(Phaysis)

I’ve avoided putting out any sort of statement regarding my political ideologies because, frankly, I don’t want to defend them. In my mother’s household, any form of arguing was punishable, so I never developed the innate desire to defend or attack. But I’m a grown man now, and quite honestly, I think I’ve learned the difference between debate, arguing, and fighting. This isn’t any of those; it’s just a confession. If you agree with them, then great, you’re my echo chamber. If you disagree with them, then great, you have an opinion of your own. It’s a big world, and it takes all kinds.

With that in mind, here are some thoughts on where I stand. Continue reading

getting out of bed, like there’s no god
forceful, ball of gas burning turning gold, then white
squinting eyes, tilting shadows, killing night

dream is over, the nightmare is dead
no god of mine, in mind, to find
in my head, in my heart, in my bed

today, i’ll forget everything i ever knew
disbelieve everything i’ve ever loved
and say one everlasting prayer –

thanks for putting up with me
good night to you, lord
now i lay you down to sleep.

terra spin, ground movement under way
footwork, artwork, shitwork, clockwork
to the stop of time, to end today

now all things fit together in stride
sinful play is now playground
and it’s finally good outside

fusion furnace of hydrogen, origin unknown
it came from somewhere, but i don’t care
it’s there and it shines down, warms the stone

but it can still be calloused and cold
on the sunny side of stained-glass windows,
where the sun sets like there’s no god

with whispered doubts in hushed breaths,
prayers, for souls to keep in the night
for when we finally lay down and sleep.

(June 20, 1997)

If god doesn’t directly control your life, but indirectly influences it by manipulating others and shifting circumstances outside of your control, then that’s logically inconsistent. The agents of his control would vary depending on who he was trying to influence. God would be directly controlling you if you were those other people. What about them? This worldview is arrogant and vain, seeing others as the tools by which god rules yourself.

If god directly controlled your life and influenced those around you, then all hope is lost. Laws and societal structures mean nothing because they could be superseded by a capricious deity for the reason of aiming your course through life. It would be impossible to expect you to be responsible for your own actions; the blame would be shifted to an external force. Being nice has no effect. Murder would then be god’s will, and that would contradict our assumptions that he is a benevolent god. This worldview is faithless and cruel.

What, then, about a worldview in which god places absolutely no control on any of us so that we may be free to do and think as we wish? It would certainly align with the ideology many theists maintain about god giving us the gift of choice. So where is god, then? Once he built the system, did he walk away? The deists call this the “absent clockmaker” theory. He put the clockworks together, set the time, wound it up, and let it go to tick away in his pocket. He left us to grapple with our own choices and fate on our own, to shoulder our own blame, to rise above our worse natures.

Only with this worldview can we be truly deserving of the reward of an afterlife. Only with this worldview can we stand before him on judgment (for those that believe in that sort of thing) and declare that we fought through the struggle and bettered ourselves and our world around us. If I were a theist, this would be what I believed. It makes more sense, and it’s more dependable than the other two options. You can make your choices confident that forces outside of this terrestrial plane aren’t fiddling with natural laws or social order just to confound you. God’s not going to intervene when you’re in a bad place, and he won’t contravene when you’re finally in a good place. He won’t be standing back to let the devil test you, because that would be interfering with the clockworks. Being tested is no way to prove your mettle; sticking to your mettle while not being tested is the only way to prove your worth.

With the exception of the question of the existence of god, the deist approach is pretty close to where I am now in my own worldview. Most days I’m an atheist, some days I’m an agnostic. It’s not something I discuss openly in mixed company. I try to not be an evangelical atheist (you know those types), but sometimes I can’t help but froth at the mouth when I hear someone speaking nonsense; I’ll advocate for the devil if the need arises. I’ve had the fortune of being presented, during a younger age, with a panoply of other ways to view the subject of existence, many of which are unpopular with the current regional societal trends, but still worthy of consideration nonetheless. If I can pass those options on to someone else and help them to see the wider picture, my work is done.

So how you guys doing? Good? You folks comfy enough? Grab a chair, pull up some floor. Me, I’m doing swell. Just dandy. Got a short story from last year I’m retouching, chapter by chapter. Also reviving some old songs for posting at my Glass Door site.

To do that, I revived my old desktop PC and am trying to remaster some of that music for posting, and lemme tell ya, it’s not so easy. I honestly can’t see how I got anything done with that old piece of shit. But I got it working, sorta, enough to tweak some music. I’ll have to wire the PC into my actual recording gear to record the audio, since the computer is too old and ill-maintained to record its own audio without dropping clicks and pops into the recorded waveform. [frowny-face]

Actually, the only thing I really need that PC for is the Yamaha S-YXG50 synth software which was written so long ago that it won’t work on modern systems. I have a few songs whose sound depends on that software, so as soon as I record those tracks, I can transfer all the files, mothball the PC and move on. (If none of that made sense to you, just lay down on the floor and close your eyes until the confused feeling passes.)

Let’s see…what else? Ah, yes, against all better judgment and wisdom, I signed a 6-month lease extension on my apartment. It’s an OK place, but my neighbors suck. I’ve reached a point where I don’t care how much noise I make, because obviously the McStompy’s upstairs and the pasty-white soul screamer next door don’t care, either. Last weekend, I cranked up the bass box on my sound system and turned on the music just to prove to them how thin the walls are. Maybe they got the message, I don’t know. But there I am, living there for another 6 months. Here’s hoping I don’t lose my job anytime soon, eh?

Speaking of job, one of the managers in my department, a decent guy who’d been there for most of his professional career, gave his two-week notice. I was chatting about it with another coworker, and apparently he’s leaving the company to pursue a new career. Which I was fine with until I found out what he’s looking at doing: going into researching Creation Science. Yeah. Let that sink in for a minute.

Now, I can’t fault someone for having a passion. Hell, can’t fault someone for making a conscious decision to change their life, lifestyle, and career to explore their faith. But Creation Science? Why not study UFOs or something else instead? It’s just as factual. It just gets my goat, a perfectly sane, technical man deciding to look for data to support his religious claims. It’s like a drunk man using a lamp post more for support than illumination.

Even when I was a dyed-in-the-cloth Southern Baptist evangelical youth, I could still find a way to reconcile the creation mythos with evolutionary science. They fit perfectly. Did I think the earth was 6000 years old? No way. I knew the universe was eons old, broader than consciousness, and that it could still fit in God’s pocket. I carried with me the understanding that the physical processes that govern the universe are the tools that god used to create everything. It made complete sense that all life on Earth would start from the simplest forms and evolve up to the high forms we exhibit. That was the real design. Even our nation’s founding fathers, who were die-hard Deists, held this opinion. He wrote the rules, and we eventually happened, not the other way around.

I just cannot fathom the leap of logic necessary to believe that dinosaur bones were placed inside the ground by the Devil, with permission from God, in order to test our faith in the Creator.

I think I’ve always had a touch of paranoia, even as a kid. What started as an open trust in the benevolence and altruism of humanity turned into a self-protective distrust of those who would seek to hurt me. Throwing myself into the religion of love did nothing to turn me right again. In fact, it fueled my paranoia until I burned in its self-fueling heat. Did not matter one iota that I was turning into an irascible asshole as long as I was doing the Good Work to shine the light on the demons in the shadows and call out the devils in the corner who seek to dominate, contort, and drag humanity down to Hell.

Now, as a sophomoric old man, I’ve dropped the pursuit of the invisible, yet I am still hunting the boogeymen lurking in the shadows. Instead of railing on about a spiritual war, I’m rattling on to any who would pay attention about the corporate war over consumer souls, digging deep and hypothesising about the snares set to dominate, twist, and drag us down into another level of control and profit.

I’ve become one of those old men who, after being confronted with a new thing on the market, will talk loudly about The Riggings Beneath It All, the puppetry, smoke and mirrors designed to soothe, confuse, and ensnare us. Can’t stop myself from pointing out the rig. And part of me hates this about my nature, about the fact that I cannot put my trust into much in this world.

In my younger life, I could pray for guidance, love, and release (knowing full-well that my mission was to illuminate), but now, there’s no prayer except to my fellow man, begging for him to see what’s going on. There really is no difference between the two; one is praying to the nonexistent, yielding nothing, and two is praying to the immovable, yielding nothing. One voice cannot move the masses. Not in this culture, not ever. And there is no Deus Ex Machina who will step in and put it all right when it all goes horribly wrong. The older I get, the more I understand this.

I assume the feeling of powerlessness is natural.