unscriptured

Beer and wine have both been cited as evidence that God loves us and wants us to be happy. I asked God if it’s true. He said that of course he wants us to be happy, after all we’re part of the universe and in many ways God is the universe and so if we’re happy then part of the universe is happy and so at least part of God is happy. Or something like that. I may have been a little drunk at the time, so my memory’s a little fuzzy.

And when I sobered up, I realized that God’s answer may or may not have had anything to do with alcohol as evidence. His answer seemed to address the part about wanting us to be happy without really addressing whether or not alcohol was specifically evidence of that. So we talked again. God told me that it was an issue of our senses, that our senses were the real evidence that he wants us to be happy, so anything that brought joy to our senses could be considered as evidence that he wants us to be happy.

But what about pain then? What about bad smells? What about ugly piles of garbage, or screeching traffic or the taste of earwax? That is, what about all the bad things that our senses, well, sense?

He just handed me the old saw about how can you tell the good without having the bad to provide a contrast. I scoffed. Then he went on and suggested that maybe there was a whole range of sensation that we’re actually shielded from, maybe in a spectrum that goes from a bad of one to a good of a hundred, maybe our human senses only really measure from about fifty to about ninety. To go below fifty, we’d have to be in Hell. To go above ninety, we’d have to be in Heaven.

I was amazed to hear such specific numbers coming from the usually so amorphous Supreme Being and I told him as much. Not to worry, he countered, the numbers were just a thought experiment. In fact the whole thing was just a thought experiment and might not even be true at all. But when it comes down to it, isn’t the whole universe just a thought experiment by God? So where does that leave us?

I went into a cave this week. It was one of those tourist trips, an hour or so of being guided along a trail to look at stalagmites, stalactites, and various other underground formations.

It’s certainly awe inspiring to look at the beautiful crystalline structures and contemplate the millions of years they spend in the making. God came along with me, she said that it was good sometimes to see these things through human eyes. When I asked what she meant by that she said it was an issue of scale. Really a cave is a lot like a geode, only bigger. They’re both just formations within a spherical space. One of them is small enough for us to hold in our hand and the other is big enough for us to wander around inside.

Since God has the whole universe and more as her perspective she has to make a conscious effort to come down and experience things at our scale. It’s sort of like if we could not just try to imagine being an ant crawling around inside a geode but could actually become an ant crawling around inside one.

And for God there’s any number of different scales to wander around in. She can spelunk inside an atom or stand in awe inside a planet. She sometimes wanders from one galaxy to the next the way we go from room to room. I asked her what her favorite was, but she demurred, she said each experience had its own charms and had to be taken for its own values.

Later, though, she did tell me that it was too bad we could never have the sorts of senses that would let us really see the beauty inside a black hole. So yeah, some differences are just matters of scale but some are completely different games. I just do my best to try and know which is which.

Being humans, we like to humanize things. But also, being humans, we recognize that we have limits both in what we can do to humanize things and in what we’ll accept as humanizing.

The thing that I think exemplifies this best is mascots. Corporations have them, sports teams have them, even individual products sometimes have them. A mascot is usually an anthropomorphized animal but is sometimes just a made-up little thing that is neither human nor animal but is none-the-less made to seem alive, and is supposed to make you feel better about whatever the mascot is fronting for. It occurred to me that in some ways were like mascots to God. We’re made in his image, but only as much as the limitations of the universe allow, but I’m not really sure who or what we’re supposed to be fronting. Maybe the universe. Maybe our job is to make God feel better about the universe so he doesn’t just scrap the whole thing and go do something else?

So then what’s our job, what exactly is it that a mascot does? As near as I can tell, what mascots do is wear some kind of silly outfit and run around making fools of themselves.

I’d say we’re doing a pretty good job.

It’s June. Gay Pride month. It’s a time of year that I like to do a little introspection and sort of ask myself about the meaning of being gay. I’ve said before that I don’t think being gay is itself anything to be proud of, but rather, that having the strength of self to recognize our own gayness and embrace it, in the face of pretty much all of our culture telling us to be straight, is something to be proud of.

Now in my own case, being gay feels, at times, like an affectation. That’s not because there’s anything artificial or false about it, but because basically I lead a mostly celibate life. It’s kind of like being married but without someone else in the bed. It’s a thing that’s come about because basically sex just isn’t important enough to me to go through the effort of pursuing, and to put up with the idiosyncrasies of other people’s insecurities and eccentricities to get.

One of the things I’ve heard said about sex, is that it’s like pizza, in that even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good. People describe unembellished sex lives as being “vanilla” and I think they’ve got the food metaphor wrong. They should describe it as “cheese pizza.” Cheese pizza is your basic sex and the various fetishes and embellishments and what not that we bring into our bedrooms (or out of them, as the case may be), those are the toppings. Most people have a few favorite toppings and some people want everything at once, but still, everybody can enjoy a well made cheese pizza.

So what gets me by, while I’m living my mostly celibate life? Masturbation of course. But where is that in my pizza metaphor? Well masturbation is like just having just the crust; it’s like living on bread and water, it’ll sustain you but it won’t make you happy.

But never fear, I’ve got other things to keep me happy.

I’ve been planning a trip abroad. I’ve scheduled my vacation. I’ve purchased non-refundable airline tickets. I’ve gotten tickets to an event in Cambridge, England, and read some chapters on how best to do Disneyland Paris. And on Monday of this week two things happened: my new passport arrived in the mail and I got laid off from work.

Talk about mixed messages. Or maybe the message isn’t mixed, maybe the universe is trying to tell me to get out of the U.S. and don’t look back.

Now, unlike most people, I talk with God on a pretty much daily basis, so if the “universe” is trying to send me messages, well, it’s got a pretty direct line to use. So I took advantage of that. I waited for a lull in conversation with the Big Man and asked him point blank if this juxtaposition was just random chance or was there a message I was supposed to read between the lines?

He equivocated. He does that a lot and it’s probably the most annoying thing about our relationship. So here’s my take away from this week’s activity: I’ve got direct access to God and can’t get straight answers to simple questions, so for those of you that don’t have this access, if you’re expecting to read God’s answer to you in some subtle sign that comes at you in your daily life, you might want to stop waiting and come up with your own answer.

It occurred to me this week that humans mostly start out as Communists but end up as Capitalists.

Okay, those are loaded terms and filled with enough competing ideologies and propagandized misuse that a bald statement like that cannot be left to stand. So, I’ll try and say what brought me to this observation. Anyone who’s hung around with little kids has probably observed that they like to be helpful (though this desire seems to wane at about the same rate as they begin to actually be helpful). I see that as the Communistic impulse, each person contributing to the general good as best they can. Then as they get older, they tend to care more about getting stuff, be it physical or not, for themselves, losing the impulse to help unless it also directly benefits them. I see that as the Capitalistic impulse, each person out to improve there own lot, justified by the idea that if each of us betters our own situation “the rising tide will lift all boats.”

In politics this transition from the selfless to the selfish is noted by the cynical joke/observation that if an American is not a Democrat when he is young, then he has no heart, but if he is not a Republican when he is older then he has no brain.

I talked to God about this, admittedly over-simplified, view of the two big-C ideologies and she told me I was missing an important part. It doesn’t much matter what the driving ideology is, it’s going to devolve down to yet another old joke, “Under Capitalism, man exploits man. Under Communism, it’s the other way around.” The reality is simple, no matter the official system, we need people to lead, and people that want to lead, mostly want power. And when it comes to power, it’s the people willing to do whatever it takes to grab it that have it and are, by that willingness, usually the least deserving. So it comes down to a mashup between the movie “Wargames” and the third law of thermodynamics, the only way to win, is not to play, but there is no way not to play.

You know, I started off thinking about how little kids want to be helpful, and somehow, from there, I’ve just gone and depressed myself.

It’s Memorial Day weekend. Monday is the day that we Americans set aside to honor our fallen soldiers. I was thinking about that and that got me to thinking about how we shouldn’t honor all the soldiers. I mean, some of them did horrific things. Now they may have done them because they thought they were right or even just necessary, or they may have done them because they were just following orders, but if we honored people just for doing what they thought was right, well we wouldn’t have many villains left.

I asked God about it and he said that I was on the right track. It’s important to think about these things. It’s important for us to figure out when our leaders are right and when they’re wrong. And that applies as much to religion as it does to war. Just because somebody tells us that they know what we have to do to get right with God doesn’t mean we should abandon our own common sense and our own inner guide to do what they say.

So take some time this weekend to honor those who died for our rights and those who died for our sins, but also take the time to dishonor those who took advantage of our desire to do what is right, who led us into bad wars and down paths that are paved with good intentions.