unscriptured

So my last post talked about how time seems to speed up as we get older. The older we get the more we find ourselves asking, “Where did all the time go?” But that’s not the only thing that goes. For me, one of the main things that’s going is my hair. But the hair doesn’t just go all on it’s own; before the follicles go their color goes.

Actually, when I think about it, that’s kind of backwards. Sure my hair is going grey, but it’s not the parts that have gone grey that are going away. My hair first started going grey when I was twenty-six. Okay, God is reading over my shoulder as I write this and he complains that that’s not strictly accurate. What happened at twenty-six is that the hair at my temples went grey. Nothing else lost its color until sometime in my early forties. And before God starts splitting hairs over my claims of color, let me just say that my hair has never been on the dark side, so while the parts that have changed are technically grey, they’re close enough to white that you could call them that as well.

But anyway, I was saying that the notion that the color goes and then the hair goes is kind of backwards. What seems to actually be happening is a two-pronged attack; part of the hair turns grey, and other parts of the hair fall out. And actually, if you want to get technical, all of the hair falls out, it’s just that in going bald, not all of it then grows back in. And again, “but,” but what I actually wanted to talk about now is not the going bald part but the going grey part. In my case, the grey at the temples has spread somewhat, but this just means that all of the temples are grey rather than merely the dashing streak that I had in my twenties. As to what else of the hair on top is going grey, pretty much nothing. My beard, on the other hand, is now nearly completely white.

And that just seems wrong. Going grey is a sign of growing old, but it’s my youngest hair that is losing its color. I pestered God about this and he gave me the kind of story that you’d expect out of a con man. He told me that since men only have beards for at most about four fifths of our life, that that means that the beard’s lifetime is shorter than our lifetimes. So that means that every year that goes by for me is like a year and a quarter going by for my beard. It’s sort of like dog years but not as extreme. Anyway, this means that relatively speaking, by the time I reached a certain age, my beard was older than me, and so it going grey first was actually the expected thing. Even though it makes a certain amount of sense, I still think God is probably just pulling my leg on this one. What I need to do is to start looking at pictures of older men naked. If the theory is true, I should see that first the beards go grey, then, in even older men, the underarms and groin, then finally the hair on top. I can’t wait to get started. Now I not only get to look at porn but I get to say that I’m doing it for God. Not bad. Not bad at all.

One of those things that everyone learns as they get older is that time seems to keep getting shorter. When we were kids it took forever for Christmas to finally get here and now that were grown the years flip by like pages flying off the calendar in some old movie.

When I was younger I had time to get all sorts of things done. Of course, when I was younger I was also usually late to bed, needed an alarm to get up, and had a hard time getting into work on time. I claim that these facts are irrelevant but God keeps telling me they’re not. I tried making my case but she didn’t have time to listen.

After she was gone, I got to wondering how time must seem to her. I mean she’s been around for even longer than the universe, so time must seem like it’s going really, really fast to her. That just got me to wondering then, if the universe is “everything” and God created the universe, then she had to be around before everything, which means she’s not part of “everything,” but then that means that “everything” isn’t “everything.” It’s sort of an anti-tautology and it makes my brain hurt. I guess that’s why I’m not a priest or a preacher or anything, figuring out this supernatural stuff is hard.

Maybe I could figure it out if I had enough time, but as I already mentioned, there just isn’t enough time.

Last week I mentioned that while having a little bit of fun God and I came up with two alternate “explanations” for the universe. Theories that offer more than the “simple” scientific view of the world, but that don’t require God to be behind everything. Last week I talked about the universe as a giant bit of computer memory. Now I’m going to tell you about our second idea. It’s called Polytheistic Solipsism.

In Polytheistic Solipsism, the universe is a shared hallucination.  We are all beings of pure thought.  The physical reality we experience is the result of consensus driven story-telling amongst us all.  Some people are better at pushing their ideas into the physical realm than others and so they have more power over the universe.  This doesn’t necessarily give them a better life, after all some people have pretty horrific stories they want to tell.  We can overcome the influence of strong individuals though, by combining our wills together to affect the universe in a greater fashion than we do as individuals.  This is a very democratic view of the universe, but still has a touch of feudalism to it.  Getting a large group of people to pray for something is an attempt to get our “real selves,” our selves that exist outside of physical reality, to join together in a cause and to change the universe in a way that is consciously directed.

We are all gods, hence “polytheistic” and the universe is literally what we imagine it to be, hence “solipsism.”

Polytheistic Solipsism can be used to explain miracles (two thousand years ago we had a collective belief in “magic” and so magic and miracles were possible), reincarnation (our “outside” selves continue on and can choose to reenter the physical world after they have finished one story and are ready to tell another), and even luck.

It even explains science. Just as the rules to some games have changed over time, by agreement amongst the players, the rules of the universe have changed. Those of us that collectively believe in a rational, explainable universe now dominate the discussion, that is have control of the hallucination, so now magic is out and science is in. There are still pockets of people that want a less rational universe so we get things like poltergeists and UFO sitings. The next time you experience something that seems a little paranormal, maybe you should look around and wonder what the people near you believe in. Maybe if the universe is weirder than you think it’s really because the people around you are weirder than you think.

One of the games that God and I play is to try to imagine what the universe would be like without her. Since the universe is what we perceive we’d have to come up with something that would be consistent with what we perceive but which doesn’t require God to be behind everything. Now science is already doing a pretty good job of explaining the universe without having to resort to miracles, magic or messiahs, but we wanted to come up with ideas that offer a more expansive reality than what science shows. I mean, after all, what good is an alternate view of the universe if it doesn’t offer more than science?

So far we’ve come up with two interesting “explanations.”

The first and least is the metaphor that the universe is a giant bit of computer memory with all the bits set to one and variation only provided by our inability to accurately read out those ones.

This one can be really hard to get across to non-computer people and, amusingly, is just as hard to get across to computer people but for completely different reasons.

You probably know that everything inside of computers is represented by ones and zeroes. Technically we’re talking about “digital computers.” There are other types of computers, but that’s another discussion.  Anyway, using these binary representations you can describe, if not everything, damned near everything.  Those ones and zeroes, when properly organized and when interpreted through the right software, which is itself a collection of ones and zeroes, can be used to produce this blog post, the carefully crafted world of a Pixar movie, or the haphazard collective reality of Second Life. Much like quantum foam can be seen as the core variability that leads to all the diversity of the universe, the simple difference between one and zero leads to all the variation of what we see on our computer screens.  At the base level, those ones are considered “on” and those zeroes are considered “off.”  Now imagine that the multiverse is described in a giant computer.  Imagine that every bit in that computer is actually set to “on.”  Everything is true and everything exists simultaneously.  We, however, are imperfect readers of that memory.  We read that memory and we see it as a series not of infinite “ones” but as a series of ones and zeroes.  Because we’re all humans, which is to say we’re all the same kind of peripheral, we mostly malfunction in the same way, which is to say that we pretty much all misread the same bits as being zero and the same bits as being one, so that the reality we experience is pretty much the same from one person to the next.  But everyone has their own slight differences, so everyone experiences the universe just a little different from everyone else.  Each of us has some unique zeroes of our own.

That’s our first “theory.”  We don’t have a name for it yet.

I’m going to wait until next week to tell you the other theory, that’ll give you a little time to look at the world as a series of ones and blind spots. Maybe it’ll open up some possibilities for you.

June already? My how time flies. June is important to me because it’s Gay Pride month and while I don’t have a lot of pride in being gay myself, God has assured me that it’s okay to take pride in the accomplishments of the gay community as a whole.

Just in my lifetime we’ve gone from being the love that dare not speak its name to being a legally protected minority on the brink of having our committed relationships fully sanctified around the country and the world. I should probably mention the world before my country, though, since that’s where the first marriage gains happened, much to my disappointment even in the face of my elation.

When I was growing up society did an awfully good job of protecting me from knowing that homosexuality even existed, a state of ignorance that many today still wish to foist upon our kids. Let me tell you, not knowing that other people did the things that I did with other boys, not only didn’t stop me from doing them, or enjoying them, but didn’t stop me from growing up gay. The only thing it did stop me from was learning how to dance.

Really.

Even while I was still assuming that when I grew up I would marry a woman and raise a passel of kids, I didn’t see the point in learning to dance. Dancing serves more or less as an audition for our sexual abilities, and I really didn’t see a point in learning things that were supposed to help me get into bed with girls. Of course since my sense of rhythm seems to be a few degrees out of kilter with everyone around me, I might never have been any good at dancing, but if I’d known that boys too could hold each other cheek to cheek, I might at least have been motivated to give it a try.

It’s Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of barbecue season. This weekend in millions of backyards all across the United States families will get in touch with their inner cavemen by charring some animal flesh over open flames, thus demonstrating their dominance over nature and their position at the top of the food chain.

And what does God think about this?

He thinks the sauces matter more than the rubs.

I saw the movie “Priest” this week. Without giving too much away let me just say that it’s a vampire movie that takes very little from traditional vampire tales. Even the involvement of religion, which should be obvious from the title, doesn’t have any of the usual “magical” element of pitting ecclesiasticism against the undead. Not that the vampire’s in this movie are “undead.”

But what the movie does do, almost as a sideshow, is give a glimpse into one of the ways the world would look if religion and government were the same thing. The big anti-catchphrase of the film is “if you go against the church, you go against God.” I asked God if that wasn’t the inevitable view of all religions and if the world portrayed in the movie, where actually caring about God was no longer the point of the church, wasn’t an inevitable aspect of combining religion and government. What he pointed out to me was that the phrase, as used in the movie, had the trappings of religion but none of the substance, so saying that it represented religion was no more valid than saying that the movie “Outland” represented science fiction. “Outland” is a western, it’s what’s called “space opera” in that it has the outward trappings of science fiction but doesn’t have the science as any sort of intrinsic part, in other words, it has the form but not the function. If you were to replace the religious trappings in the movie, it would not change the story at all. You could change the phrase to “if you go against the government, you go against the people,” change the “priests” into “warriors” and really nothing else would have to change. Okay, there’s a scene involving “confession,” but you could make it a call to a psychiatrist, and again, only the form would change, not the substance.

So what God then pointed out to me is that in both cases, in the case of the movie being “about” religion or in the case of it being about an overreaching, oppressive, dysfunctional government more concerned with it’s own survival than with the well being of its constituents, what it is really saying is that over time the institutions of man often become more about themselves than about the people they serve. When we serve our institutions for their good, and not for the good of those the institutions serve, that is when we go against God. This is true whether those institutions are religions, governments, or corporations. While we need to band together in groups, often very large groups, to accomplish more than we can as individuals, we should never forget that it is the individuals that matter, not the institutions. We may, at times, have trouble seeing the forest for the trees, but that’s actually not so bad. Without the trees, there is no forest.