Slay Your Gods
Well, it's been two years now since I prayed my last prayer, capping it off not with an "Amen" but a whispered "There is no god." As is my tendency, I'm celebrating the anniversary by collecting my thoughts into a blog post. Whoop-dee. Expect no theme purpose or order to what will follow, as I do not believe in such things. (Ha ha! Is atheist joke, is funny.)
One of the most tiresome memes that I've ever encountered is the idea that if it is horrible, it cannot be true. I remember Zac's father telling me about something his wife had posed to him: what if we got what we expected when we die? Christians get their Heaven and atheists get their annihilation. A horrifying thought, to be sure. But it hasn't got the slightest basis in reality. That kind of wishful thinking is what drives the lottery. I've been there many times myself. The truth-- that, statistically speaking, you might as well set fire to whatever money you spend on lottery tickets for all the return it's going to get you-- gets lost in the fanciful thought of piles and piles of money all because of one little dollar. If you really want to make money hand over fist, run a lottery. If you want God's blessing, become a priest.
Now that I've written it down, one name will hang with me for the rest of my life: Drew Howard. Kid got a terminal illness (damned if I can remember the name). We are talking the kind you don't get better from. Doctors can't fix this shit, they just slow it down. And our church prayed for him. All, what, two thousand of us? Across both services, the prayer chain, friends and family, had to be somewhere near that many. Two thousand of us in our little apocalypse cult prayed for well near a month. And Drew Howard shriveled up and died anyway. Two thousand of God's chosen couldn't sway him to save one little child. What defense can anyone offer? "It's God's plan?" Fuck God. "He's in Heaven now?" No, fuck you; you say prayer works and I expect-- no, I demand proof. You don't get to put that much prayer toward a problem and fail.
And you know what? These people still go to church every Sunday, sometimes twice, sometimes on Wednesdays too! And they pray! They pray for good fortune and celebrate God's kindness when a paycheck comes in. They are so... so small. As people, they are small. I can see no effective interface with them. They have not even the sense of their smallness.
This would not be so infuriating were it not for the fact that I find this behavior even in people I respect. One of my friends from the Wolves' Den, smart guy, in Engineering-- I walked in on him talking about some quack theory about how the Flood changed the atmosphere and that's why nobody lives as long as the Old Testament says they used to. As a serious possibility, I mean. I had to walk away. I simply couldn't stand to listen to it. Any "science" I've seen come from the Flood has presupposed the Flood and attempted to work its way toward plausibility, as opposed to taking what's already been established through scientific rigor and working outward. Bloody hell.
I am one of those incorrigible types who reads all the footnotes. You know what keeps showing up in the Old Testament? The words "the grave" followed by a footnote leading to "Hebrew sheol". Okay? Now, read up. Doesn't sound like anything in Christian theology, does it? Not in the evangelical strains, at least. In other words, God's inerrant, single-version, sacred holy Word had to have been edited to become that. The principle that the Bible is in any way divine is a farce.
I find the following principle to be at the core of all systems of morality: maximize pleasure. The obvious contradiction, that some behaviors considered moral inflict pain, is easily thwarted by stating that, as no specific vector was specified, one may assume that the maximization takes place across all vectors. One man may do something that pleases himself but harms someone else; decide the morality of this by maximizing pleasure across the social vector. A man may do something that pleases himself but harms himself at a later time; decide this by maximizing across time. A man may do something that might please him or might injure him; decide this by maximizing across probability. I find that Christians pursue the promise of eternal pleasure in Heaven and flee the threat of eternal pain in Hell. Buddhism states that existence itself is pain, therefore they seek Nirvana, the state of no longer being. Myself, I cut out the middleman. What's good is what creates the most pleasure. Other systems simply use another layer of abstraction.
There is no such thing as paradise. This fantasy of an existence lived in eternal pleasure is only that-- a fantasy. By its very definition-- by the laws of physics that dictate its behavior, our universe prohibits an eternal existence. Nothing made of matter will continue forever. All that we know, our entire house of cards, our little game of survival, will one day fall apart. We have one life and one life only to live. It can be taken away by a single failure of a pulmonary muscle to contract. A tiny bit of metal interposing at the wrong place and time can bring it down. Failing that, a mere hundred years is enough to see any one man dead, and given another millennium he will be long forgotten. Ours is a wretched lot.
And yet I smile, because this above all is true: that we can imagine a better world does not change the fact that our existence is the best we have, the one and only. Brief as they are, we have our lives. The world is terrible, but to live is a blessing. Scarcity creates value; that our lives are finite gives them unlimited worth. So I shall not succumb to despair. Life is worth living, brief spark though it may be.
Slay your gods.