Carnival of the godless #9
Easter is a special time for the godless. We are reminded of the ridiculous idea that a god who loves all of mankind (for reasons unclear) and is entirely omnipotent requires his own son to die for the aforesaid mankind’s sins. Erm. Couldn’t we just do community service?
If we cannot laugh at them now, when can we?
Dread pirate roberts at Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems is not laughing. Well, he may or may not maniacally cackle when he’s torturing his prisoners, I don’t know, but in his post he gives a spirited explanation of why his understanding of epistemology does not permit religious belief. I would have liked to have seen a bit more of the thinking behind his assertions but I understand that there’s plundering to do.
Coturnix at Science and politics, a blogger I like a great deal even though he doesn’t link me back (not that I’m upset or anything – this is not a pout, really, just my overbite), explains how he indoctrinated his kids. Bora, you’re an amateur. Zenella is four and when she’s not chanting "Eddie Gray’s mighty white army" (she never accepted his sacking), she’s giving it a few bars of "Johnny Howard, Johnny Howard, you’re not fit to wipe my arse". BTW, ladies, I don’t really have an overbite. Just naturally kissable lips.
Madman asks how the religious can square piety with corruption. Dude, they believe in a numinous being who created the entire universe but cares whether you are naughty. They can probably rationalise anything. Madman is an atheist. A rare thing in India, where religion permeates every fibre of society. Maybe Bangalore is a bit different – it’s certainly much richer than most Indian cities and you do see a lot of executive types if you’re at the right end of town. Madman is a very good example for those who do not know that India is moving on and think the Kiplingesque word-garbling native is the end of the story (which was hardly the whole picture even in Kipling’s day). Madman’s an excellent user of words who really puts the idea across neatly. Check the rest of his
blog out.
Bob at God is for Suckers hopes to prove that God is logically impossible. I can’t help feeling that someone should point out to Bob that God is bigger than logic, having invented it, and is not bound by it. Still, he’s created some lively discussion in the comments.
Peter Fredson at Stupid Evil Bastard gives us two posts. The first pokes cruel fun at those who think there is an elect – he imagines
their disappointment when they realise heaven’s full. Essential humour for anyone who’s heard a Jehovah’s whatsit type and thought, yes, but how do you know you’re in?
His other reimagines George Bush as King Ferdinand. Shiver me B52s!
Dan Williams submitted a post that he made to Thom Hartmann’s discussion community (and if you don’t know Thom Hartmann, you are missing out – he’s one of our prophets: unheralded by talking the word of, erm, well not God obviously). Sadly, Dan, your link was fucked. If you send me it again, I’ll update this post and put it right.
Jarndyce&Jarndyce at the Pseudo magazine have a novel slant on the creationism in schools story. He’s found it sneaking into British faith-based schools. I think the schools in question are actually quite clear that they’re teaching creationism in RE and not in science but even so, the subject of faith-based schooling is well worth exploring and for very much the reasons that it has become so explosive in the US. The bottom line is that "faith", whatever that is, has very little to do with most of the curriculum. It tends to distort knowledge, forcing it through a prism of godfulness that insists that knowledge must coincide with a prior truth (something that makes knowledge very uncomfortable) or be rejected. What makes the subject difficult in the UK is two things. First, that while most Brits are just not particularly fussed about faith, however defined, the PM is. He thinks there are votes in it. He is surely mistaken. Most people are uncomfortable with his religiosity – we’re not Americans who would blanch at electing someone who was not a professed Christian. We have very few nutter evangelicals and they are taken very much not seriously. Second is that we have a Muslim minority that we want to show respect to (and rightly so – if you’re expecting an anti-immigrant rant you came to the wrong blog) and part of that respect is not to deny a culture that – at least it seems to us – is intrinsically religious. Personally, I’m a great admirer of the French notion of laicite. They learned their lesson from centuries of religious strife. I suppose the British did too (I don’t include the frankly incomprehensible Northern Irish). We learned tolerance, which in British English means pretending you don’t hate other people)
Michelle at Mutant cat is topical.
She lashes into the use of the cross as a symbol.. Michelle’s my kind of girl – highly narcissistic and very highly histrionic and loves Satan. And her mum.
Richard at Philosophy, et cetera discusses the use of modal logic to make God out of what might be necessary. It’s not for the layman but if I understand him correctly, he’s attacking those who turn "if God exists, his existence is necessary" (which is very arguable) into "God exists because if he exists, his existence is necessary" (which is not). Richard, if I have him right, is upset that the "if", which is not even a maybe, transmutes into a definitely. Well, it’s an old story. The godbotherers don’t generally deal in "if". We could happily discuss what it would mean for God to be necessary so long as they didn’t take that to be a tacit acceptance that he exists.
Gretchen at the Green Lantern sees Alanis Morrissette as black and hot pink. Her boyfriend looks disturbingly like the COBE view of the universe. I would have liked to know more about how her synaesthesia feels (an interest prompted by Baudelaire, whose description of it is in my view unsurpassed).
Jake at Shnakeblog has discovered that atheists are religious too. You what? Surely not. Well, Jake has noticed that his faith in no God is the mirror image of Christians’ faith in God. Take the next step, Jake. Scepticism is a far better tool for understanding the world than faith and not knowing is superior to knowing if you want to increase your stock of knowledge. It bothers me that so many of the godless "hate God". If he doesn’t exist, kids, there’s nothing to hate.
Brent at Unscrewing the inscrutable is just occasionally a victim of conviction. He’s an excellent and convincing writer who
knows God doesn’t exist but, as a commenter points out, he is sometimes guilty of the sins he excoriates. Still, who among us isn’t? Let he who is without sin etc. It’s a thought-provoking post but knowing is, for me, ultimately less satisfying than doubting. And he’s given me a whole new picture of the Easter Bunny that is particularly disturbing.
Ruthie-Annie notes the double standards of the Schiavo-botherers. Ruthie-Annie poses an uncomfortable question for them: why don’t they care about other lives in other places? Well, Ruthie, the regressive right are like sheep. Someone tells them what the issue is and they bleat. The stuff about starvation etc is not something they really think about. They are just watchwords, cyphers, that express a broader belief. They don’t understand it but they line up with it. A bit like my Christian friends who will tell us that Jesus died for our sins but cannot quite find the words for why he needed to, or suggest that we are all born sinful but can’t quite explain why. For that matter, I’m yet to see a convincing explanation of
why God actually gives a shit whether we’re good or bad. He clearly doesn’t care that the world has bad in it, since, as often noted, he doesn’t intervene to prevent it. Okay, he gives us free will but why? Is he just amusing himself?
Smijer is doing a critique of Strobel’s A case for faith. I’ll be honest and admit I’m saving this one for later, because it’s quite long. I thoroughly recommend Smijer though. He’s one of those unashamedly intelligent bloggers who you know you’ll enjoy. A bit like a cuddle on a cold day. Hey, I like cuddles. Anyone who says I don’t is going to get smashed in the teeth.
Finally, and to coin a phrase, last but very much not least, he didn’t ask to be included but no expression of godlessness would be complete for me without Father Luke. Father Luke used to be a priest and in all the ways that matter, he still is. If you’ve made it this far, you deserve some of his writing, which in a just world would bring him renown and riches.
This is a personal favourite, which captures for me the essential humanity of a world without gods.
That’s it. Errors and omissions to the usual address, where you will most likely be ignored. Still, you have more chance of being answered than a sinner’s prayers, so why not try me?
Carnival of the godless will be fortnightly from now on, Brent tells me, beginning at
Wolverine Tom on April 10.
Submission details here.
Get a lack of God in your life
Dr Zen has the pleasure of hosting
Carnival of the godless next week. This week's is at
Nanovirus.
In these grim times, when American presidents intervene in the family affairs of their citizens, pushing a "God-driven" agenda, it's good to remind ourselves that reasonable, intelligent people (and a few who aren't) can write with clarity and focus about why they don't need a god to drive anything.
I'm welcoming submissions. They can be about anything that can be described as godless: the universe and everything in it, religion as a thing, even the big boy himself. So long as you don't praise him.
You don't have to be a raving atheist. But let's face it, it'll help.
Stanthorpe to Byron
They are mashing down the grapes at
Wild Soul. You push the skins and stalks down. As the juice ferments, they float up. You push them down.
The wine is excellent. You can feel they have cared for it. You can feel the caress.
I know I should admire the caress. I demand it. I want it in everything.
But I am disturbed that they are going to plant out more grapes -- other varieties -- so that rather than be purveyors of wine they have cared for, they will one day be just another Granite Belt winery.
***
Passing through Lismore, I see ahead of us a motorbike rider lift his legs out to the side. Woohoo, he is celebrating. Woohoo, I am not you, he is saying.
I struggle sometimes to think what I traded freedom for. Love? I don't think so. I wanted to be loved but not enough to be beloved. Is it because I no longer feel loved that I no longer feel I am loveable?
I know that there are people who will feel hurt that I say I don't feel loved. But I don't think any one of them loves me. They love an image they have of me that I cannot see reflected in myself.
I am afraid that if I were wiped away tomorrow, only what I do would be missed, not what I am.
I am not blaming anyone else for that. Whatever else they do or don't do, I know that they didn't make me afraid.
Sometimes I try to move beyond allowing fear to be my interpreter. But I am misunderstood and I feel it was better to stay inside. I have moments, hours, days that I could just stay where I am, never move again, never venture.
I would miss the scent of the trees but I would soon be able to convince myself that I was learning enough not to need it.
Perhaps I am just not loveable. Perhaps there really is no one who can. Perhaps it doesn't matter because I have just overestimated how much it is worth.
I keep trying to think that I have done that and that it is okay just to care about other things but I'm not convinced.
***
On the bus, I am looking at a woman's face. I am trying to decide whether she could possibly be attractive. I don't mean to
anyone, not attractive in an objective sense. I mean attractive to me.
She is engaged to be married but I know she does not want to be married. She feels brittle, breakable even. She thinks that it will go away once she has done it, that she will feel right about it in the aftermath.
How do I know? I know. Something she says tells me she is trying to convince herself. I know what it sounds like. I speak that language myself. It's not a language you can sing in.
No wonder I have given up poetry. I used to express hopes, fears and, yes, desires. Now my hopes are extinguished, my fears too mundane to stand to look at and my desires too ugly to make good poetry.
Given the chance I would lie to her, promise her redemption and fuck her up the arse. She could put it down to drinking too much and pretend she didn't enjoy any of it.
No, I decide she is not attractive. I just couldn't imagine bothering.
***
The sun shines on me, standing on the front at Byron Bay. Everyone is happy. I can't see anyone who isn't laughing or at least smiling, unless they are sleeping it off in the afternoon warmth.
Everyone is kissing and running. Everyone is jumping in and out of the waves.
I'm thinking, I fucking hate you all. I'm going to have to leave before I cannot stand how I hate you all.
I'm thinking, I can no longer abide being on the same planet as myself. I am smiling too. It's a beautiful, sunny day and everyone's happy in Byron Bay. I am smiling too but why am I crying?
Thursday 5pm
I am so bored.
I have a choice of projects: a report on a Japanese insurance company or global macro-economics. Written by a nonnative speaker who doesn't understand that articles are not optional.
Hours putting in "the" and "a". I sometimes feel I am worth the money just for not saying, "No, I refuse. Get a monkey to do it."
I need a new forum. I'm tired of the uselessnet, which is for knobheads. I'm tired of wikipedia, which is a cunt magnet with its own cunt gestapo, with more fuckheads than my pantry has moths. I need a solution for moths in the pantry. I have become willing to exterminate them, so long as I don't have to see it or remove the carcasses.
I know. There's a hell just for animal lovers who tire of loving insects just as much. You don't have to tell me. I swim in the guilt of where the fuck did those little ants go?
Actually, I know what I need. Human beings. I tried to find something interesting in Brisbane, but it doesn't seem to exist. A green left thing that didn't suck would have been nice, but all I can see are activist things with a narrow focus. I don't want to stand on street corners.
I could walk but I'd have to walk before I could start walking. I saw a snippet on a current affairs show about a woman who walks for three hours a day and doesn't eat. She seemed to be complaining that she had become thin. I couldn't help thinking, you lucky bitch. Not only can you spare three hours for walking but you are as thin as a rake. Yes, she will die of it. Okay, there's that. But we all die. Is it worse to die of being thin than it is of smoking? Or, heaven help us, of being old?
There is no one here who cares about the big hurdle at Cheltenham. I miss the geegees. I miss pubs. I miss people who laugh at themselves. I miss myself.
The mowing man looked at me strangely today. He said, do you want it mowed? I said, does it need it? I was hoping to convey, well, you are the mowing man, I bow to your expertise. There are some shoots, he said. Well, do it if you want, I said. No, he said, I'll come back next week. He looked disappointed in my participation. He felt I could raise my game.
Well man, I was thinking, you did wake me up. That's why I look like I just dragged myself out of bed. You rang my doorbell. That was nine hours ago. I haven't seen another human being since, except for T's troglodyte dad, who I glimpsed at about 3, but we don't know each other, and even if we did, I would not have anything to say to him about anything.
A Grimm tale
"Mr Fox, I would like you to be in charge of the chicken pen."
"I'd be delighted, sir. I've always been committed to the welfare of chickens."
Meanwhile, in Fairyland...
Inspiration for SJ
Winter is not always cruel.
Faxafloi Bay
Austurvollur day
Around the web in 800 very boring words
If I see one more motherfucker with a Days sober counter on their smugarse site, I'm putting up a Days drunk one. Don't even get me started on fools who boast about giving up fags.
***
I am jealous of
Tom. He has managed to be interesting on the subject of fountain pens.
I love fountain pens but enforced use at grammar school has put me off the notion of ever splashing the ink across a page again. Besides, I grip pens in my fist, without elegance, and find myself scratching more than writing.
Tom is not, though, despite his great post (illustrated too), in my good books. Why? Because I am very selfish. I don't mind not bothering to reply to emails for months on end but if someone leaves me hanging for even a couple of days, I sulk.
Actually, it's not Tom I am sulking with. It's S. I was having a lovely correspondence with S and she dumped me. I can't think of any other word for it. We are chatting away (I use chatting in a broad sense because I was not using one of those messenger things -- no way! I'd never edit another word if I found someone to talk to) and bang! without a by your leave, she's gone.
I realise that on the interwebnet the etiquette is not established. Can I email her? What would I say? Why did you dump me? Did I do something to hurt you?
No! What is best is to whine on my blog (which she doesn't read) so that I look like a fool for the entertainment of the three people in the world who lead lives duller than mine and/or pity me sufficiently to come by occasionally and patronise me.
I secretly think he thought my novel was shit and didn't want to say so. He knew I'd know he'd ducked the question and he thought that I'd think less of him for saying that he thought less of me for writing less well than he thought I'd write.
Paranoid? Me? Get fucked.
***
I am also sulking with Jen, who 404'd her blog. I hate that. A writer who destroys words? Say it ain't so. She's too busy moving house to read this, so I can badmouth her from the safety of halfway down a dull post. But secretly, I enjoyed her blog. I am genuinely upset that it's gone. I ate the feed. I only eat the feeds of a few blogs and sites, and those only the most lively and engaging. Actually, I'm lying. I did a purely rational thing. If I check the blog each day, I now take the feed. It doesn't matter if they are engaging. They can be dull, for months on end, and I'll still check them.
I have a tipping point though. I put up with fuckwittedry for just so long and then I can the fuckwit. You know who you are.
Yes, I know,
PJ 404'd her blog too and so did
P. Am I sulking with them? No. PJ is a goddess and sulking just isn't permitted, and if you sulked with P every time she did something pointlessly selfdestructive, such as ditch her blog or email her tits to the entire population of Holland (no, wait, she will), well, you'd spend your whole life in a dudgeon.
Anyway, they both returned. I'll stop sulking with Jen when she is settled in and starts to miss the attention.
***
Another person who is not reading this is arleen (sorry, can't be bothered with any more links). She's on Lent. It's like the Atkins Diet, but instead of carbs, she's avoiding the interwebnet. Bloody good idea. I should do that but make it forty years instead of forty days.
Problem is, I don't have the willpower. Fags are a lot easier to kick.
War on words
Language is power, we know, and the pen is mightier than the sword. The regressives know it anyway but the rest of us have been slow to cotton on. They wrap their awesome negativity in positive terms, and worse, they have been allowed, by compliant, supine media, to make those terms neutral.
It's much discussed that they have largely won the abortion debate, for instance, by calling themselves "pro-life". Who would be against life? We're all for that, right? We are compelled to ignore that they are antiwoman, antichoice, inhuman and antiscience by the very pro-ness of their name. We conveniently ignore that they are often pro-death, when it comes to executing criminals or bombing the shit out of Arabs and other unfortunates. But simply pointing the finger at their hypocrisy does not work. As Lakoff explains, they are not working on at the thinking level. They go for the gut.
They are smart guys. Some of them. They know that they have the advantage that most people do not realise what their agenda is, or agendas, I should say: it's a monstrous simplification to suggest that it is only about oil. No, it's about a great deal more than that, although if we framed it rather more broadly as about wealth and the fear of losing it, that would be more to the point.
They were smart to call their offensive against the Third World the "war on terror". Terror is, erm, terrifying. It's not nice. Most of us don't understand it; don't understand why people would do it. It's easy to paint "terrorists" as "evil" because most of us don't care enough about politics, or how society is, or even how the world is ordered, to understand that others might be willing to kill for it. (We are not even aware that our leaders will kill for just the same reasons as the terrorists, although more effectively.) "War to control resources" just doesn't have the same ring. It's not us against the bad guys. It actually makes us, if not the bad guys, then just part of the scrum. If we were part of the scrum, that would mean we'd have to abide by the same rules as everyone else.
It's smart to call their bigotry "family values". If we called it what it is: "antitolerance"... well, that's not nice. But families? Who doesn't love their family or if not, feel sad that they do not have a family they could love? Isn't the family the core of our life? Surely its values are worth having? Yes, but if my family were to adopt the values that there's something wrong with gays, swearing is bad and all that horrible, intrusive, offensive shit, then I'd be fucked and so would the queer rellies.
It's smart to call our government "democracy". Where that connotes "liberal", well, yes, we are fairly free and I'm thankful for it. Of course, we are not entirely free because freedom is all too often a function of money, and the richer are on the whole freer than the poor, who, let's face it, are all too often debt servants with miserable fucking lives, let down by underfunded education systems that have not opened their minds so much as turn them forever against any notion of learning. But we can read whatever newspapers we like (although they are free only to print what rich men believe they should... well, the cavils are easy but it is, I agree, the best there is available -- a more active civil society, less weighed down by commerce and its control of the agenda and our thoughts about it, would be good but this is something we are not yet actively prevented from making if we want it).
But where it connotes "you have power", of course, I laugh. It does exactly the opposite to what it says on the tin. We do not exercise any power. We get to choose which faction runs the place. It's more like sport than part of our lives. One is reminded of Byzantium and the contest between the factions there. They had the advantage over ours of not actually pretending to be about anything.
Am I saying that we should eschew these words, abandon them to the regressive right and forge our own language? Yes, I suppose I am. I think we should use them only when we mean them, and otherwise, use words that say what we mean for the things they stand for: they are antichoice, not prolife; they are for bigoted values, not family values; a war on the world, not on terror; and what they want for the Arab world are subservient plutocracies at best, or well, fuck it, any government you like so long as it lets Exxon drill where it will.
Making the right choices
Anti-abortion ideologues beware: I'm promoting objective, factual information on:
Roe v. Wade abortionYou can too. Join me in
Bombing for Choice.
In Toohey Forest/My life without me
You have to walk a long way before you can convince yourself you can no longer hear the sounds of the road. It doesn’t feel as though you’re in the bush when you’re walking on asphalt but once you turn off on to one of the earth tracks, you can pretend you’re Burke, striking out into the great nothing.
***
The night before we watched My life without me. It is incredibly moving. From the understated bravery that Ann faces her end with to the tenderness of Lee’s approach to loving her, it was a work of exquisite acting and careful direction. Hollywood death movies are among its most abysmal, aiming at the lowest of common denominators, drowing in schmaltz. It’s always, you’re going to die, oh my gahd, bring on the strings, and you are hard put not to spend the rest of the movie laughing at how much it hurts them.
Not here. Ann gulps, says “I thought I might be pregnant”, which is what you or I might say, and tries to understand her small, ordinary life without her in it. She is very young and you would imagine the film would strive for tragedy. But, incredibly, it refuses, and is instead a comedy of manners, a portrait of the way we are.
When Hollywood wants to affirm life, it tells us how great our lives are, how big they can be, if we will just reach for the stars. Coixet tells us how small they are, and how much they have in them even so. Ann’s love of her children was heartbursting. I defy anyone who has children to keep a dry eye. She is robbed of their lives – much, much more painful than losing her own – but she spares them as best she can, dedicating her death, just as she has her life, to them. In one glorious scene, Ann, lying in her bed, can see through a bead curtain, how her children and husband will live. They are laughing, joyous, ordinary people having a fun night. Without her.
What struck me about Coixet’s vision was that she very carefully but unobtrusively establishes that it is the beginning of winter when Ann is told that she will die within two months. She will never have another summer. She could mourn a wasted life – those of us who believe that lives are
for achievement and not just for living – would feel sorry for her. She has sacrificed everything for her children and her husband and now it is for nothing.
But it is not. She makes her winter beautiful and dies without regrets, and those she has left behind live her life without her.
***
We stop for a moment to drink water. The day is cool and still. I hear a bird high in the treetops but I can’t see it. J points. It was a lizard but I can’t see it. Look, she says, it’s on a branch just there. But I can’t see it.
Maybe it has gone, she says.
Soon we are back to the asphalt. I am talking about Mrs Zen. I should never talk about anything to people from back home. I should never talk. I sound unhappy but I am not. It is something else and it sounds like the grinding of gears.
Sometimes I look at the room I am in, and I want someone else to pick up the things that are scattered around it. Sometimes I want to take everything in it to the tip.
Sometimes I think that if I only had a box big enough to throw everything in, I would be happy.
20 weeks
Are abortions
too easy to obtain? Well, from Michael Howard's point of view, it probably seems they are. His point of view, of course, is that people will vote for it.
I have two problems with Howard's desperate grab for votes. The first is one that I've long felt: a man's opinion is not worth much in this area. Let's face it, we shouldn't be doing the choosing. The support for many men on the right for antichoice positions stems, you suspect, from their fundamental belief that women's role is to be babycarriers, homemakers etc. The termination of a pregnancy is a fundamental refusal to accept that role unconditionally.
Am I saying men ought not to have an opinion, a say? No, I'm not, but I'm very uncomfortable with the notion that it's "our baby too" and that means we get a claim on a woman's womb. I'm reminded of the scene in The office where a woman, who has been lording it over the rest of the office because she is pregnant, gets slapped down by a warehouseman: "Well done. You let some dickhead blow his beans up your muff."
It's still her body, her jurisdiction, her life, her decision. We never acquire the right to take that away.
My other reason is a little more personal. Babies in the UK are scanned at about 20 weeks' gestation to check for anomalies. Ours showed an anomaly, which could only be resolved in a further scan a couple of weeks later. It would not necessarily have shown at 18 weeks. The potential, very unlikely, bad outcome was very, very bad -- something that would doom the child to a short, painful and meaningless life at best. I cannot respect people who believe that is better than a termination but that is not quite my point. My point is that if terminations were banned after 20 weeks, we would have been forced to have the twins regardless, or to seek an illegal remedy.
Anomaly scans are at 20 weeks for a reason. The fetus is just developed enough for major structures to be big enough to check. A couple of weeks earlier they are not quite there (so that in places that do an 18-week scan, a rescan will probably be necessary in case of doubt). So Howard wants women to be faced with a difficult decision, one that is not easy for most -- however much antichoicers trumpet that abortions are too "easy" -- and that can be agonising, that they only have a couple of days maybe to make. And where would I and Mrs Zen have been left? Our children are fine but we had to wait beyond 20 weeks to be sure.
The whole thing is in any case bullshit. If you think fetuses are people, they are people at any age, no? They don't become one at any particular point. Yes, they begin to look more and more like babies, but the homo in potentia is there at day one. They're not on a sliding scale from day one to their birthday. They do become more viable, but 24 weeks was chosen because it is pretty much the lower limit of viability. This choice was made to assuage the antichoice brigade. We said, okay, they *could* live (with medical intervention) at this age, even if we don't think they're alive now, so we'll agree to this limit because we can't be said to be killing what cannot live anyway. The antichoice brigade didn't agree, exactly, but they knew that you couldn't argue it beyond that.
I suppose that floating in there is a third reason for not liking Howard's statement. I don't believe we need to make any more concessions to the antichoice brigade. They're wrong. They're not wrong philosophically, because of course life might be considered to begin at day one or at birth or at any point in between, and we could argue it and argue it and no one could actually win, because unless God actually speaks to us and tells us what he intended, it cannot be decided. But they're wrong because their views never help, never add, never make the world a better place. They only hurt. I'm just not willing to allow anything to be done in the name of a God who wants only hurt for his creation. They may not be wrong about when you start to live, but they are completely wrong that there is a God like that.
Ill
I do not wish I could cease to be. I wish I could cease to have ever been.
A question I have for the Buddha is, if you cease to become, is it all unwound, are you gone? But the Buddha is not unwound, so when you think about it, you know that you are not.
I do not want only to cease to become.
***
I am looking down on myself. I am curled in a ball. I am wondering whether the person in there is trying to keep the world away or keep himself away from the world. Are they ultimately the same thing?
I am curled in a ball because I am afraid that I have lost track of whether I am more sinned against than sinning. I have stopped caring. I just want the sin to unravel and the world to be pure and clean.
***
I know I have immense resources but I have become confused. How is knowing that not the beginnings of a plan for action? How is it so hard to make others know that they don't win because I know it, but they lose if they do not let me know it?
I know I have immense resources but no way forward.
***
I am afraid of everything. I have immense resources that I could use to conquer fear.
I prefer hatred. I prefer imperviousness. It's easy to think you have a shell when you're not watching the boots coming in.
I prefer love but I don't know how to do it. I prefer love but it means people hurt you. I prefer love but it will only work if we all admit we're curled in balls, trying not to look.
I am afraid of everything but I prefer love. How can I resolve that while I'm lying in a ball on the floor?
***
I don't care about disappearing up my own arse. At least then I don't have to look at you. You've made me ill and I don't have any medicine.
