Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 5:29am
I am a terrible person and I’d like to explain why. I have zero faith in humanity. I was recently discussing people with my friend Mr. Bowman. It was a perfect setting for the searing pain I feel contemplating the human condition to really make itself known. There is something fundamentally wrong about the way we rationalize. Let me take the well known mantra:
“I’ll believe what I believe, you believe what you believe, as long as no one is getting hurt, who cares.”
I think this is a terrible way to live, yet there are very few people who would not look at this sentence like it is just as obvious as eating. People either fail to realize or simply ignore that mere beliefs influence everything, absolutely everything, we do. Harm can be accounted for in more ways than someone getting shot at or beaten. What I believe, is Nick. You can judge my actions, but you’ll never know where they were coming from.(And how many would argue that’s all that matters?) For the sake of stifling civil unrest, I behave in a way that keeps the peace and gets me by, at least.
The great, and yet extremely problematic thing, is that I’m totally aware of why and what I’m doing all the time. I know my motivation, I know that most people will not receive the things I say the way I meant to convey them, I know just how little I care about humanity when I think about the way they say they are thinking about things. It really and truly depresses me. I see no hope for us. I’m waiting for either the atmosphere to shrivel up, a nuke to get dropped, or random unaccounted for asteroid to finally just get it all over with.
Does it hurt our society to go into wars talking about liberation and civil rights when the people we’re fighting have been entrenched in civil war for hundreds of years over what land is entitled to them by God? Yes. Does it hurt our world economy to have nearly a billion people think you are an infidel and should be killed? No shit. Does it hurt our country to have a president who believe the soldiers he’s sacrificing are just going to heaven anyway, and maybe, just maybe, if he pushes the red button he’ll entice the rapture? You see where I’m going with this. People are harming themselves in more places than they can even care to think about when they believe some invisible Deity is talking to them.
Not only that, but I’m going to take from Sartre and say that when someone makes a choice they are choosing for all people. This means that every time you decide to do something “good” or “bad,” you're essentially waving a flag of acceptance for anybody else to do the same thing as you. With this in mind, I cannot ever think we’ll be able to appreciate our position in time, our opportunity to learn and be something great, as long as people are investing their mental faculties stressing over why God doesn’t seem to be showing them as many “signs” as he did last week.
I hate Dinesh D’Souza. Dinesh frequently debates the so called “new atheists” and belligerently stumbles over critiques of their books. He is a perfect example of how years of training, bad rationalization, and terrible logic can be molded into a very pretty, if you're uninformed, monologue of exasperated equivocation and avoidance of questions. What kills me the most is that as “smart” as he is in trying to protect his faith, he runs into the blatant wall of denying and misrepresenting evidence that any idiot I’m usually in correspondence with doles out of hand. I absolutely hate it.
The easiest way to explain this is when someone tells me “Evolution can’t explain the origin of life.” If you don’t know at least three reasons immediately regarding the ridiculousness of that statement, then you are partially part of the reason I am so distressed. I’m trailing a bit, but back to why I’m a terrible person. I’d snipe Dinesh. I think his ideas are ridiculous, better, I know they are ridiculous and not just because my heart beats faster and my stomach turns in knots the louder I say it. I wouldn’t care about his family. I wouldn’t care if he looked like a martyr for his beliefs. I sincerely hate harmful persistent ignorance to such a degree that I would be completely indifferent to wiping him off the planet.
I know a lot of people with some really shitty lives. They may take solace in thinking that their god loves them, will always protect them, has a plan, can show signs, talks to them, can make them happy after they die (which they frequently want to do), but that does not mean that staying infinitely resigned to that idea is good for them or is providing anything beyond placebo happiness. I have one friend who’s crazy busy all the time, has a pretty asshole family, so what’s she do? Get’s back with her completely dick of a boyfriend who was, no doubt, influenced by the devil previously which totally explains why he treated her like shit in the past.
What’s so great about situations like these is that those people we call friends, you know, the ones who are supposed to help you not make really shitty decisions and give help and support when things are going bad. Those friends are on their knees right next to her, squeezing their eyes real tight and raising their arms waiting for God to take the mean words from her dad’s mouth and waiting for God to stand up to her boyfriend. When I have to watch people I really care about roast themselves over a fire, go ahead and blame me for being an asshole. There is no hope.
It’s stories like that and people like Dinesh that make me not believe in love. It’s too perfect of an ideal. It’s where the idea of God fails miserably time and time again. Too many people are slaves to their emotions and when they want to call one of those love, they simply add the Nth degree to whatever action they feel best displays that love. There is no perfect ideal, one super truth for you to espouse. Why would you think so? Love thy neighbor? My old one took golf clubs to the side of my house. Love they enemies? Yes hold up paper heart cutouts when they “follow us over here” when we pull out of Iraq. Love your family? My mom is a psycho, my friends’ mom’s are even worse. There comes a point where you either suffer endlessly for this notion of love or you do whatever you can to get yourself out of a really shitty situation.
Jesus died because he loves you? What good is a sacrifice if it comes back to life? Not just that, it can even fly up into the clouds. For too long I thought that people died, couldn’t fly, and couldn’t be put on death row for practicing witchcraft in the 21st century, but then I’m told of the West Memphis Three who were tried for a murder that they didn’t do, sentenced on theological grounds, and imprisoned. Right before that I’m sure one of those nice town folk would tell me about this flying invisible man who, let’s never forget bears a striking resemblance to so many gods of antiquity, takes my sins his father lets me have away, and super evil demon beasts are making me beat off and praise stem cells.
I don’t make up how shitty life can be. I’ve tried for too damn long to be super positive and remain “faithful” that ultimately the truth will set us free and win out. The only enjoyment I get anymore is ridiculing things I feel I can no longer change. I can’t refrain from being condescending when I’m in some “heated debate” over the validity of Intelligent Design. I always sound like a belligerent asshole when I say fuck every other word or have that look of “you’ve got to be kidding me” when I hear someone who needs to debate between his love of drugs and love for his girlfriend.
I have to say things for what they are. I’m compelled by the overwhelming sickness I feel trying to cover up the absurdities of some peoples’ positions regarding life. The problem is that I care, I really care about what you believe, and I can’t go off into the darkness and pretend like I’m comfortable when people happily spread damaging ideas that ultimately come back and affect my well-being. In my self-centeredness I seek to influence those around me for the “better.” Not the best and certainly not the perfect truth, just the better. Hell, how about the “stable.”
I was going to stop writing and try to just wait it out, see if I could just be me and let sleeping dogs lie, and I’m simply incapable. When someone tells me something they can’t prove, I want them to know they can’t prove it, let that sink in, understand how damaging that should feel, then re-evaluate why they said it. I want people to be as maddeningly conscious as I feel I am. And I hate to think that they really are. If it turned out that everyone really, like really, understood what was going on, totally got the gist of every argument, was truly informed and still decided to carry on like there wasn’t a problem, then I might as well drag a razor down the river. I’m banking on that not being the case.
5 comments
Updated about 7 months ago
Billy Bowman (Bloomington, IN) wroteat 10:39am on April 24th, 2008
I'm glad I'm such a thought provoking person, i suppose.
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Nick P. wroteat 1:07pm on April 24th, 2008
You steal all your power from those damn cats.
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Billy Bowman (Bloomington, IN) wroteat 1:35pm on April 24th, 2008
haha.. must be... you know you can't resist their cuteness!
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Byron R. Turner II (McKendree) wroteat 3:06pm on April 24th, 2008
I find it hilarious that you have Dinish D'Souza as much as I do. I recently met him and went to a lecture by him this past month. He's a fucking idiot.
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Nick P. wroteat 4:35pm on April 24th, 2008
I honestly can't listen to him speak without imagining me endless beating on him with a baseball bat trying to cut off some tangent of logical excrement.
