Miracles

A three-year-old girl nearly falls off a cliff, but is saved by a hedge. A four-year-old boy falls off a cliff & dies. Translated into Christian: The three-year-old girl was miraculously saved & the four-year-old boy was called home to God. Translated deeper: The three-year-old girl was miraculously saved from being called home to God. It seems like the four-year-old boy who died received a better deal than the three-year-old girl who lived.

Thermonuclear Theology

“The X is such-and-such.” Did this sentence exist before the formation of the solar system? If the eternal God were in fact omniscient, then the answer would be yes. Furthermore, this sentence has existed into the eternal past. Apply any content: the narrative of a novel, the lyrics of a poem, etc. Then what sense is there in the claim that “this poem is new” or “this is a recent story?” The content was always coexistent with the infinite mind, and so was never nonexistent.

In other words, this last paragraph has always existed. If there is an Omniscient God, then there is no “time” at which that God would not know the contents of this last paragraph. The play Hamlet existed “before time.” Extending this, the content is not only existent eternally into the past, but simultaneously eternally into the future.

Did Shakespeare create Hamlet if Hamlet existed before (infinitely before) Shakespeare existed? This, so far as I can tell, is applicable only to intellectual things; thus I can say, “Before Shakespeare existed” while also denying a “time” before the play Hamlet existed.

Consider this: God did not create Hamlet, yet Hamlet existed before Shakespeare existed. So, who created Hamlet?

Extending this: What about our thoughts? Any thought I have is subject to this omniscience. Could I have any new thoughts? One begins to catch the scent of determinism, of a theistic fatalism. Are my thoughts mine? I have this particular thought Y, yet this particular thought Y predated me. If such an omniscient God could foreknow these things, then what does this mean for the independence of my mind? My mind, being indistinguishable from its thoughts and expressions, therefore has its full disclosure, its entirety examined infinitely, infinitely prior to my existence.

Richard R. La Croix discussed these ideas at some length.

If this is true, then already at the beginning of things made, God had mulled and scrutinized over all of human history (and then some) infinitely; no detail failed to be infinitely considered. One can only imagine, and inadequately too, how unfathomably sterile and redundant our history must seem to God. It is a broken record.

Moreover, what does this entail for God’s own interaction in history? God knew his own activities before creation, and knew them in infinite contrast, if you will. If he did X, then he would know everlastingly prior to X. If he did non-X, then he would know everlastingly prior to non-X [The degree of applicability of the qualifier “prior” is possibly, but not necessarily zero. For it to be necessarily zero, you might have to invalidate God’s omnipotence.].

To know one will do such-and-such (not merely expect or intend) is to know that one will not do the negative of such-and-such. A condition of knowledge is its correspondence with truth. If you know X, X is true. If you merely believe or think X, there is no necessary inference to X’s truth-conditions. So, if you know that you will do such-and-such, then it is true that you will do such-and-such. You cannot, therefore, know such-and-such will happen and then such-and-such does not happen! This is effectively: such-and-such is true, yet such-and-such is not true.

If this omniscient God knows that such-and-such will¬ occur, then it is not possible that such-and-such will not occur. One must not forget the key importance of the term “know” in the proposition; it is not merely speculative or probabilistic projections. When, in common conversation, a person says, “I know you will die” this is a probabilistic projection. It is not impossible that you are some divine exception to the rule, and you will in fact not die. There is a nonzero chance of your immortality. Now, we agree that it is very unlikely that you will live forever, but this in itself is insufficient to disclude the possibility. To truly know X is to disclude the possibility of non-X.

This is, of course, not an uncontroversial review of some epistemic concepts.

Returning to the fundamental issue: if God knows that He (and you) will do such-and-such, then it is impossible that He and you will not do such-and-such. Consider the implications of this: suppose God knows that He will push a small rock over a cliff at time y. This would mean that it is impossible for God not push a small rock over a cliff at time y. What sort of omnipotence is this?

If God knew he would push a small rock over a cliff at time y, and yet he did not push a small rock over a cliff at time y, then God’s omniscience is emptied of significance and legitimacy. In other words, for God’s omniscience to be legitimate the following conditions must obtain: If God knows X to be true, then non-X cannot be true.

This, however, in application, invalidates omnipotence. If I know I will do X, then I cannot prevent X from being done by me. An omniscient God is a species of determinism, determining itself and everything besides.

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If Hell is separation from God—that is, a place where God is not—then, if Hell exists as such, God is not omnipresent. God may have the power to be omnipresent, and opt to avoid such-and-such location, but in that case he is technically not omnipresent.

“Separation from God” – what of self-awareness in hell? What of regret? What of memory? Did I create these things? In the Christian system: God did. Thus, the artifacts of God are inexorably bound to me—I am such an artifact! Thus, if hell is complete separation from God, it would more coherent to call Hell “oblivion.”

The "Immeasurable Granduer" of Tolstoy

These are a few excerpts from Chapter 5, "Tolstoy: God's Elder Brother," of Paul Johnson's 1989 book The Intellectuals. This should not be taken as a critique of Tolstoy's literature--only his personality. Beautiful writing is beautiful writing, but imbecility is likewise imbecility.

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[Tolstoy’s] dairies reveal that, as a young man of twenty-five, he was already conscious of special power and a commanding moral destiny. ‘Read a work on the literary characterization of genius today, and this awoke in me the conviction that I am a remarkable man both as regards capacity and eagerness to work.’ ‘I have not yet met a single man who was morally as good as I, and who believed that I do not remember an instance in my life when I was not attracted to what is good and was not ready to sacrifice anything to it.’ He felt in his own soul ‘immeasurable grandeur.’ He was baffled by the failure of other men to recognize his qualities: ‘Why does nobody love me? I am not a fool, not deformed, not a bad man, not an ignoramus. It is incomprehensible.’ – 107

There were times when Tolstoy seemed to think of himself as God’s brother, indeed his elder brother. – 108

He had the assumptions & attitudes of a Russian imperialist. On being accepted by the army and assigned to a gun-battery (the natives had no artillery) he wrote to his brother Sergei: ‘With all my strength I shall help with my guns in the destruction of the predatory and turbulent Asiatics.’ Indeed, he never repudiated his Russian imperialism or the chauvinist spirit, the conviction that the Russians were a special race, with unique moral qualities (personified in the peasant) and a God-ordained role to perform in the world. – 110

…Tolstoy, by his own account, was also chasing Cossack women, gambling and drinking. – 111

‘To write stories,’ he told the poet Fet, ‘is stupid & shameful.’ Note the second adjective. This was an intermittent theme, that art was an outrageous misuse of God’s gifts… – 114

In youth he was extremely shy with women and so resorted to brothels, which disgusted him & brought the usual consequences. One of his earliest diary entries in March 1847 notes he is being treated for ‘gonorrhea, obtained from the customary source.’ … But he continued to patronize whores, varies by gypsies, Cossack & native girls, and Russian peasant girls when available. – 115

When Tolstoy was in the country, especially on his own estate, he took his pick of the prettier serf-girls. – 116

At a time when he was publicly preaching the absolute necessity to educate the peasants, and indeed ran schools for their children on his estate, he made no effort to ensure that his own illegitimate son even learned how to read and write. … So Tolstoy’s son Timofei was put to work in the stables; later, on the grounds of bad behavior, he was demoted to woodsman. – 116

ON 16 June 1847, when he was nineteen, he wrote: ‘Now I shall set myself the following rule. Regard the company of women as an unavoidable social evil and keep away from them as much as possible. Who indeed is the cause of sensuality, indulgence, frivolity and all sorts of other vices in us, if not women? Who is to blame for the loss of our natural qualities of courage, steadfastness, reasonableness, fairness, etc., if not women?’ The really depressing thing about Tolstoy is that he retained these childish, in some respects Oriental, views of women right to the end of his life. – 117

He wrote in 1898, when he was seventy: ‘[Woman] is generally stupid, but the Devil lends her brains when she works for him. The she accomplishes miracles of thinking, farsightedness, constancy, in order to do something nasty.’ Or again: ‘It is impossible to demand of a woman that she evaluate the feelings of her exclusive love on the basis of moral feeling. She cannot do it, because she does not possess real moral feeling, i.e. one that stands higher than everything.’ He disagreed strongly with the emancipationist views expressed in J.S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women, arguing that even unmarried women should be barred from entering a profession. Indeed, he regarded prostitution as one of the few ‘honorable callings’ for women. – 117

‘Should we permit promiscuous sexual intercourse, as many “liberals” wish to do? Impossible! It would be the ruin of family life. To meet the difficulty, the law of development has evolved a “golden bridge” in the form of the prostitute. Just think of London without its 70,000 prostitutes! What would become of decency and morality, how would family life survive without them? How many women and girls would remain chaste? No, I believe the prostitute is necessary for the maintenance of the family.’ – Tolstoy – 118

His wretched brother Dimitri, for instance, was surely an object of compassion: he sank into the gutter, married a prostitute and died young of tuberculosis in 1865. Tolstoy could barely bring himself to spend an hour at his deathbed and refused to attend the funeral at all—he wanted to go to a party instead. – 125

As a rule, Tolstoy took, his friends gave. – 125

[Turgenev] had been generous and thoughtful in helping the young writer [Tolstoy]. In return he received coldness, ingratitude and Tolstoy’s brutal habit of insulting, often brilliantly, the ideas which he knew his friends cherished. – 126

Knowing himself to be dying, Turgenev wrote his last letter to Tolstoy in 1883: ‘My friend, great writer of the Russian land, listen to my appeal. Let me know if you receive this scribble and allow me to embrace you once more hard, very hard, you, your wife, and all you family. I cannot go on. I am tired.’ Tolstoy never replied to this pathetic request, though Turgenev lingered on another two months. So one is not impressed by Tolstoy’s reaction when he got the news of Turgenev’s death: ‘I think of Turgenev continually. I love him terribly, I pity him, I read him, I live with him.’ It has the ring of an actor, playing the public role expected of him. As Sonya [his wife] noticed, Tolstoy was incapable of the privacy and intimacy needed for person-to-person love, or real friendship. Instead he embraced humanity, because that could be done noisily, dramatically, sensationally on the public stage. – 126

Far more serious, however, was Tolstoy’s authoritarian view that only he had the solution to the world’s distress, and his refusal to take part in any efforts at relief which he did not plan and control personally. – 128

He hated democracy. He despised parliaments. …It is a fact of somber significance in Russian history, that for half a century her greatest writer set his face like flint against any systematic reform of the Tsarist system and did his best to impede & ridicule those who tried to civilize it. – 129

Tolstoy was a determinist and an anti-individualist. The notion that events were shaped by the deliberate decisions of powerful men was to him a colossal illusion. Those who appear to be in charge do not even know what is happening, let alone make it happen. Only unconscious activity is important. History is the product of millions of decisions by unknown men who are blind to what they are doing. – 129

The fact that Tolstoy spoke of ‘God’ and called himself a Christian made much less difference than one might suppose. The Orthodox Church excommunicated him in February 1901, not surprisingly in view of the fact that he not only denied the divinity of Jesus Christ but asserted that to call him God or pray to him was ‘the greatest blasphemy.’ The truth is he selected from the Old and New Testaments, the teachings of Christ and the Church, only those bits he agreed with and rejected the rest. He was not a Christian in any meaningful sense. Whether he believed in God is more difficult to determine since he defined ‘God’ in different ways at various times. At bottom, it would seem, ‘God’ was what Tolstoy wanted to happen, the total reform. This is a secular, not a religious concept. As for the traditional God the Father, he was at best an equal, to be jealously observed and criticized, the bear in the den. – 130 to 131

The real enemy were the Western-style democrats, the parliamentary liberals. They were corrupting the whole world with the spread of their ideas. …The greatest danger to the world was the ‘democratic system’ of Britain and the United States. …Russia must turn her face from the West, renounce industry, abolish the State and embrace non-resistance. – 131

On smallpox inoculation: ‘There is no point in trying to escape death. You will die anyway.’ – 132

‘It would be a much better world if women were less talkative…It is a kind of naïve egoism, a desire to put themselves forward.’ – 133

But it is the habit of intellectuals, who write everything with an eye to future publication, to use their diaries as pieces justificatives, instruments of propaganda, defensive & offensive weapons… -- 134

Berkeley Mad-Labs

This is an older work of mine (four years or so).

“I want the first fiddle” -- Chris van Belle

Berkeley is a wild, postdiluvian, postmodernist anachronism, which is to say, Berkeley is purely a theme park, or at minimum a buffet for the abberant class. What does this precisely mean in precise terms? The answer to this question lies in the bistros and used bookstores, the arteries of Telegraph and Shattuck, and the varied philosophies of the very vocal homeless population.

All of this fierce essentia gave me an opinion of Berkeley as a sheer, disjointed madness rather than a traversable space. These first impressions, however, belie another nature; the research laboratories, while also possessing some form of an unfamiliar psychedelia in their experience, represent a sort of social Masada. These havens separate out the cream from the general milk.

It was half past nine p.m. or thereabouts when I was introduced into this catacomb, this meandering corridor of incredulous saints, this hive of stinging theorems, this empire of the empirical Tao. My guide was my brother, Chris - who deserves one paragraph of description, written in a language he might fathom.

Chris van Belle, in conversation, is analagous to a very user-friendly front end for higher processes, a cascading menu of brevia that refers, if you so inquire, to a distributed information matrix. From ASCII to EBCDIC to Unicode, Chris’s storage of information has been superlative, and inferring from his range of supplementary data, his RAM is updated on a semidiurnal basis. IOW, Chris is a smart card. Our network of memories have had their emoticons, and our personal digital signatures, but its the EDI and the native file formats that truly stir my CPU with a residual and recurring Shockwave.

After several security clearances, such as code-pads on laboratory doors and card scanners, I was finally in the promised land. Amongst this peculiar and verboten habitat, a humorous punchline involves the molecular architecture of the KvAP voltage-dependent K+ channel in a lipid bilayer. What is God? Vibrational submicrogal transfer across a reverse micelle surfactant proBDNF. What is for lunch? Stable low-pressure hydrogen clusters stored in a binary clathrate hydrate.

I have forgotten the room number to this lab, so I am going to refer to “Chris’s” lab as the X_BioHazard_Boom_Boom (XBBB). XBBB is located on the second floor of a brownish, unassuming building (The Building of Doom) on the fringes of the university’s campus. Though the entire floor is dedicated to research in infectious diseases, XBBB is specifically concerned with the virus CMV; another pleasent, though non-biological anacronym ending in “-MV” is the DMV [CMV and the DMV are functionally synonymous].

I noticed with furrowed brow that XBBB was ornamented with warning stickers, biohazard signs, and an emergency washing apparatus. Initially, given this flourescent and multicolored decor, the lab assumed an inviting aura reminiscent of Wonka’s most secret confectionary lab, replete with concoctions able to inflate troublesome gluttons and guttersnipes and gobblers, O my. In XBBB, an errant taste might result in paralysis, cancer, or death, but without the melodious requiems of the Oompa-loompa. There was much danger, too much to chronicle, but suffice it to say that radioactive and mutagenic substances were in my immediate reach. This was a charnel-house, a cloistered fun-farm of many godless lucubrations.

Nonetheless, this is the love of the subject. It is this love, the love of resolving this world in a lucid fashion, that is the understructure of this entire account. The obsession and concentration of these few toilers surpasses the language within which their findings are deciphered. The inspiration that compels such sacrifice on the altar of correct explanation comes to the multitude, but only a smattering perservere to realize some portion of their ends. I wanted to make this declaration outright and without concealing it inside an abstruse quip or simile. On the other hand, abstruse quips and similes are my choicest weapons.

Chris is exceptionally consumed with the sickness, or rather, the virus; he is the guilty monk, repenting for any truancies from his monastery. My visit was brief, but if my visit gives me any representative insight at all into Chris’s normal schedule, then I can rightly infer that Chris has dissolved his total life into that monastic order of the sciences. I was dragged, in the name of progress, to this lab for nearly the whole of my vacation. Moreover, the hours were steadily longer, which is to mean, our nights in the lab went “progressively” later into the morning.

For Chris, these intensely unhealthy late night sessions were only exacerbated by his habit of waking up around six or seven in the morning. This round-the-clock chicanery had been the norm for several weeks prior to my coming, and yet Chris exhibited no signs of physical collapse. How long can the human body tolerate such methodical neglect? The answer to his physiology’s fallout might require more of his engagement in lab, more engagement with the catalyst to this general break-up.

I digress. I wish now to desribe Chris’s superior or overseer in the lab, a man by the name of Walter. I was hesitant at first to meet Walter, because I felt it was intrusive and perhaps innappropriate that I be in this relatively high-security lab while important work needed to be done; in short, I felt like some silly tourist in need of some kindergarten-like tour through this shiny, neat place. Fortunately, Walter is a cool goose, a witty kitty, a nice slice, a pleasent pheasant, a humorous tumor, etc, etc.

Near the end of my first night, I had become very comfortable with being in the lab. More importantly, I had became more natural and honest with Walter; the first, second, and third night had become like comedy time in a viral containtment dock. We would joke about Chris’s upstart ways, his insistence on ignoring protocol -- a protocol assembled at the cost of billions of dollars, billions of hours of research at thousands of labs in locations all about the globe. Walter, in a lighthearted fashion, would recount all of the infinite travails Chris’s sense of entitlement had brought him. He said that if Chris was under the tutelage of a different graduate lab worker, he would have been either relocated to another building or simply murdered.

The waggeries and lampooning did not end there, but it is impossible to convey the grandeur of these gatherings. So, I should ask that you recall your own glib great times with fellow glib great persons, and project your happiness into this chronicle; this is the only way to grasp such occasions that fail the phrase. All in all, any adequate description would demand that we include the word, “chortling.”

Chris, Walter, and I...three amigos in the cosmic enchilada, burning the midnight oil with some brainy guacamole. Three musketeers in the caramel core of man’s profoundest search for meaning in the universe. Three domains of cellular civilizations with this feature of consciousness that permits our communion. What is it that orchestrates these unplanned, yet purposeful events? What is it that guides the human body into these non-repeatable situations, this unspeakably joyous happenstance, which ties together with other blisses to unfold like Indra’s pearls? On my present plateau I can glimpse my former trails, and guess at those trails yet to come. The final frontier is always personal.

My last visit to XBBB was like the others, and better than the others. Chris and I arrived, chatted with Walter some, then stepped out to pick up some dinner. We asked Walter if he wanted to come, or at least if he wanted anything to eat; he declined the first, but accepted the latter. Whatever we were going to bring back, he would surely enjoy. I opted for a Chinese dinner. Chris and I inevitably returned, and set out all the take-out packages in a cute buffet-like pattern on the table. The three of us ate heartily and spoke heartily. Though the setting - a cramped laboratory lunch room with flourescent gamma rays - was banal, our collective serenity perceived it as the coolest dive in town, a tower at the edge of reality.

I left early that night, about two in the morning, and walked to Chris’s apartment, nearly seven-thousand miles from the lab. Chris arrived home at five-thirty that morning. We exchanged closed-eyed mumbles before melting into the linoleum floors. My meltedness, however, was short-lived; I arose at seven a.m. in order to meet my ride back to Port Hueneme. Chris, utterly exhausted, mustered up a farewell; the whole visit, at that departure, had seemed to have transpired entirely in that farewell, entirely in one minute. I was off, off, and off a little further.

And so it goes, as with all first-hand accounts of living life, that one must mention how incomplete the narrative is, and ever will be. Therefore, I must capitulate to language, that gloriously helpful hindrance, and confess that no semanteme is capable of denoting or connoting one iota of the my terrific time. It endures in my memory, and in Chris’s memory, but Chris’s telling (if he were to tell it) would differ radically. He would omit this, or emphasize that, or include this other thing. In the end, two divergent paintings would be created, which is to say: how do you know I am giving you the truth?

For An Ancient Friend

& she wept,
& she beat her chest,
& she moaned,
for her child—
tormented, hanging, alone;
on the sand, over
thirty pieces

Shore for the Godless

“It is not God you worship, but his music, his art, his people, his buildings, his stories, his culture in general. God is thanked, which is, it seems, a secondary act—a formality for the engenderer of what it is you actually love.”

“You misunderstand my worship of God; grossly misunderstand. Worship is not intentional, for me—but a groundswell of devotion, &, because of God’s position relative to mine, an exuberance, a dancing-love: that God, after everything, yet loves me. God’s music, art, and the like, which is human music, art, etc., are hints, reminders, mnemonics even, that retrieve that encounter; it is the re-living, re-vivifying, of that relationship—like the ring on the betrothed. I may not be mainstream in this, but I consider the Christian reality of being reborn a perpetual experience—perpetuating into eternity; it is, & I don’t mind sounding naïve, an eternally fresh waking-up, of being timeless with the infinite Creator at the heart of all creation—which, to my mind, is love.”

“Beautiful—what you say. I believe in the power of words, too.”

“Don’t be fooled by your own words, then. I mean more than words.”

“Who doesn’t in conversations like these?”

“Well, I venture to say: you.”

“I mean more than words, but let me prove it: let me prophesy, or rather, predict, if I may. Religion, spirituality, faith, or whatever the appellation, has been, I believe, a companion to mankind since mankind acquired imagination; it is powerful, because—powerful for the same reasons the human imagination is powerful. It flows from the core of that magical sense, & has given it breath—metaphors, poems, confessions, etc. But this religiousness, this transcendence, has had many faces, many gods. Now, & only recently, this magical sense has no face—no gods, no God. It is master-less; without a set of axioms, or narratives, or heroes, or lexicon—without a concordance. “Now what,” the newborn asks itself. There is one certainty, it thinks: its mortality. Mortality—mortality for what it is: my end; no more beginnings, no middles, no more ends, but the final one…”

“Is this your prediction?”

“No. Allow me my wordiness…” he paused; “Without the old language, the familiar tongue, that is, the religious tongue—without wanting to refer to it, since we feel it is too much associated with misleading lifestyles & images—we try to find our own descriptions of our magical sense, feeble perhaps—but ours. As the archaic beliefs die, their poetry dies; it does not die from lack of use, but of recognition; it perishes in secret, in its heart. Your light-towers are foreign; our home is far-off; its shore is all darkness. So far, some of us have attempted praise of the fact—that dream of homelessness. But even they look for our light-tower, furtively. So we search, perhaps without success; but, and I predict tendentiously, over time, over a long time, a span equivalent to the span of religion’s incubation, its monopoly on our history’s imagination, over an eon of futile stuttering, we may perhaps find our poetry, our shore—a shore for the godless. A meeting-place, our temple, for our hymns, & our love. There, I hope, human beings will see themselves, all at once, without additions, without falseness, & still speak lovingly. Someday, perhaps. I say to myself, ‘it is today.’ However, this is only what I say.”

Gymnosophy

Bertrand believes God is communicating through rainfall on his windowsill -- particularly, if recorded with the proper technological setup, the raindrops that hit his windowsill translate into Morse code messages.

Bertrand translates Morse code messages into English. (We do not see the message)

Each beginning letter of each word in all the Morse code messages corresponds to the first letter in the name of a city, any city on earth. How does Bertrand know this?

It was revealed to him by another man by the name of Rupert. Rupert received a mysterious telegram addressed to him from a Mister Baruch. It read: “To Gilstaff, B of Ugashik, Alaska (stop) Beginning letter of word (stop) Beginning letter of city (stop) the same in raindrops (stop).”

Where is the telegram? It is buried in Vadnais Heights, Minnesota. It is buried with a blow dryer and an address. How did it get buried, and buried with these things? Rupert’s dead ex-wife was an interpreter of dreams; it was her idea. She wrote the address, selected the blow dryer, and chose the location of the burial.

They uncover the telegram, but only the telegram and the blow dryer are there. The telegram has been scribbled over, and stamped: “Babington’s General Store.” It is a local store. Rupert departs. Bertrand goes to Babington’s General Store.

There is a poster up for cracker jacks. Bertrand buys some cracker jacks and discovers a small map (of coordinates) inside the cracker jacks box, which leads to something in Ugashik, Alaska. In fact, the map from Babington’s leads to Bertrand’s house, specifically, under Bertrand’s refrigerator.

A tunnel is beneath Bertrand’s fridge. It leads to Tallmadge, Ohio -- it ends up in somebody’s basement. There is a man sitting in a chair, wearing a pope’s hat. His name is Anne Killigrew.

Anne asks for the blow dryer, receives it, plugs it in, and blows it in his ear. He tells Bertrand to write what He dictates (Anne is hearing messages from the blow dryer). The message is this: “Gladbrook is very pleasant in the spring. You will meet a woman named Fornax. She will introduce you to Ocrisia, who will in turn shepherd you to your destination.”

Bertrand is in Gladbrook, Iowa. He stands in the middle of a desolate field (no one around). He turns slightly to his left -- a young boy is standing next to him. He says, “I am Ocrisia; I will introduce you to Fornax.”

Bertrand is puzzled. He turns slightly to his right; the same young boy is standing there. He says, “I am Fornax, let me introduce you to Ocrisia.” Then Fornax points to Bertrand’s left. The same boy is still standing to his left. He says, “I am Ocrisia. I will now take you to your destination.”

Ocrisia is suddenly an older woman. Bertrand asks, “Ocrisia?” Ocrisia nods, and then waves her arm towards a home in the distance. They both enter; there is a television on. Bertrand smashes it. Ocrisia takes the pieces and makes a line of broken debris that leads back outside of the home. The line leads to an outhouse.

Inside the outhouse there is a man by the name of David; he just stands in the outhouse. David comes out of the outhouse, Bertrand goes in, and then Bertrand shuts the door.

David and Ocrisia stand for a minute. The door opens -- Bertrand is gone. Ocrisia leads David back into the house. A crowd of silent people are there, standing ever still over a hole where the television was. David jumps into the hole.

David finds himself in a large ballroom. There is another hole in the ground. David jumps into the hole. David finds himself in a warehouse of boxes. He browses the thousands of boxes, on their millions of shelves. He finds three boxes that have words on their fronts. One box reads, “Green Spring, Kentucky.” One box reads, “Red Cloud, Nebraska.” One box reads, “Blue Grass, Iowa.”

David pulls two young girls (about 15 to 17) from an unlabeled box. One girl climbs into “Green Spring” and the other climbs into “Blue Grass.” David climbs into “Red Cloud.”

We find Ocrisia standing over Anne Killigrew. Ocrisia hacks off Anne’s face. Anne calmly scatters into the washing machine (in the basement). A faceless Anne runs down the “washing machine tunnel.” It ends at Bertrand’s fridge in Ugashik, Alaska. Anne finds the young boy Fornax sitting with Rupert’s dead ex-wife. Fornax shoots Anne and pushes his body back into the fridge tunnel.

Fornax gets a Morse code message from the rainfall on Bertrand’s windowsill. It states: “Go to Appomattox.”

Fornax promptly commits suicide with drano. Rupert’s wife then commits suicide with the gun Fornax used to kill Anne. Bertrand arrives home to find the bodies. Ocrisia arrives from the fridge tunnel and commits suicide in front of Bertrand. Rupert arrives from the window and kills Bertrand. David climbs out of the toilet and slaughters Rupert. The two teenage girls (from the warehouse) fall through the ceiling. One kills the other one. The surviving teenage girl goes into the toilet. David commits suicide by hanging himself in the bedroom. A new character walks in the front door, then walks out the back door.

We find ourselves with the surviving teenage girl in a small room. There is a little desk in the middle of the room with a paper form on it. The form says: “Please write your name.” The form has many entries, so the girl writes her own information on the form: “Henry George.”

Henry then climbs and walks through a series of portals: doors in walls, ceilings, floors; a cabinet; under bedsheets; etc. Each place she enters leads to another place of portals and entrances. This continues for a minute or two.

Finally, Henry is back in the warehouse. She slips into her “original” box. She falls into a king-sized bed, ornamented with all kinds of comforts: down pillows, down comforters, peacock plumes, etc. Henry’s room is beautiful and cozy. She becomes drowsy, falling into a deep slumber.

The “new character” (that walked in the front door & exited through the back door) enters her room from beneath the bed. He gets in bed with Henry. The two bodies literally melt & mold into one mutated body.

The phone rings. The new mutated body (without a name) picks up the phone, but never speaks. The body is merely spoken to. [We hear the voice] -- “To find God, go back to Babington’s”

The body (hereafter called “Bob”) arrives at a huge, intricate factory -- the entrance sign reads, “Babington’s.” Bob is crawling towards the entrance, but falls into a concealed pit. Falling, falling, and falling. Then Bob splats into a pudding on a lonesome highway, next to a sign that says, “Zavalla, TX. Pop. 29”

A passing car pulls off onto the shoulder to investigate the “pudding.” There are two people -- an old man and young, blind boy. The old man begins to stir and shift the pudding into a pattern of lines on the ground. Another car pulls up and three people exit. The three gather around the old man. They look inquisitive. Then another car pulls up, more people gather. Then another car, then another, and more people gather. Eventually, a large, silent crowd is gathered around the old man who is twiddling the pudding into patterns, shapes, lines.

The old man abruptly stops, and looks a bit horrified. A man asks, “What does it mean?” The old man pauses, then slaps the blind boy to the ground. The old man shouts, “Tell them, Bertrand! Tell them!” Bertrand remains silent for a minute, and then sobs wildly. As he sobs, he begins to beat the old man to death. Still sobbing, Bertrand begins to eat, slowly, very slowly, the corpse of the old man. He sobs & eats; after some time, the crowd begins to exit. Bertrand is still sobbing, still cannibalizing, as the last person exits.

Snippets

“The world is my sin,” wept a criminal on a cross.

His philosophy reads like a dictionary.

Some cry out, “Let the curtain fall!" when it was, in fact, never raised.It was never raised.”

The Edge of The Table

Part I:
The Non-Discovery

I picked the lock & opened the small, metal warehouse door; it opened into the darkness of a vast garage; into something of the darkness & dankness of a boarded-up greenhouse; it was a room left to rust & fall in; the odor of rot, of a garbage disposal, hung amidst its black.

The flashlight I had brought barely pierced the dusty, humid air, the grayish-brown air, the oppressive air. I walked slowly alongside the corrugated, aluminum walls, searching for a light-switch: I found none. It was apparent, however, from my tour along the walls, that this room had the approximate square-footage of a military hanger—the lightless center of which could not be illuminated from the perimeter by my flashlight; so I, with a sense of mild dread, pointed my light & shuffled into the heart.

It was not more than ten seconds before something appeared from the murk: something low to the floor, & rectangular—a sort of moss-covered conference table. The table seemed to hover a mere foot from the floor; it was still mostly indistinct before I pointed my light around it. There I found another table, another conference-style table, perhaps three-feet in height; this table, it seemed, in the poor lighting, was also moss-covered. Everything remained indistinct, still shrouded in darkness, still clouded with dust & moisture; I desperately wanted to find an overhead lamp, a switch or rod to open a sunroof—something brighter than a five-dollar flashlight; but with no other option, with nothing but my desperation & curiosity, I went on exploring & squinting.

Another table appeared: this one nearly five-feet & likewise indistinctly moss-covered, but of a bushier moss. I did not look thoroughly at anything; my sense of mild dread had been stimulated by, as I saw it, the oddity of these tables—their different heights, their ascending order, their unexplained existence. I felt that a simple & quick survey would be the safest thing to do—safe, that is to say, from my own menacing expectations.

Then I found something, which upon finding turned my subtle dread into confusion: a table of assorted gadgets, instruments, tools, & general miscellany. I inspected this table with some thoroughness: there were toothpicks, magnifying glasses, tweezers, sharp pins, knives, glue-sticks, acrylic paints, spoons, matches, scissors. There was also one microscope—an impressive, professional microscope. Strangely, but no more uncharacteristic than any item of that strange assortment, there was a night-vision goggle headset; it was interesting, but only mildly so relative to its context. Everything was neatly laid out; everything was, after a little examining, functional. I worried that the owner of these materials had only recently left—that he or she would return shortly. Despite my fear, & in view of the condition of the place—the dankness, the moss-covered accouterments, & the general sense of forsakenness—, I decided to remain, to fill in the blank, to kill time in random exploration.

The table of miscellany was fairly long; its contents fairly strange: there was some theme to them, some relation to small tasks. I thought that these things were possibly the utensils of an artist or amateur naturalist; something was meant to be meticulously picked at, tinkered with—something intricate perhaps. There were instruments of a seemingly medical nature: scalpels, droppers, etc.; there was a syringe, which made me suspect, even more, my struggling artist theory.

Of these tools & accessories, there was one very atypical gadget: a listening device. It was obviously modified, but it was not clear in what way, or to what purpose, it was modified. It did not fit the theme of the other objects. Its cumbersome black headphones & visibly high-grade microphone seemed out of place; I theorized of what occupations or hobbies would require such combinations of things.

At one edge of this table, this long, antiseptic, well-dusted table, stood a cheap electric fan; I switched it on—& followed its cord to an electrical socket in the cement floor. The freshness of circulated air was welcome relief; it partially unclouded things: the other tables had more definition in the purer dark. I thought I should reexamine these other tables; perhaps there were more odds & ends, more hints.

So it was: there were, immediately noticeable, table lamps—the kind of jointed, necked table lamps one finds on a slanted drawing table; the kind of lamps that are simultaneously magnifying lenses, for exacting artists or such. One necked lamp per table, it seemed. I hurriedly turned them on; they emitted a warm, natural light; but it was what the lights revealed, what unbelievable things lay under their mundane glow, that all at once made me forget the other items; that all at once revealed something more profoundly unexplained.

The sudden illumination made their faint voices rise; faint shouts, faint murmurings—but nothing clear; their quiet words were too quiet, too muffled in the moss & murk, too stifled in the humming of the fan. I did not truly listen; I did not want to listen at first: I did not want to listen to my delusion. I did not want to be swallowed up in such derangement. It was too ugly to think it true; unsettling, disconcerting—too intimately displeasing: but they did not disappear. Their voices quieted because, I imagine, I had stayed silent for so long; silent, staring, glazing, & waiting for their voices & their miniature forms to recede into the hiccup & daydream from whence they came, squirming. They did not fade out. They continued to stare up at me, as children might stare up at an imperious, human-faced mountain. Miniature human beings—I thought, I dazzled; “it is not true,” echoed irresolutely through these thoughts. Everything felt too rapid. I unfocused my vision; I refused to concentrate. “It is not true,” I whispered as I hurriedly turned all the lights off.

In the dark, I exhaled slowly, therapeutically; to calm myself, to fight off the sensation that some disorder had seized me—& that it would seize me again, & again: perpetually. The flashlight was off; the fan was whirring gently. The tiny voices seemed, from the distance I had put between them & I, stopped. All the spacious isolation of this warehouse, this hanger, or whatever it was, had returned—with its burden of weightlessness & blindness. I exhaled & inhaled; I felt that it would be beneficial to lie on my back, on the cool cement; just relax—let things come into proper proportion; find some reason for this; disregard it: no, it did not happen. My eyes were closed.

It was an illusion, some hallucination, the effect of darkness, humidity, confusion, unpleasant odors on the psyche; it was, perhaps, a table infested with roaches, or a species of noisy insect—yes, & my brain went temporarily south: maybe out of shock, disgust—cockroaches are repulsive. The combined effect of darkness, humidity, confusion, the abrupt sight of a shiny, nauseating infestation, the anxiety that an owner would expose me amidst his or her privacies, all of this, more of this, could trigger—did trigger—derangement. It was a temporary delusion: miniature human beings are physical absurdities.

I had contemplated the event; I could say, with confidence, something realistic about the event. The breathing exercises had worked: I was again breathing naturally, unconsciously. Something was still skewed; my feelings remained, in some sense, unreturned. Yet, I reasoned, as anybody must reason, that something as powerful, as overwhelmingly in possession of one, as delusion or hallucination is not easily removed from one’s mood; its reality in the memory, its reality for the emotions, recycles itself. Nevertheless, I was breathing naturally. I expected the delusion to surface again, with some lesser degree of force, but I knew, after all, that it would be a delusion. I expected it to return, because I essentially did not want it to return.

Lying on the floor, in the blackness, I felt things were intelligible—except for a few loitering questions, a few holdovers: I still did not know the why of those tools & items. The question imposed itself; it was there, naked in the light of a possibility: it was there as an adjunct to my delusion: did those instruments relate to those little insects? I thought ‘insects,’ but the words ‘miniature’ and ‘humans’ stirred underneath—held down, as I needed them to be.

It followed: my amateur naturalist hypothesis is true. The owner studies insect colonies; dissects under the microscope; observes through the magnifying glasses; injects insects—but with what solution, I did not even attempt to guess. The listening device, I reasoned, must be for the listening & recording of insect vocalizations; its modifications must serve for focusing on local, individual vocalizations—for very precise listening, I mean.

Some of the items, according to this context, made less or no sense: matches, for instance—or, the glue-sticks. I could think of many outlandish uses of glue-sticks for the study of insects, but nothing familiar; these things, to be honest, suggested inhumane techniques—imaginative little tortures, I suspected. I was not disturbed by the suspicion, but very persuaded by it: the whole off-putting environment impressed me as being suited for an off-putting personality. I was not so enthusiastic of insects as to condemn an entomologist from a little, infrequent misuse of his materials: I doubt insects experience pain in any lucid, racking sense.

I remained on my back, amusing myself with speculations & inferences. After a few minutes of this, I decided to get up & have a second look at the insects—still not without a worry, but a very diluted worry. I stood next to the lamp on the tallest table; I hesitated; the light clicked on.

I stood there. I thought: this is delusion—this is delusion. I said solemnly to myself, in a broken, half-brave voice, “this is delusion.” I spoke as though the statement was a charm, a physical negation of the realities before me, yet there was no change.

Tiny, nearly inaudible voices, small human voices, floated up—as before. Once more, as before: tiny, barely visible bodies: tiny, yet correctly proportioned human bodies: human bodies no larger than my fingernail: they stood crowded, like bipedal ants: crowded into little huddles, little aggregations of life, little tribes of little human families; they looked up at me; some flailed their arms, their one-centimeter arms; some were jumping; others were sitting; others were lying on their back. Children, the elderly, the middle-aged, teenagers, infants; men, women; girls, boys; all the human types: alive, but extremely miniature.

The deepest aspects of my theorizing imagination were reeling: How are such existences possible? Why is this phenomenon here? Am I irretrievably deluded? How am I confounding insects with human beings? I felt the heaviness of the air more intensely; its pressures intruded from every direction. It was obvious, in an absurd way, that a substantial number of these human creatures were trying to correspond with me; but I stood gawking—& glazed. I do not recall the amount of time that passed, or the majority of the thoughts I had during that time. I do not recall what it was that carried me back into myself, but that unhurried force eventually restored my judgment, my feeling for facts. The shock bled out; it was, or seemed, manifestly true: these small humans were manifestly real—& they were interacting as I was integrating.

Before interacting, before I felt it safe & sane to interact, I thought I should see more—that more information would be healthy. I had turned only this one lamp on, & seen only this one table clearly. I wanted to see the other tables clearly: to see their occupants, if they had occupants. My sense of estrangement lapsed into noncommittal curiosity. The other lamps clicked on; I burned the details into me; they were too dissociating to forget—too miraculous.

In that lamplight, in the surreal & naked view of everything, the tables, which were visibly & uniformly fifteen-feet long by five-feet wide, presented themselves as something other than moss-covered, & other than flat. Each of the three tables presented three different environments, as natural, as geographically accurate, & as eye-catching as the professional landscapes of miniature railroad tables. My memory of these tables is vivid, as anything so unreal, so stimulating, so adrenal is vivid.

The first environment, the environment I first lit up, situated on the tallest of the tables, the five-foot high table, was a kind of wide-open pasturage with miniature flora: trees, grass, shrubs, fields, groupings of flowers—a very pleasant, storybook pasturage: sprinkled with ponds; laced with threadlike rivers that snaked through one-inch willow trees, nestled on microscopic shores. Everything was natural, alive, functional—only shrunken, miniscule. This particular table, this beautiful table, was the only table with human residents; the reason for this, I noticed instantly, was given by the nature, the environments, of the remaining two tables.

The second tallest table, the three-foot tall table, presented a bleak & inhospitable desert—with dunes, with relatively high mountains, with no apparent sources of water. Everything was dried-out, lifeless & hot—unexpectedly hot: owing to an intricate system of heating coils, toaster-like coils, built into the underside of the table, which I discovered later. It was a picturesque little desert landscape: a deceptively natural amalgam of Middle-Eastern & African deserts.

The final table, the shortest table, being only about one foot lifted from the floor, presented an unnatural environment: a very miniature, very elaborate, very circuitous labyrinth—whose walls were bare & standing razors; razors standing no higher than one-half inch; razors without holes, without perforated middles—only uninterrupted metal; razors firmly, rigidly connected with, what I assumed to be, rubber cement; razors glued to each other, as the walls & boundaries, & glued to the tabletop, as the foundation. There were corridors, false routes, forked routes, dead-ends; all the intricacies of the most disorienting labyrinth, delicately constructed. It was this architecture, as I interpreted it, which implied an upsetting theory: a theory I kept unmentionable in my imagination—only permitting something abstract & disembodied to enter, & enter only in a vague, undistinguished, passing fashion. I suppressed a word: cruelty.

The tables were parallel to each other, with space sufficient between them to serve as a type of pedestrian path, a type of thoroughfare: on which one had very comprehensive access: the perimeters & the interiors of the table landscapes could be comfortably reached from these pathways—why?

It was after looking over the last & lowest table that a feeling of exhaustion took hold of me; I felt as though the concentrated & persistent energy of the delusion—as I still employed that harmless name—had drained itself & its host. My investigative natures did not want to rest; they pushed against themselves; nonetheless, like a person too long tested, whose eyes were too long forced open, I gave no resistance—I let go. I turned off the lamps, turned off the fan, turned on my flashlight, & found my way to the exit—to a door out of a dream, I thought. I wanted to leave, to sleep, to bury everything I had seen.

As the small, metal warehouse door closed, a deeper & separate door closed—a vast & heavy door: with a sign above it: “Do not close.” I felt this door, felt its heavy tug, as it shut itself again & again—against something dark & radiant. Its heavy pull & soft creaking swayed & sang me to sleep: I was so far off, but inescapably there: there, in visions: of throwing over one thousand tables, laughing.


Part II:
The Discovery

The door is not like I remember it; it is smaller, thinner, & dirtier—perhaps not. I am not like I remember, & the scenery follows. I never closed the door—never really closed it. I have walked through it, & into its boiling gut, so often: for weeks. I could not close the door, so I have returned to open it, to walk through it; I am still inside it, behind it—I want to get out. I am still standing, mute & pale, near its tables; I have returned: to drag my memories from its tables. I must walk, as I have walked everyday, through the door: & do something—search through its illusions, & shout: No.

I open it: the same unpleasant blindness; the same uncertainty: it is dank, as before. I am dreaming. I open it: the humid, black murk: the same fear. “Now open it,” I repeat aloud. I open it.

My new flashlight cuts open the face of the dark, but this dark is severe & deep: so it is again, I am breathing heavily—so it has been in my dreams & reflections, I am breathing heavily. I am shuffling, as I have shuffled for weeks. I am pointing the light around, as I have pointed it every day, in every corner, on every surface & emptiness—waiting for my dream to fade in, & confess, “I am your lie.”

I know where to go: to its center: to its deceptive little nucleus; I feel the image of a table’s edge: reaching out for me: to make me silent, reverent, ridiculous. I know, as I draw nearer, what it is I will see: myself, wild. An edge is caught in the light; I recognize it—but I am unready. I have never so willingly pursued a daydream; no, I want to think no—I am pursuing nothing, & am being pursued by nothing.

The light reveals the surface of the table. It is all still sitting here: manifest, visible, definite. In its glow, I feel nothing; nothing is left to give up: it has been given up in my absence, in the recurring returns to these tables. I sense only what is technical: the shapes, the colors, the sizes, the patterns. I am looking down at my image, at what is incurable & broken in me; I am decorating these tables, as my corpse decorates a gurney: & some will think of my corpse: here is a human—however: here is no human. Thusly, I look down & murmur in my thoughts: here are no humans, but one: me.

The tables lay under the soft lamplight: the miniature human beings appear confused—as they ought to be: they are, as I am, confused—they are as I am. They are hushed; they only gaze up: in anticipation, it seems. Why am I waiting for myself; what do I anticipate in myself? It is too much of a concession to interact; if I decide to talk to them, to myself, I would surely loathe myself for returning to this place. If they spoke, it would be too much of a concession to listen—but I want to listen; I want to speak to my ears: what would I say? What would I say in response?

I leave them in their smallness & stupefaction; I must, that is, I need, or I want, to go to the table of instruments: for the listening device & a magnifying glass. I want to listen, to look; I cannot refuse myself; it is too late: I am already powerless against my own imagination—something has already surrendered to itself. I am already lying—exploring my lie is no more a lie; it is a necessary confession—it must be; it is.

As I pick up the headphones, the microphone, the magnifying glass, I know: these too must be unreal. All of it—there is no distinction: I acknowledge that I am partially out of my mind, & it feels rational; I know that I am rational, that I am only suffering what I think to be delusion, that I am rational for thinking such. It is a lucid dream: so I am lucid: I may participate ironically.

There is a dirtied, single-stand black chair of adjustable height; it sits beside the lowest table, & appears to have been adjusted accordingly. I stand it against the highest table & force it to its tallest position. It is worn, yet strong & comfortable. I don the headphones. With one nearly trembling hand, I aim the microphone at these half-inch human beings; with the other hand, I hold the magnifying glass, & focus it. I should snicker at myself—entirely alone, hunched on a cement floor, equipped with imaginary paraphernalia, examining the empty ground, listening for silence.

They notice me; they gaze up so helplessly: seeming to recognize that I can view them more closely, in higher detail—but they remain very still; no one speaks. The children appear afraid; among the adults & elderly there are looks of wonder, bewilderment, &, as a kind of common denominator, hesitation.

They appear neither modern nor medieval, but rather ancient & agrarian—inhabiting roughly constructed huts of grass, rock, clay, & wood; huts in a variety of sizes: from a dime-sized single hut to a quarter-sized family hut to a three-inch long, rectangular hut—which, if these humans are comparable to real ancient tribesmen, I would assume serves a communal, superstitious function.

Their fashion is also proper to the agrarian lifestyle: pelts & the like—but pelts from where? There may be fauna—I move on: I soar, if you will, over the hills & valleys with my magnifying glass; I am like millions of hawks, millions of clouds; it is very breathtaking for something this miniature; with such access, such velocity of vision, such ease & freedom of movement in something virtually indistinguishable from the earth, I feel weightless; I feel dissociated; I feel as someone above all things—as one dominant, potent, glorious.

I soar over the fields that I had last time given only a cursory look; I see now in higher resolution: wheat-fields. Everything I had seen earlier without magnification now zooms up in rich, vital, intimate life-size: the willows, the streams, the stones—and here: I see a smattering of miniature cattle grazing in the green hills; some are asleep in the shadows of miniature willows. The cattle possess the colors of those pelts—my delusion, at least on this point, is not altogether incoherent; it is sustaining its rhythms & narratives with a degree of verisimilitude beyond, well beyond, any of my relevant precedents. In this respect, my explanations of it make little sense to me—but that I cannot explain it thoroughly has become, so instantly, less terrifying; my dream is mostly beautiful; my dream, my madness, is good.

“Merciful God, speak to us”—it is the voice of an English-speaking male individual. He has addressed me as ‘God’—it is an embarrassment: my puny, mincing ego, extrapolating & flattering itself. ‘Merciful’—my idiocy is outside of me, mocking the both of us. How should I chastise it? It should be reprimanded, kept in proportion: too much perspective has already been lost.

“Who spoke?”—Where is he? Where is the face of my ego? Does he wear my face: in miniature?

“It was I, merciful God; I spoke.” There are too many of them—perhaps over one hundred of them; their mouths are too tiny. They are sporadically set across the table: in five, independent colonies. I require a test: a method of distinguishing, isolating, identifying.

“Separate yourself, speaker; go to a hill, a far away hill—& I will speak to you again.”

(TO BE CONTINUED)

One Simple Request: Denied.

I ask the believer: pray to your deity to perform for me, for the unbeliever, an action. Pray for such an action as will eliminate the majority of my doubts. Or to be more specific, pray for this action, in this detail: that I am quickly transported to some remote planet, where I can yet breathe and sustain as I am here; that I am then met by one hundred ravens, who speak my language and with them, I converse for a while; that I am then taken back to this planet, and this spot.

The believer speaks, “Your proposed miracle is absurd and frivolous.”

“What miracle? I have only spoken of actions that do not seem to break any known natural law. Is such an action miraculous? I thought miracles were actions that broke natural law. I assume, of course, such a thing called ‘natural law,’ and furthermore, that if such a thing or things exist, in a still indefinite sense of ‘exist,’ that I know of every one of them.”

“Somewhere in your suggestion a physical law is violated. But for the sake of your argument, let us posit that you are asking me to pray for a miracle. In that event, I should tell you that God does not operate in that manner.”

“In what manner?”

“God grants miracles according to His will and His plan; he is not a personal magician, nor are his miracles without a function—ultimately, the function of salvation; moral and historical purposes are included.”

“What of my salvation? Is there a miracle for my salvation—a miracle fashioned to that end?”

“Yes, and…”

“No, I should not hear of its content!”

“What do you mean by this?”

“Either I recognize the miracle, or I do not. Correct?”

“To what span of time do you refer? You may not recognize it in this year, but recognize it in the following year.”

“Alright, I will refer to two separate time situations. First: at the moment the miracle is performed. Second: all time thereafter. My earlier either/or condition applies to both. Correct?”

“I assent, but feel unsure of it.”

“Can you articulate your reservation?”

“Not at the moment.”

“If it comes to you later, we can return to these premises. However, returning to prior things: if I recognize the miracle when it is performed, then will I be saved? Or at any other time: if I recognize the miracle at all, will I be saved?”

“It is not guaranteed; it is your choice at that point of recognition.”

“What would hold me back? If I truly 'recognize' the miracle, which I take to mean, 'I acknowledge and believe it is a non-natural action of your deity,' then what reasonable grounds would I have to refuse the conclusion? Or, perhaps, there is sufficient leverage in the demonstration whereby it may be explained otherwise, and so one might reject a theological explanation. And if this is the case, then is the miracle sufficient for my salvation?”

“Define ‘sufficient’ in your usage; or better, conceive of such a ‘sufficient’ miracle.”

“Yes, I played loosely with that term. Let me instead substitute that word with this condition: an event that guarantees my belief in your deity, without abrogating my free will. Now, first things first: I could ask: ‘What is free will?’ Or: ‘What restriction, moral or otherwise, applies to your deity, such that your deity cannot save me contrary to my free will?’ And other implicit queries stir in these waters. Nonetheless, since your convention requires ‘free will,’ and since I think it most entertaining to rupture convention from within—that is, having a thing defeat itself—I will keep ‘free will’ in my condition.”

“I too am savvy enough to keep ‘free will’ in a provisional column. However, I will indulge your condition. Such an event, or miracle, assuming that it is coherent, and assuming thereafter that it can occur, is not within my human power to deliver.”

“Is it in your human power to pray? And when you pray, is it within your human power to pray for this?”

“Yes to both of your questions, but it is within my conscience to refrain. Jesus commands that you should not test God.”

“Then what is prayer? You pray for the protection of friends, the safety of your snacks, the smoothness of your road trips. Are you not testing your deity? Are you not petitioning for the abrogation of the course of natural law, by petitioning for extra-natural intercession?”

“Those are not tests; they are not demands for proof, upon which God’s existence is to be accepted or rejected. Rather, they are comparable to requests. I do not ask for these favors with the intention of disproving God, as your request does—and so your request is a test.”

“Quite, that is why I asked you to petition on my behalf. If I make the request, it is a test. If you make the request for me, you are merely requesting a favor without the ‘intention of disproving God.’ I wonder though: will your deity refuse your request on account of my intentions?”

“I would imagine that such a spiritual round-robin would say something of my intentions; namely, that my intentions are petty or profane. On this possibility my conscience gets snagged.”

“Your intention is for my salvation.”

“That is what I may humor myself with, but is it really so? And another concern I have is that you must pray for yourself—that I am in no special position to ‘deal out’ miracles, as it were.”

“First, and again, you request safety for your friends and family. You request healing for the ill and injured. Why not request something arguably more important: the salvation of a fellow sinner?”

“I do, but you are asking for something unusually specific.”

“You would rather pray for my salvation in the general?”

“Perhaps, yes. The more general, the less narrow. The less narrow, the more opportunities for salvation. You would have me petition for only one shot at salvation, whereas I should prefer innumerable chances. Even more, I should prefer to leave that process to God.”

“Are you saying that if you pray for this one very important thing at this one time in this one specific way, that you are taking your deity’s power away from it? Or that you are prematurely stopping all the many other opportunities your deity will provide for my salvation? The first is impossible. The second is, if we are to maintain in your doctrines, implausible. Why is it implausible? If someone else were to pray that you see the Virgin Mary in your shoes and thereby accept the truth of the deity, would this curtail all your future opportunities at salvation? Such a conclusion seems misplaced in your system.”

“What becomes of the man who prayed for my salvation in that foolish manner?”

“Are you more interested in your salvation, than the salvation of others? ‘What greater love is there than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends?’ Here is one suggestion: that a man lay down his immortal soul for his friends. Or better: that a man lay down his immortal soul for his enemies.”

“Do you mean: eternal damnation of one’s soul in order to procure eternal life for the soul of one’s enemy?”

“Precisely. Is there any greater love than this?”

“The love of God.”

“Your deity has nothing to lose.”

“Should we get back to the main point, or change the subject?”

“Alright, the main point: you fear praying for my salvation by these terms. You feel something is amiss in such a prayer; as if you were forcing the holy hand of your deity into an unholy pocket.”

“Yes.”

“Why not simply make a genuine effort? Why not simply try?”

“That is your problem: I do not feel genuine in asking for such absurd actions. Your miracle would not come because my heart was not in the prayer. It would be a sham—a sham of the most irreligious sort.”

“Are you implying that, if your heart were into such a prayer, then your deity would become my ‘personal magician’?”

“Not your personal magician—your savior.”

“The dividing line is thin nowadays. Jesus improved my health. Jesus helped me get this promotion. Jesus prevented me from getting into that car crash. These are personal actions.”

“Magic is trickery; it is not real. Moreover, magic cannot do some of these things.”

“Where magic cannot do these things, natural reality can. But, obviously, that should not be our first answer.”

“Facetious unbelief. You are an entertaining man. I do pray for your salvation.”

“Hold on. Stop that. If you pray for my salvation you are not leaving ‘that process to God.’ And worse, you are giving me ‘only one shot at salvation.’ Are you punishing me for my joke?”

“I am requesting God for a successful process, and to provide you with innumerable shots.”

“Will you change your deity’s mind, or by requesting that I be saved, make it redouble its efforts?”

“I have heard this kind of contention before. It goes something like, ‘If God is perfect, then why pray for him to do something differently?’ Here is my response: God takes into account your request. That is, his plan includes your request. Being outside of time, God’s plan integrates your prayers.”

“If I do not pray to your deity, will its plan be the less perfect?”

“No, but your life will the less fulfilling.”

“That does not sound like the effects of a perfect plan.”

“We human beings do not know God’s perfect plan; how could we know the effects?”

“How could you know if your prayer, therefore, contributes to these effects?”

“God promises such.”

“What if that promise is false? What if your deity permitted this false promise to be circulated amongst men? It might be part of your deity’s master plan.”

“God does not lie.”

“Ah, but men do. And men can prevaricate on the subject of theology; or worse, misunderstand and champion error. Think of all those adherents of all your ‘false’ religions. The theistic ones might as well defer to your kind of defense when championing some article of their faith. ‘Allah promised mankind X, and Allah does not lie.’ Does this seem reasonable to you. Is there not something viciously self-contained and circular in this premise?”

“There are other evidences that the God of the Bible is the true God. There is the well-documented account of the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. There are the biblical prophecies that were realized. Etc. Etc.”

“I must conserve one of your beliefs for you: the unknown perfect plan of God. What if this bible is full of error, that its characters fiction, yet your deity, in accordance with some unknown feature of its unknown schedule, made it seem manifestly true. Perhaps by some comedy of errors, or by some remote launch of causal dominoes, everything you take as proof was fixed and/or permitted by this deity to mask a tremendous set of misunderstandings. What if…? A whole host of speculations may follow.”

“The argument defeats itself. If the Bible is full of error, then how can I know if God’s plan is unknown?”

“You are ahead of me. This is your dilemma, not mine. If God’s plan is unknown, then it may be the case that his plan requires a mistake-ridden Bible to seem ‘well-evidenced’. But if the Bible is mistake-ridden, then how do we know if God’s plan is unknown, or that there is a God at all?”

“How far have we drifted from the shore? I believe we were first discussing absurd miracles.”

“Now we are discussing absurd beliefs in general.”

Comments on a Comment

This post is part rebuttal, part clarification, part satire. My brother, Christopher van Belle, commented on one of my earlier posts, “My Struggle, by The Lord Thy God.” This post is a comment to his comment. His words are written in red (to honor his favorite rabbi), & mine are in the standard white.

Jonathan Smith,

Please show us the golden plates on which God delivered to us his revelations and concise commandments in 'My Struggle.' And the angel's name this time? Dimwit?

Anyways, thanks for the astute criticism and especially for the proscription of persimmon whip (I'm weak enough to try this just once...), but I'm afraid the message of Christ was love and subservience, while most of your anti-God arguments are directed against self-indulging gloaters, indeed those same Pharisees and Sadducees that Jesus despised. Jesus' teachings command us to take the seat of lowest honor at a gathering, and he himself says his purpose was to serve, not to be served: (John 13:5-17)

The message of Christ was love, subservience, obedience, passivity, other-worldliness, voluntary poverty, non-dialectical self-assurance, & an overall non-dissent-oriented approach. It is a complex, but not entirely unique message—nor is it entirely subservient, or entirely self-cultish. As for Jesus’ non-dialectical self-assurance, I quote Nietzsche:

“Denying is precisely what was quite impossible to him [Jesus].—Dialectic is also quite absent, as likewise the idea that any faith, any ‘truth’ can be proved by argument (—his proofs are inner ‘lights,’ inward feelings of happiness and self-affirmation, a host of ‘proofs of power’—). Neither can such a doctrine contradict, it does not even realize the fact that there are or can be other doctrines, it is absolutely incapable of imagining a contrary judgment…Wherever it encounters such things, from a feeling of profound sympathy it bemoans such ‘blindness,’—for it sees the ‘light,’—but it raises no objections.”—§32, The Antichrist, Friedrich Nietzsche

And a lengthy excerpt from a recent blog post by John W. Loftus…
Check out the full article: http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2008/07/beversluis-jesus-who-was-he.html#links

“That portrait also ignores many other passages in which Jesus not only becomes angry, but erupts in ‘vindictive fury’ that prompts him to lash out at the scribes and Pharisees with appalling abusiveness, calling them a ‘generation of vipers,’ ‘hypocrites,’ ‘fools,’ ‘blind,’ ‘serpents,’ and ‘whited sepulchers,’ and upbraiding them with even more menacing threats of being cast into uttermost darkness and a ‘furnace of fire in which there is only perpetual weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth’ (Matt. 11:21-24, 12:34, 13:42,49,23:13-33,25:30,25:41-46; Mark 6:10-12, 9:48; Luke 11:39-52). The frequency of these ‘Woe unto you!’ passages and the obvious glee with which this eternal punishment is described and contemplated is altogether remarkable. This extraordinary torrent of invective is not directed at social injustice or poverty or hunger or oppression or slavery or tyranny, but at people who disagree with him. These violent outbursts bespeak a zero tolerance for dissenting opinion and a very conditional interest in (and concern for) prospective followers. Is not that sort of behavior indicative of a "psychological profile" that bears looking into? Even if it is not the behavior of a lunatic or a megalomaniac, it is not quite what one expects from the main character in ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told.’ Plato and Xenophon never portray Socrates behaving in such ways. On the contrary, he characteristically responds to disagreement and lack of interest with cool detachment and impenetrable unflappability. I cannot imagine him resorting to name-calling, insults, verbal abuse, and threats of the kind that fill the synoptic Gospels.”

This sort of approach to alternative hypotheses is not intellectually humble. Everything is foregone. This is a necessary attribute to be an all-knowing deity, but when such is the ideal for the Christian, it tends to incubate a self-fellating, cognitive myopia—a complacency of faith. There is a deep acquiescence (a.k.a. subservience) in this Christianism—the subservience of reason, of open-endedness, of dialectic. Not all Christians are anti-dialectic, but the Christianity of the synoptic Gospels is anti-dialectic.

...So he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples' feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

"But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits such a regime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not mind; this short life counts for too little in their eyes." -- Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?"

Jesus replied, "You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand."

"No," said Peter, "you shall never wash my feet."

Jesus answered, "Unless I wash you, you have no part with me."

"Then, Lord," Simon Peter replied, "not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!"

Jesus’ subservient actions should be contrasted against his proclamations of his transcendence, divinity, power; he will sit in judgment of men at the right hand of God—this behavior is, in any other human being, suspicious. It is a possibility with such a personality type that he would wash the feet of others for depersonalized, symbolic, self-sanctifying reasons. A full, clinical pathology is impossible from this remove.

I would like to remind everybody that my post was satire, not systematic theology. These few comments are not exhaustive; there are several other non-Christian perspectives that I would love to include & discuss, but such extended additions would be too humorless for me.

Jesus answered, "Those who have had a bath need only to wash their feet; their whole body is clean. And you are clean, though not every one of you." For he knew who was going to betray him, and that was why he said not every one was clean.

When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. "Do you understand what I have done for you?" he asked them. "You call me 'Teacher' and 'Lord,' and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another's feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. Very truly I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.

I would like to quote Ludwig Feuerbach, an 18th century philosopher & theologian:

“God concerns himself about me; he has in view my happiness, my salvation; he wills that I shall be blest; but that is my will also: thus, my interest is God’s interest, my own will is God’s will, my own aim is God’s aim—God’s love for me is nothing else than my self-love deified.”

And some more…

“God is the…unrestricted omnipotence of feeling, prayer hearing itself, feeling perceiving itself, the echo of our cry of anguish. Pain must give itself utterance; involuntarily the artist seizes the lute that he may breathe out his sufferings in its tones. He soothes his sorrow by making it audible to himself, by making it objective…
…Hence man turns away from nature, from all visible objects. He turns within, that here, sheltered and hidden from the inexorable powers, he may find audience for his griefs. Here he utters his oppressive secrets; here he gives vent to his stifled sighs. This open-air of the heart, this outspoken secret, this uttered sorrow of the soul, is God. God is a tear of love, shed in the deepest concealment over human misery.”

But we still suffer from a lack of servants today, as you keenly point out, "You are hooked up, as they say; my selective grace is free of charge, & handy for the lazy, morally unmotivated masses who do not feel it essential to do good works, but desire prizes." I don't disagree with you that the prize-loving freeloader Christian exists, and perhaps you would agree with me that his philosophy is a perversion, not a paragon.

“His” philosophy is an exclusively Christian perversion, not a Buddhist or Taoist perversion. Is there something latent in Christianity that permits this, or is it just a vast curious coincidence among Christians?

“…Only read the gospels as books calculated to seduce by means of morality: morality is appropriated by these petty people—they know what morality can do! The best way of leading mankind by the nose is with morality! The fact is that the most conscious conceit of people who believe themselves to be chosen, here simulates modesty: in this way they, the Christian community, the ‘good and the just’ place themselves once and for all on a certain side, the side of ‘Truth’—and the rest of mankind, ‘the world’ on the other…This was the most fatal kind of megalomania that had ever yet existed on earth: insignificant little abortions of bigots and liars began to lay sole claim to the concepts of ‘God,’ ‘Truth,’ ‘Light,’ ‘Spirit,’ ‘Love,’ ‘Wisdom,’ ‘Life,’ as if these things were, so to speak, synonyms of themselves, in order to fence themselves off from ‘the world.” — §44, The Antichrist, Friedrich Nietzsche.

From Nietzsche back to Feuerbach—and the following point argued by Feuerbach is perhaps the most germane for us; think, as you read it, of these terms: “in-group” & “out-group.”

“All the horrors of Christian religious history, which our believers aver not to be due to Christianity, have truly arisen out of Christianity, because they have arisen out of faith. This repudiation of them is indeed a necessary consequence of faith; for faith claims for itself only what is good, every thing bad it casts on the shoulders of unbelief, or of misbelief, or of men in general. But this very denial of faith, that it is itself not to blame for the evil in Christianity, is a striking proof that it is really the originator of that evil, because it is a proof of the narrowness, partiality, and intolerance which render it well-disposed only to itself, to its own adherents, but ill-disposed, unjust towards others. According to faith, the good which Christians do, is not done by the man, but by the Christian, by faith; but the evil which Christians do, is not done by the Christian, but by the man.”

The phenomenon of in-group/out-group processing is not, of course, exclusively Christian; it is, however, essential to Christianity—to the maintenance of the theory of a “pure Christianity” (which is cherry-picked Christianity). “Pure Christianity” is psychologically comparable to “pure Communism.”

And because of sin, which entered through one man, we suffer today from "shortage, war, famine, earthquakes, storms, & other habitually recurring human crises." But also through one man we are delivered from those things: (Romans 5:12-20)

I would ask the question, “You still believe in the Adam & Eve myth?”—but I have my answer. Never mind the parallels between the Sumerian antecedent Epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament, never mind the lack of archaeological evidence, never mind the myth-structure, never mind a considerable amount of available biblical scholarship, never mind the theory of evolution…no, it is preferable to believe in the chatty snake & poisoned fruit casuistry.

"Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned— for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.

"Christianity makes suffering contagious." -- Friedrich Nietzsche

"But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

"Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

"The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."

"God hated the world so much that he sent his only son so that whoever does not believe in him will perish and be denied eternal life.” – (source unspecified)

And Jon, although the haughty and proud attitude of God in 'My Struggle' makes for an entertaining character, it's disparate from the example we have in Jesus, His son:

Jesus is said to be “one with the Father”—the Old Testament God. I think what Mark Twain wrote about that Old Testament Father is quite eloquent:

"There is nothing in either savage or civilized history that is more utterly complete, more remorselessly sweeping than the Father of Mercy's campaign among the Midianites. The official report deals only in masses, all the virgins, all the men, all the babies. all 'creatures that breathe,' all houses, all cities. It gives you just one vast picture ...as far as the eye can reach, of charred ruins and storm-swept desolation... Would you expect this same conscienceless God, this moral bankrupt, to become a teacher of morals, of gentleness, of meekness, of righteousness, of purity?" – Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth

"Strange...a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied seventy times seven and invented Hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!" – Mark Twain, ibid.

I am sorry, readers, that this has become a quote-off, a battle of other’s wits; it is nonetheless, I hope, interesting & edifying. There is always somebody who said it better.

I will try to limit my excerpting to only the juiciest & well-written.

"At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, 'who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?' He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said 'I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me.'"

And

" 'Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?' Jesus replied:' 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hand on these two commandments.' "

The disciples did achieve a partial success; they became “like little children” in every manner save physiological. I do have the sense when I am reading the New Testament that I am reading the works of the prepubescent.

Jesus loved love—how cottony-soft. I am sufficiently impressed; I am ready to glaze over the acts of the One God (three gods?) of the Old Testament: the genocides, the infanticides, the caprice, the humiliation of others, the gloating, the divine narcissism, etc.

For Christ’s sake, read the Old Testament. I am not saying that it is an entirely barbaric collection of works, only that it sometimes depicts its god character as, no offense to you (you are not He), a bullying & vainglorious douche.

And the same Jesus commands us to not judge others. Not their taste in music, not their convictions, not their bouffant hair styles or Willy Wonka suits, not their Michael Smith DVDs, not their platitudinous Biblical t-shirts. And I hope his followers would also not only suspend their judgment, but also grow to avoid judgment organically, including that of atheists or homosexuals or whoever else organized religion has smeared.

“Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.” (Matthew vii. I, 2.)—What a strange notion of justice on the part of a “just” judge! --§45, The Antichrist, Friedrich Nietzsche

Jon, I've harped on some of the points I can counter, and have left many - indeed many solid ones - untouched. Not that my opinion holds any sway, but the essay is a solid critique of post-modern Christianity that hopefully would have some post-modern Christians assessing their own post-modern diversions from Jesus' example and more strongly desiring the spirit of a humble foot-washer.

First, subtract all cases of the phrase “post-modern” in this paragraph. Second, give Jesus a little more credit: he also ascended to heaven, transfigured, pimp-walked on water, made a storm chillax, resurrected & pulled a lamb from a yarmulke; foot-washing was a stop gap job.

You and I do not know if Jesus actually performed this act of altruistic self-petting. You & I do not know if Jesus actually did most of what is ascribed to him. We have the writings of persuasive religious salesmen: they knew what worked the crowd (the congregation). Pity, humility, sympathy, friendship, love, etc. are marketable. You like it. You focus on it. You tilt everything in that direction. You smoothen the canonical outliers. You feel loved.

Sincerely,

Your free-willed brother

P.s. I'm compelled to ask: "Is the choice between reform or extinction a moral choice?”

As for this quote, “Is the choice between reform or extinction a moral choice?”—This quote occurs at the end of the essay, as an example of a possible question, not a necessary question: that is, it is not relevant to the thesis, nor is it a dichotomy I would consider present in every moral scenario. The last paragraph demonstrates types of moral questions that, given the hypothesis of the essay, must be considered anew: must be viewed nakedly, as things biological, emotional, economic, statistical & (as Nietzsche would say) Human, All Too Human.

Derren Brown Instant Conversion: Part One


Derren Brown Instant Conversion: Part Two