That's not what I asked."
"Yeah, hey...."
"What did I ask?"
"..."
Wade watches the exchange anxiously. His boredom is frothing over into frustration.
"What did I ask?"
"You asked how much."
"Yes. How much?"
"Look, even if you had...like...captured...Chuck Lister...I mean, seriously...Do you know how that fucking sounds? I mean, do you know how that fucking sounds? But even if you did have the guy, no way Grissholm is gonna pay for him. No way those fucking guys will pay what you're asking."
Wade cuts in, "They'll chop your fucking balls off instead."
"Yeah, no shit."
"They'll fucking find you and they'll chop your fucking balls off."
"Plus, if DeBoyo finds out you're trying to sell his brother to the Lord, he'll fucking go nuts."
"Yeah. And then he'll find you and cut your nuts off, too."
Spearle relaxes. He takes one pull from his beer.
"So, let's just put this out there. No one will pay for Chuck Lister. Not Grissholm, not DeBoyo, not anyone. They'll just come and cut my balls off instead?"
"Yeah, dumbass, so I wouldn't go around telling people what you just told us."
"They'll find me?"
"Yeah they'll fucking find you."
"You're sure?"
"Fuck yeah I'm sure. Sure as shit stinks, I'm sure."
"How?"
"How what?"
"How will they find me?"
"Fuck if I know. They just will."
"Right."
Asaph thumps the table hard with his gaunt fist. One or two eyes shift briefly in the direction of their booth. No one actually looks.
"What the fuck is your problem, dude? I'm telling you this bullshit is gonna get your ass fucking dead. This is fucking bullshit. If you have a fucking deathwish, go somewhere else and fucking die. Get the fuck out of my face with this fucking crap. What the fuck? I mean, seriously, what in the fuck, dude?"
Spearle looks at Asaph, then at Wade. Maybe he smiles a little. The two won't be sure afterwards, but then, they'll never mention it to each other either.
"So you're sure they'll come after me and they'll know where to find me?"
"This conversation is fucking over."
Wade and Asaph slide out of the booth like meat rigged to a conveyer. Asaph throws a couple wadded bills on the scarred tabletop. The finish is scuffed. Spearle's unemptied beer stands sentinel over the soggy lumps of cash.
The two leave without saying anything. Spearle downs his beer, pays the tab, and strolls out into the dank evening.
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