Monday, January 26, 2009

There is a fine line between enigmatic and creepy...

... and I walk this line every day.

In a very real way, I strive to be more unusual every day. I think it's a method of combating boredom, but it's tied in with ideas of self-improvement and an attempt to understand everything.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle states that nothing can be observed without effecting the object in some way. I think that the reverse is true as well; nothing can be observed without effecting the observer. Or as Nietzsche so negatively put it, "if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you." I've always thought that quote represented a conservative fear of knowledge as a means of maintaining a weak ideology. Sort of the equivalent to "idle hands are the devil's playthings" the underlying message being "Work hard all of your life and don't think about things so you can die and go to Heaven."

I hope if Christians are right, we at least get to talk to God before going to Hell. If I'm going to be damned to eternal soul shattering torment for eternity, I want to at least tell him that he is an asshole for hiding the right religion in a bunch of fucked up, self-repressed dimwits and a book that has been rewritten more times than A Christmas Carol.

What's he going to do? Damn me even more?

Try as you might, it's hard to reconcile a loving God with one that condemns non-believers to eternal torment, and yet makes his Bible so unbelievable... not to mention unreadable. Occasionally I worry that I'm being a little too intolerant of this particular religion, but then I remember that those who believe in it worship a God (whom they believe is perfect) who believes that me, my family, and pretty much everyone I love deserve to suffer for all eternity for not believing that which I have overwhelming evidence not to believe in.

And consider Hell in terms of Christianity's obsession with absolutes; absolute torture for eternity. Not a lot of torture for a long time, but absolute torture forever. And I assume this is not just physical torture, but psychological torture as well like being ass raped by a water buffalo while razors slice into your pupils and rats chew off your arms, legs, and genitals. Not just for fifteen minutes... forever... with no break. So after doing this for a lifetime, you still have an eternity to go.

Just for not believing something that doesn't make much sense.

Try as I might, I can't consider Christianity to be a moral religion. I know Christians who are moral, wonderful people. I even know Christian denominations (i.e. Gnosticism) that I could believe in, but these are so far away from mainstream Christianity that most Christians would consider it no better than atheism or Satanism.

And speaking of denominations, I once asked my Born Again friend (now an atheist, but that's beside the point) about Catholics to which he suggested that the idolatry and Mary-worship of Catholicism distracts from the glory of Jesus and thus would prevent a Catholic from crossing those pearly gates.

This horrified me. That God would be so petty to decide that there were those who believed, but not enough so they too get sent to the water buffalo ass-raping table. Not to mention all of the Jews and Muslims who worship the same God, but not through Jesus. How can anyone justify that such a God is perfect?

Living a half hour's drive from anything that vaguely resembled a town, I grew up in a social group where Christianity and conservativism was the default cultural value. Although I went to a fairly good public school, socialization determined the dominant ideologies. God was real, white, and male. Guns were good. Queers were bad (most of us didn't know what they were, just that we didn't want to be one). Christopher Columbus discovered our country and made peace with the Indians.

Although I always felt that I was learning half-truths in life, it didn't really start to get to me until fifth grade when I realized that my complaints fell on deaf ears. Until this point, I had viewed school mostly as a game... which is the way you are supposed to think of it at that age. It evolves from memorization games and challenges into... work. So I started to do my work in advance so I could finish the game early and not worry about deadlines. Consequently, I ended up with old math homework shoved in the back of my desk but never turned in. I never really got why that was a bad thing. I did the work. In fact, I did it early and learned all about it.

I soon felt like a rat in a maze. It became clear to me that more than being taught, I was being conditioned... prepared for the rest of the world. But from what I saw of "the rest of the world," I had very little interest in it. Every adult I knew was somewhat dead inside. Their lives were full of unhappy compromises demanding absolute dedication.

This is when my depression started.

I couldn't do my class work. Try as I might, I couldn't see the point. It wasn't laziness, although I'm certain that helped. I just didn't care. If I enjoyed the class, I generally got pretty good grades, but I didn't enjoy most of my classes. When I took tests, I found that most of the answers I got wrong were because either I misunderstood the question or it wasn't very important information. Consequently, my only means of self-improvement on tests were exercises in memory retention... because you can't completely eliminate misunderstanding no matter how many times you double-check your answers. Essay questions were my favorite because sometimes I could just blather on about something I knew even if it didn't answer the question. Usually teachers were impressed enough that it worked.

You know, people say that teenagers think they know everything. That saying always bothered me as a teenager because I was acutely aware of how little I knew. It didn't occur to me until recently when talking to a friend of mine who is a seventh grade teacher that they don't think they know everything, they are just beginning to realize that they have questions that adults don't have an answer for... and that is truly frightening.

As Bertrand Russell observed, "Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position." Christianity does the same thing through the blind acceptance of a perfectly moral being despite his questionable actions. This is the kind of modeling behavior that leads to tyranny.

This is also why I slipped into depression and why I have yet to escape from it. Around that age, we lose our childish comfort that we are taken care of by just, intelligent adults. We learn that the confusion and fear that we are feeling is something that the adults have learned to deal with, but it never goes away. The older we get, the more we are told that we just have to play the game and not think about the things that are wrong, but how do you look at a child without thinking about the needless bullshit that they will have to go through because so many of us have just ignored or justified the problems of life?

I resigned myself to the idea that adults knew nothing of any value with regards to these problems, so I set out to discover them for myself. Unfortunately, with no guidance, a limited twelve-year-old vocabulary, and a fledgling internet, it was very difficult to find anything that explained these problems. I soon found that I had a love of debate and would seek out people who weren't afraid to argue. It didn't matter if they agreed or not. Some of my favorite debaters were staunch Republican Christians... possibly because they didn't care if they offended me.

The Tao Te Ching was of enormous help to me. If you haven't read it, it only takes about fifteen minutes. Unlike the Bible and other religious texts, the Tao keeps to the essentials by being as clear, direct, simple, and unambiguous as possible... but no more so, thereby obeying the rule of Occam's Razor, which I believe is one of the best tests for wisdom. It also conforms exactly to Sir Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion, which not only suggests a link between the physical world and the metaphysical, but shows you the underlying principles that unites them.

I'm not sure if I've strayed from the point. Lately, I've just been feeling very lonely and trying to make conversation with people makes me feel even lonelier. Consequently, most of my conversation involves me waiting to make a witty remark or offering an amusing non-sequitor. I suppose this makes me feel enigmatic and clever, but often I seem to fall into the category of creepy... or at least I think I do.

Bertrand Russell also said, "One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways." This is a sentiment that I am trying very hard to live up to.

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