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