Since 2001, I’ve been struggling with a crisis of faith. I was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church as a baby, participated in the Eucharist, and was Confirmed. I went to a parochial elementary school and junior high. I went to a high school that is run by the Jesuits. In college, and in the beginning of med school, I participated in the Catholic Community.

I still believe that the person presented by the four Gospels known as Jesus Christ is someone worth emulating—someone who cares for the unwanted, the down-trodden, the outcast. Someone who is willing to face up to authority and to unflinchingly stand true to your beliefs, without arrogance, without false bravado.

I still keep the words from the sermon on the mount in my heart: blessed are the poor, blessed are the hunger, blessed are those who, in their quest for justice, are made to suffer at the hands of authority. Blessed are those who are merciful, blessed are those who strive to bring peace to the world.

But in 2001, evil and/or deluded people performed evil deeds in the name of God—Muslim and Christian alike—and in the religious communities around me, no one heeded my cry for understanding. I was treated to dirty looks, and shaking heads, as if I were the one who was crazy and deluded.

The Roman Catholic Church’s failure to express true contrition for the acts of perversion their representatives have done over the years was another blow to my faith. The continued ranting and raving of sick fucks like Pat Robertson for vengeance upon his enemies and the failure of other Christians to condemn him made me wonder what the point of believing was. The demented, idiotic leaders of this nation who are intent on turning our secular democracy into a Christian fascist theocracy, every bit as sick and twisted as the madness spewed by bin Laden, made me wonder if God even existed.

My religious education through the years has taught me that God does not make himself/herself manifest to human beings in flashy, ostentatious ways. In my mind, much of the Old Testament is allegorical, metaphorical, and reflects the incomplete thinking of less sophisticated people, or more likely, the imperfect translation of less sophisticated, more superstitious people. So while I don’t believe in the literal appearance of a burning bush, that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to know the story of Moses, and to draw lessons from it. So I’m not expecting God to suddenly appear with the legions of heaven behind him. I’m not expecting him to show up in my dreams telling me that everything is OK. More than anything in the Scriptures, I think of what Galileo told the Inquisitors:

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

God has already given us the answers. I’m not just talking about sacred scriptures. I’m talking about the totality of human experience. About our relationship to each other, and to the physical world. The difficult part is understanding it all. Faith is not about easy answers, or blind obedience. Faith is about trying to understand. Without doubt, there cannot be faith.

But in the end, I cannot completely be rid of my desire to believe that a massive, benign hyperintelligence exists somewhere in the great beyond. Call it wishful thinking. Call it madness. I know that what everyone says God is, isn’t. Or at least, it’s not the whole of the story. Each culture in the world has an idea of what their supreme deity is like, and I think the post-modern, pre-Singularity vision of what this might be has already been postulated in works of speculative fiction.

I think of Charlie Stross’s Eschaton, the massively distributed galactic AI that shows signs of near-omnipotence, near-omniscience, near-omnipresence. Or Philip K Dick’s VALIS: the vast active living intelligence/information system that has been keeping its eye over us since the beginning of civilization.

I’ll accept the idea that it’s all just wish-fulfillment. Really, it’s just a more sophisticated form of an imaginary friend. But the fact of the matter is that, just as we can never prove the existence of God, we can never prove his non-existence either. (And if you believe in the Singularity, then it follows that a being with properties of God has a possibility of existing. And if you believe in Eternal Inflation, then anything that is possible is inevitable.)

In the end, I think the most honest answer to the question of “Does God exist?” is “I don’t know.” Anything else is dogmatism, in my mind.

But these thoughts come up when I overhear someone ask, “Is Obama Muslim?” Google leads me to this blog post that records Obama’s thoughts on his religion, and what he means by faith. It is the best answer I’ve ever heard someone give to the public at large. It’s just too bad that many people are too simple, too stupid, too wrong-headed to even have a chance to understand what he’s saying.

In the Western model of education, there is an operational distinction between physics and metaphysics. The former gets you grants from the Department of Defense, and opens doors to working at NASA or JPL. You get to work with nuclear reactors and supercolliders and fusion bombs and Einstein-Bose condensates. The latter is stereotyped as the demesne of hippies trapped in the 1960s and undergrads who have no idea what they want to do with their lives. Generally, the discipline is called philosophy and not metaphysics, but a rose is a rose. You know you’re pretty marginal when even the social science and humanities people look at you with that “What the hell do you do?” look in their eyes.

What is strange is that this was not always so. When the Roman Catholic Church held sway over the Western world, physics and metaphysics were the same thing. If you think about it, it makes a hell of a lot of sense. Even in this present day, physicists expend a huge amount of effort into trying to figure out (1) where everything comes from and (2) where everything goes. In other words, a Theory of Everything™. The current incarnation of the most popular theory out there is called M-theory, where the M could easily stand for “meta.” The more popular nomenclature is String Theory, and it’s really just contemporary metaphysics dressed up with the trappings of mathematics since none of it is in a testable state at this time.

But I’m not here to argue semantics, nor really discuss the curious divide between hard science and philosophy.

What started me on this tack is going to midnight mass on Christmas.

If you’ve been following this blog for any amount of time, you may recall me mentioning I’ve been in a terrible crisis of faith since 2001. I was born and raised Roman Catholic, was baptised, participated in the Eucharist, and was Confirmed. I attended a parochial elementary school and junior high, and went to an all-boys high school run by Jesuits. Even all through college and most of med school, I still went to mass every Sunday.

And then a bunch of lunatic-fringe Muslims hijacked a few planes and crashed them into the WTC and the Pentagon.

This is not where everything went to shit quite yet.

We all know that religious fundamentalists are scary people who need to be quarantined and maybe even euthanized. Right? Right? I mean, it’s not surprising that a bunch of whack jobs would do such a thing, right?

That’s where I part company with most of the Western world, I guess.

The sad thing is that what we really have to chose between are Islamic psychos and the Christian fascists. Religious fundamentalists are going to destroy the world, and there is nothing we can do to stop them.

Despite my training in Western science, and despite the disappointments I’ve suffered from my faith, I still haven’t abandoned the idea that there might be a God after all. I seriously doubt that he/she is like the God described in the Old Testament, but I think that the possibility of the existence of an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient hyperintelligence is greater than zero, meaning that, given enough time in the universe, one or several are bound to occur.

I mean, I really doubt that the God that these sick fucks worship actually exists, but I still haven’t abandoned the idea that there might be some kind of Presence™ out there that is relatively benign, that may or may not take an interest in our little pale blue dot orbiting and unremarkable yellow sun in the backwaters of an unremarkable spiral galaxy sitting in the midst of an unremarkable galaxy cluster.

The fact that it’s a possibility that isn’t ruled out by the laws of physics nor the laws of thermodynamics means that atheism can’t be right, either. I think the only honest way to go without being overly dogmatic and ramming your beliefs down other people’s throats is to be agnostic. Wishy-washy maybe, but what if the Flying Spaghetti Monster really exists? What then?

Seriously, though, from the atheists that I’ve seen who are vocal on the Internet, it just seems like yet another religion from which you can exclude others and condemn them. Not really my taste, and if you can’t disprove the existence of an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient hyperintelligence, then how do you know what the truth is? You can’t. Simple as that.

Mind you, this is by far not an apologia for the raving lunatics who claim to have the keys to Salvation™. I think anyone who is dogmatic about anything but can’t prove their point with reproducible experiments should just shut the hell up and let people who have real talent get on with the business of discovering the inner workings of the universe. Anyone who thinks that they, and only they, know the truth is either selling something, or smoking something.

The reason I believe that omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent hyperintelligences may exist is the simple fact that we know matter can self-organize, and that self-organized matter can become intelligent (perhaps I’m using the word too loosely, but you get the picture.) And it so happens that some self-organized intelligent entities (read, human beings) are interested in trying to create artificial intelligences that have some or all of these capabilities. If AI is truly possible (and it is still an “if,” since we have yet to produce a program that can really pass the Turing Test), then it should follow that hyper-AI is also possible. While the only intelligent form of matter we know happens to consist of mostly carbon and uses a highly distributed network of networks of nanoprocessors (in other words, neurons organized into nuclei, organized into functional partitions in the brain) for computing tasks, operating in a mostly aqueous environment, we are, after all, actively trying to replicate or at least emulate this functionality on silicon. And if it can be done in silicon, why not in uranium or lanthanum? Why not in a 10,000 kelvin gas cloud with hydrogen nuclei and hydrogen nuclei encoding state and performing quantum calculations? Or in a network of quasars, in which gamma-ray bursts are analogous to the release of neurotransmitters in our brains?

So I think that it is still possible that something like a God may be out there, although I am rather certain that we have no idea what he/she/it is truly like.

In literature, such a creature is already well described. Charlie Stross describes The Eschaton, a highly distributed hyperintelligence inhabiting the galaxy, in his books Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise. And while the Eschaton may have limits, it seems pretty close to being omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. Other distributed intelligences haunt the science fiction scene, like the Oracle and the Architect from the Matrix, Wintermute and Neuromancer from Neuromancer, Skynet from the Terminator Series. And while I have never read anything that Vernon Vinge wrote, I get the sense that he believes that our descendants are destined to evolve into similar creatures, for whom the vast vacuum of space is not a limit.

Arthur C Clarke’s laws always come back to me. The one I always remember is that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” If this is the case, how do we know that miracles can’t be explained scientifically? I think it’s because, in a lot of ways, the average human mind is lazy. Instead of wanting to find the truth, the human mind just wants a pretty story that they can use as an answer for whenever their actions are challenged. Just think of the times that real people have actually, sincerely, claimed that God made them do it. (And think of the mayhem and suffering most of these people have wreaked on the world at large. God’s name is definitely sullied by the never-ending line of cheaters, liars, bullies, and outright assholes who claim to have a direct hotline to the deity him/herself.)

But I stand by my belief that fundamentalists should be killed, incarcerated, brainwashed, or lobotomized. If we got rid of these fucks, we could probably end like 95% of the problems of humanity.

Level I

Not sure what exactly changed this evening, after I gave up with lying in bed, weary, defeated. Maybe it was the odd impulse to write this line on a random scrap of paper:

Let lightning strike me now!

Not sure what that’s supposed to mean either, but here we are.

Level II

The problem with existentialism (at least the Camusian variety) is that it doesn’t have any answers. It is, in a way, an anti-religion. (Although I am wary of saying that religion has any answers either.) Or, perhaps more accurately, it is a meta-religion.

Level III

I’m trying to find a satisfying explanation for the term religion. Like most -ion words in English, it’s from Latin, and [various sources][1] parse it to be re- and ligere or perhaps re- and legere.

Ligo, ligere, lixi, lictus, or perhaps ligo, ligare, ligavi, ligatus both mean “to bind,” and various Christian theologians use to illustrate the relationship between God and humanity. Interestingly, during the Roman Republic and then the Roman Empire, there was a governmental position known as the lictor who essentially seemed to serve as the bodyguard of anyone who held imperium. Lictor seems obviously derived from ligo, ligere, lixi, lictus, and may refer to the fasces, the “bundle” borne by the lictor, seemingly symbolizing imperium itself.

The fasces make me think of agriculture, and there is a lot to be said about the nature of someone who has the power to grow food, and how many early creation myths probably center around the harvest.

On the other hand, lego, legere, lexi, lectus is generally parsed as “to read” and it is where lex, “the law”, is derived from. Since the religions that Western Civilization are generally concerned with are all based on various sacred scripture, this would certainly fit as well. Legere can also be conjugated as lego, legere, legi, legatus, however, from whence legion is derived, and it means “to gather,” “to collect.” In this sense, religion can be seen as a collection of traditions.

When seen through a Christian perspective, the idea of gathering is very integral. One of the sacraments, Holy Communion, is based entirely on the notion of gathering together a community, and it is this sacrament that the Catholic Mass centers on.

Interestingly, the word lignum, meaning “wood”, also seems to be related. Whether this hearkens to some kind of tree worship (I immediately think of the Druids), or whether this is simply the fact that wood is something that is gathered remains to be discovered.

Level IV

Etymology non-withstanding, I was taught that “religion” meant “way of life” and therefore could be broadly applied to many philosophical systems that are actually deployed as solutions to the problems of existence, and thereby definitely including Eastern philosophies such as Taoism and Buddhism.

So what I mean by “metareligion” is that existentialism doesn’t describe a way of life, per se, but rather can encompass any and all religions. In other words, just because you believe in God doesn’t mean you can’t be existentialist, or probably more accurately, just because you’re an existentialist doesn’t mean you can’t believe in God.

Level V

But this was all a segue to the matter at hand: at some point, you’ve got to make a decision. You can’t just sit on that existentialist point of crisis for the rest of your life. Either you make a decision, or the universe makes the decision for you.

(As an aside, existential hell exists because you can always revisit that point of crisis, even when the decision has already been made, even when it was completely out of your control. Case in point, from time to time, I still think about the point of crisis I had about 10 years ago, when I decided to tell A how I felt about her. This memory can still wake me up with a cold sweat, and I think a part of my soul withered after that day.)

But what is gone is gone. What never was, shall never be, world without end.

Level VI

So filled with the energy of existential release, I set myself to work on decreasing the amount of entropy filling my apartment. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for me to keep things in order. I suppose I just have too much stuff, and I would probably be well served by just throwing everything away.

One of these days, I may finally get everything into order, but it’s definitely not going to be any time soon.

[1]: http://www.giffordlectures.org/Browse.asp?PubID=TPNATR&Volume=0&Issue=0&ArticleID=4 “Natural Religion, vol. 1 1888–1892 Friedrich Max Müller”

Wow. I find the governor of Georgia’s attempt to ask for rain extraordinarily presumptious. What gives us the right to ask God for anything, really? I am reminded by a scene out of the Bible where the priests of Baal have a theological contest with the prophet Elijah.

But seriously, why should God help you if you’ve done absolutely nothing to help yourself? It doesn’t take divine intervention to start conservation measures: to not use your hose to clean the yard or wash your car, to plant drought-tolerant shrubbery, to not run the water while you’re brushing your teeth. Did the people of Georgia really pursue any of these things before demanding that their deity give them rain?

(revised from ”Re: response to victor & malaki)

It is interesting to ponder whether or not Southeast Asians had a concept of “god” before the advent of Hinduism. There are quite a few religions where Supreme Beings do not really exist, for example, Buddhism and Taoism, but in these days, we tend to get all riled up about the People of the Book (meaning, Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, and Muslims)

But the discussion of “god” is hampered because of the vagueness of the term, which I think encompasses at least three different concepts: (1) a single benevolent creator entity found in monotheistic religions: e.g., God, YHWH, Allah, Ahura Mazda (2) mostly human entities with some superhuman powers: e.g., Zeus, Odin, Tiamat, Vishnu (3) spiritual forces associated with natural, domestic, or agricultural phenomenon: kami from Japan, genii from Ancient Rome, elves from Scandinavia.

From what I understand, spiritual beliefs in Southeast Asia were more resonant with concept (3) I’m also not sure that “worship” is necessarily the right term, or more likely, “worship” means different things depending on which god-concept you subscribe to, in which case it seems likely that the people who inhabited what later became the Philippines worshipped spirits that governed nature, home life, and agriculture. I recall that the spirit of rice was very prominent, as were the spirits of the jungle, the river, and the sea. I vaguely remember watching a video about how the forging of the kris blade was a ritual regarding the spirit of the sea, but I may just be making this up now.

Also, I think it is in the Darangen (the definitive epic poem of the Maranao people) that I first came across the word diwata used to refer to such spirits. The same word is found in Tagalog to mean, among other things, according to the dictionary, muse and goddess, and is undoubtedly related to the Tagalog word diwa, which I understand means soul or spirit.

Of note, diwa and diwata look obviously related to the Sanskrit word deva which mean deity, and through the putative Indo-European mother tongue is in turn related to Greek theos and Latin deus, meaning god.

In any case, it’s true that there aren’t any documents from the pre-Hindu era. Which makes sense since it seems generally believed that the writing systems evolved from Indic sources. But a lot of the information is apparently preserved in living culture, if my professor is to be believed. True, there aren’t really any “pure” Austronesian cultures anymore, but, much as Celtic animistic beliefs (i.e., the beliefs of the Druids) persisted in England despite the introduction and dominance of Roman, Scandinavian, and finally Christian beliefs, a prevalent idea is that a lot of the ancient Southeast Asian rituals are couched in terms of Hindu, Islamic, and Christian beliefs. (Like the anecdote that when Catholicism was introduced into the Philippines, saints simply took on the characteristics of whatever local spirits or deities were worshipped.) I immediately think of Maria Makiling, and the Santo Niño.

So, yeah, we will never know, but we can make educated guesses.

So I was eating by myself at a restaurant the other day, and for some reason they were playing all these late ‘70’s/early ‘80’s songs, like “I Say A Little Prayer” by Dionne Warwick, and then “How Deep Is Your Love?” by the Bee Gees. The latter especially took me back to my early childhood. My dad used to own a blue AMC Concord and it had an 8-track tape player and I think he had tapes of Neil Sedaka, Kenny Rogers, and the Bee Gees.

This lead me to the notion of how impermanent magnetic tape is as a storage medium. All it would take to wipe it out is a moderate burst of electromagnetic activity, something that can be readily managed by solar flares, or an EMP weapon. And the more worrisome thing is that we still rely on electromagnetic storage—specifically, your hard drive.

Which led me to thinking about how I should backup my hard drive.

Which led me to thinking how quickly I might be able to get my Linux box with 8 hard drives up and running again.

Today, I had a discussion about how, in this country, we have allowed ourselves to be led by technology, and have failed to address the ethical quandries therein. I am referring specifically to medical technology. What were once thoroughly fatal diseases just one generation ago, are now survivable. It used to be that a heart attack was frequently an instant trip to the morgue, as was a stroke. All we could do was cross our fingers, give you a slug of morphine, and maybe an aspirin, and wish you luck. Now, people, for better or worse, are surviving seven, eight, nine heart attacks, are having multiple bypass grafts and stents, and still they don’t modify their diets or stop smoking, and, as the medical bills mount, with no relief in sight, sometimes with hospitals having to eat the cost, and as hospitals continue to go under, leaving the underserved with basically no health care, we have to ask ourselves, is it worth it to try to salvage those who are basically unsalvageable?

My thoughts then strayed to the NICU, the neonatal intensive care unit, where we manage to artificially sustain what used to be known as an aborted fetus. This is not without terrifying consequences. Many of these babies, weighing little more than a pound, suffer injury from oxygen-starvation, frequently ending up with severe brain injury, and sometimes intractable seizures, sometimes unable to eat without having a tube jammed into their bellies. And we can keep them alive for years, to the point where we transfer them from the pediatric service to the internal medicine service. There are children who continue to live by completely artificial means, where it is questionable whether they lead meaningful lives. And, seriously, I wonder if some of their lives are even as meaningful as my dog’s life, who at least can move around and exercise some volition. Do we really know how much these kids might be suffering?

And I stopped to think why the U.S. alone has failed to address the notion of rationing care and the concept of futility. Sure, there’s the old canard about how we’re a capitalistic society, and if you can pay, you should be able to get whatever you want, but clearly this is no longer the situation. It turns out that almost no one actually pays for their health care. How many of us could actually afford to pay what a CAT scan actually costs? Or even an ER visit? Hell, some of these miracle drugs we have are barely affordable (and many simply can’t.) Somehow we’ve found ourselves in this bizarre tangled weave, where the government has mandated that businesses provide health care insurance, when in fact it’s a misnomer to call it insurance. Getting ill is not a chance proposition, like your house catching fire or getting washed away in a flood. Getting ill is an inevitability and the only way you could possibly avoid it is if you died instantly instead.

And I stopped to think about the Puritanical origins of this country, that twisted form of so-called Christianity known as Calvinism. Hell, maybe it’s even a twisted form of Calvinism. There is this idea that your external appearances and circumstances are the end result of your virtuous or sinful acts. So if you were ugly or crippled, it must be because you deserved it. In this Puritanical world-view, nothing was left to chance, everything had a reason. (I suppose this presaged Deism.) And the reasons were reached by teleology.

So I kind of wonder if that’s not the real reason why the so-called religious are loathe to let people who cannot possibly lead any meaningful existence continue to exist. Because they have this kind of sick, self-righteousness where they imagine that you have to suffer and pay for your imagined sins. When clearly a one-pound baby couldn’t have possibly had any chance to commit a sin. When we know for a fact that many illnesses are caused by microscopic organisms and something that God has created as punishment.

Hell, this attitude of many Americans has been revealed by their reaction to AIDS, blaming it on homosexuality and sexual promiscuity, and by their reaction to other STDs, and their refusal to allow the use of protection for sexual intercourse.

Then, since it’s almost Christmas, I suppose it’s natural that my thoughts should stray to thinking about Jesus Christ. And for some reason, I started meditating on the commandments he was supposed to have given. Namely, (1) Love God (2) Love your neighbor. And I stopped to think about it. I think he actually left another one: Do not be afraid.

So I feel like the average American “Christian” is a big hypocrite, wishing ill-will on their fellow human beings, and mostly, by being afraid. The fact that they let terrorists affect them is a sign of their lack of faith in God. Didn’t he say “do not be afraid, I am with you”?

I think the book in The Chronicles of Narnia that left the strongest impression on me was The Magician’s Nephew[site by Keith Webb][on wikipedia]. The setting that I remember most strongly is the ruined and blasted world of Charn, destroyed by the White Witch Jadis by using magic that seems strongly allegorical to nuclear weaponry. I was struck by how the monarchy of Charn started off being benevolent and wise, then became corrupted and evil, eventually spawning the monstrosity that is the White Witch. I also remember the hue of redness encompassing Charn. (Was C.S. Lewis trying to evoke medieval visions of Hell?) What was interesting to me was the explanation for this reddish light—Charn’s sun is a red giant star. While this could’ve just been an idiosyncrasy of this particular world, it actually evoked in me the idea that the civilization of Charn had existed so long that their formerly sun-like star had exhausted its nuclear fuel and was beginning to cool and expand. For some reason (although this is apparently not the reason for its destruction), this also reminds me of the destruction of the planet of Krypton, but that is neither here nor there.

In a work that is so theologically-based, specifically, Christianity-based, it is hard not to think about theological issues, and the idea that popped into my head is the question as to whether corruption is an inevitability without saving grace.

Now the laws of thermodynamics tells us that disorder ever increases, so it would seem that in fact, this is the natural way of things. And yet, human life, and life in general, seems to belie this basic law, and points to the fact that thermodynamics is, at its base, a statistical argument, and cannot easily predict local effects or the ultimate fate of an open system. It cannot be denied that some branches of evolution have led to more and more complex ordered organisms. While we we cannot ever prove that we evolved from primordial slime forming the first prokaryotic cell, we know for a fact that we all start out as a single eukaryotic cell in the womb (or in an egg in some organisms.) We also have a lot of evidence that mitochondria are descended from prokaryotes. In the long run, yes, it is still an increase of disorder because our complexity comes at the price of the creation of our waste products which are incredibly disordered.

My point, however, is that it would seem that it is inevitable that people can start off good and noble, and over the years and the generations, they will definitely be evil and base. Lewis’ commentary on the monarchs of Charn outline this idea and apply it to government, and I can’t help but immediately apply this to the decay of the American Republic.

The interesting thing is the idea of error-correction. This is part and parcel of our modern information culture and economy. The brilliance of the Internet is based significantly on the idea of error-correction. Error-correction mostly prevents the inevitable corruption of ordered information (although we all know nothing is perfect) and better than 99 times out of 100, things turn out O.K. Life itself is pretty good at error-correction—the replication of DNA is wonderfully faithful, although clearly there are errors that are made. (And yet errors are the basis of evolution and increasing complexity and order.)

I think one of the unique things about the American Republic is its basis in a potentially self-correcting document—the Constitution. But, more immediately, the checks and balances established by the Constitution are also error-correcting.

The reason why the Republic is in such crisis is that the Bush administration and their adherents are greatly intent on (1) dismantling these checks and balances and (2) destroying the Constitution. Once these error-correcting mechanisms are disabled, we put ourselves on the fast-track of inevitable corruption, evil, and atrocities and crimes against humanity (and while Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are bad enough, you can be assured that things are bound to get much, much worse. With error-correction disabled in DNA replication, what you inevitably get is cancer. And I tend to think about Empire this way. Empire is analogous to cancer—eventually fatal to its host in the end.

So, if you wanted to be unnecessarily mystical, you can think of error-correction (and selection pressure) as the Hand of God. God® and His Saving Grace™ are the only way to prevent the inevitable corruption and decay of the universe, and the only way to actually increase local complexity and order.

(And by stretching some metaphors, Bush and his cronies are necessarily agents of Satan, who are interested in disabling error-correction.)

So maybe all Republicans aren’t religious fundamentalists, but I kind of wonder if there isn’t some sort of congruence between the two mind sets—namely, the kind of ignorance and stupidity that makes you so sure that what you know is absolutely right and anyone that disagrees with you is absolutely wrong.

And it may not have been a Republican or a religious fundamentalist who gave Mayor Nagin the smackdown for calling the ruins of the WTC a “hole in the ground”, but, give me a break.

I don’t think that place is holy or sacred at all, that it should be revered so. I think Ground Zero is an abomination, and I’m glad that they’re building on top of it so that we can begin anew. That place, that event, will always be a memory of abject horror and death, of the evil that human beings can commit. And frankly, it is also a monument to the ineptitude and incompetence of the government, for failing to protect its citizens (and the 9/11 commission shows us that it was indeed preventable), and, in the aftermath, feeding the flames of fear and terror instead of reassuring the American people that terror shall have no power of us, and that we will continue to brandish and wield our freedom in the face of those who would commit such crimes against humanity. If anything, Bush and his cronies and the stupid homeland security terror-alert colors and the incompetent handling of airports for the sake of ”security theater” are all sops to the terrorists, and every day we allow these things to impinge on our freedom is another day we surrender to these evil bastards who, by the way, happen to be religious fundamentalists.

And since that day in September, I’ve recognized who the real enemy is: these toxic human beings who are religious fundamentalists. Like I’ve said before, it doesn’t matter whether they’re Christian or Islamic or Zionist or atheist. Anyone who thinks that they’re completely right, that nothing they do can be gain-said by human wisdom, anyone like this should be locked up and pumped full of anti-psychotics, at least if we can’t just outright kill them (Oh sure, killing would be wrong, but some things are less wrong than others.) These fucktards aren’t in it for anything but raw power over their fellow humans, and their devotion to their God (or non-God, as the case may be) is pure sophistry.

(To explain the workings of my personal morality, I think that anyone who kills another sentient being and thinks that they will be rewarded has got another thing coming to them, and if there is such a place as Hell, I hope they’re having a good time down there. Sure, people will bring up the justification for killing someone else in self-defense, or in defense of those you love, and, sure, anyone who has to do this is definitely not in the same classes as the murderers who slammed planes into the WTC, but to think that the act of killing, however justified, even if it means that a million other lives would be saved, to think that killing someone should be completely free of guilt, now that is base self-deception. But I digress.)

In any case, I’m almost finished with His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, and it basically comes up with the same message: religious fundamentalism is the anti-thesis of civilization, and it must be resisted, whatever brand it may be. Fundamentalists would have human beings reduced to nothing but machines, operating under rules and algorithms that make it easy for us not to have to think, and these rules have over the millenia allowed humans to oppress, violate, degrade, and kill other humans. And frankly, this is pure evil, because it is thinking and reasoning that make us human.

And I got to thinking about that old canard that the world is supposedly going to shit because people aren’t religious any more, and that they have no morality. And if they used the word “religious” the same way that I use it—meaning someone subscribing to a philosophy (for example, maybe Taoism or Buddhism or secular humanism) that promotes goodness and connectedness and belonging and all the positive things that make us human and allow civilization to work—if they meant these things instead of by-the-book Christianity or word-for-word Islam or any other rote algorithm that precludes thought, then I might agree with them, because, yes, the world is full of thoughtless people who never consider their action’s effects on others. But what I really think is that the reason why the world is going to shit is because Western society has allowed the principles of capitalism to outweigh morality.

What I find interesting about early American history is that society was not all about laissez-faire capitalism (as if that really exists anywhere.) The early American economy (both pre- and post-revolutionary) tended to run on a moral economy, meaning, that, sure, you could make a profit, but you shouldn’t gouge your fellow human beings who were depending on your product to survive. Prices and wages were negotiated so that citizens could actually live decent lives. (OK, so there was also slavery, but there is no such place as utopia) Contrast that to the world we live in, where anything goes when it comes to making a dollar, and screw the people who can’t afford to live decent lives, they’re just lazy or some such idiotic slogan like that that is completely devoid of thought. And people will refuse to condemn companies like Exxon and Walmart for baldly exploiting their workers and the environment and making record profits for their CEOs and shareholders, never mind the damage that they are causing, and people fail to see that this kind of lifestyle is unsustainable.

Something will eventually break and throw everything into chaos, and there has surely got to be a better way to run the system. Surely sustainability ought to be a goal of any business.

And people will also say that regulation is evil and it’s better to let business owners do whatever they want, but this is pure bullshit, because anyone with half a brain knows that even in our supposedly capitalist country, the government pretty much decides who gets to make money and who gets crushed. I mean, all you have to do is say “Halliburton” and “Enron” and follow where all the dollars are going. And how this is different from a communist economy driven by a centralized bureaucracy, I really don’t know, except maybe the U.S.S.R. didn’t have to waste money on P.R. and marketing.

And, sure, people will bring up extreme counter-examples: what if I have to lie, cheat, and steal in order to feed my kids? C’mon. We all know there are plenty of ways to make honest cash, even if it is pretty much diddly-squat. For someone to surrender their morality in order to have creature-comforts earns no sympathy from me.

And I’m not advocating espousing communism, getting rid of the stock market, or doing away with money. All I’m saying is: everything you do has consequences, some of them good, and some of them evil, and in a capitalistic country like ours, the choices of what you buy and which companies you support become an expression of your own morality. Lying, cheating, exploiting the weak and powerless, destroying the environment, and fomenting war so you have someone to sell your bombs to (to choose a few choice examples) are wrong no matter what, even if it turns a profit and makes the shareholders happy, and it’s really disgusting that our society can actually make excuses for companies that do these things.

And, despite my raving rants at times, I’m no extremist. If anything, I’m all for moderation. And given that the government already has to interfere in order for our economy to even work, then they should interfere in ways that advocate for sustainability. While a complete implementation of a moral economy at the scale of the globe is clearly impossible in this lifetime, at least people should aim high. If you want people to do good, the best way is to set an example.

There seems to be this alternate reality that I keep coming back to in my dreams. There is a transportation plaza in a place that makes me think of Pasadena, except it really seems to be the civic center of an alternate Southern California. There are several mass transit lines that meet here: blue, red, yellow, orange, and green. There is also a shopping mall with extensive underground parking. The blue line can get you to the airport and to the ocean, ending in a seaside town that should be San Pedro, except it is much more tourist oriented, complete with villas and white sand beaches. The yellow line takes you to the downtown of this place which, for the lack of a better name, I have dubbed Todos Santos. This downtown area is sort of a mish-mash of Universal Citywalk, Old Pasadena, and Disneyland. The red line will take you to a bohemian/rapidly gentrifying/hipster-infested neighborhood that actually kind of reminds me of Wicker Park, but which will also take you to a shopping district that reminds me of Sunset Blvd in Echo Park, except with taller buildings. The green line, in one of the dreams I had, was what I was waiting for get home (whereever that is in this dream world of mine) and the actual platform is separated from the other ones, and it’s not always open. (The red, blue, and yellow lines share the same platform; the orange line is accessible by climbing a faux-Spanish era tower.) The orange line climbs a huge hill and ends up in an area that reminds me simultaneously of New York City and San Diego. (Yeah, I know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.) It also takes you to an area that sort of reminds me of Michigan Avenue combined with Berkeley (Scary thought, huh?) There is a university campus there that sort of reminds me of a gigantic version of my high school.

What would be awesome is if I could actually map out this mish-mashed geography of a hundred, thousand memories and impressions all muddled together.

I have been reading His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman, and it revisits a theme that I have been pondering over, which makes a lot of sense. The God that religious fundamentalists worship is not the actual God that runs the universe. The Gnostics (as Phillip K Dick interprets their text) have had this same thought long ago—the God that is overtly worshipped is actually the mad, blind God sometimes called Sammael who believes that he created the Universe, and Sammael is the God of the Old Testament, vengeful, and wrathful. The real God is the one who sent Jesus Christ and Muhammed and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi. The God who destroyed Richard Nixon, and the God who is plotting against the neocons, the ultra-Zionists, and the Wahabists. The real God is the one who transmits via Valis, and is the God who set the early Christians free from the Black Iron Prison, and who is sending the King Felix interstitials through the airwaves and across the Internet.

Maybe I’ve just been too brainwashed by the Catholic Church, but I find it hard to let go of the idea of a benevolent super-intelligence that is backing me up in this otherwise malevolent, maleficent world. My God is the God of the Underdogs, and I suspect he lost the big war already to Sammael and is reduced to fighting guerrilla warfare.

The people who worship Sammael find it easy to call my God the Adversary (and I guess he/she is Sammael’s adversary, but it’s not the same guy who decided to call it quits and take up residence in Hell. My God lives on this material plane somewhere.

I’ve also toyed with the idea that he/she is not so much a God but maybe a hyper-intelligent AI that lives in the interstices of the universe.

He/she is dark matter, is Dust.

I’ve always found it perplexing as to why the Nicene Creed has the line that differentiates between “God from God” and “True God from True God,” as if there is definitely a False God.

And then my thoughts hearken back to my Scripture class in freshman year of high school. Yahweh (the God who may be Sammael, or who may be my God) was at first called Elohim, which is plural. The Gods. And then there is the fact that all the angels are named {something}-el, where “El” means God.

And along the lines of Lord Asriel’s Republic of Heaven, I wonder if the angels actually took turns running the universe, like, maybe they were even elected and all, and then Sammael got greedy and power-mad, tossed Lucifer into Hell, and made the other angels either choose his way or the highway. (Are Michael and Gabriel just toadies? Or are they just misrepresented?)

And yeah, I think that Lucifer is pissed and would like nothing better than to see Sammael’s usurped Kingdom come crashing down, but my God has interceded, has lain low, and is playing a really complex game to keep the lesser beings of this world from being harmed in this zero-sum game between these two superpowers.

As I was driving down the I-15 to Mira Mesa, I stopped to think about the Big Bang and how the universe is rapidly blowing apart. The bigger it gets, the more spread out it gets, and I think of the opposing natures of dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is what seems to hold the universe together when it looks like it should fall apart. Dark energy is what breaks the universe apart when it looks like it should hold together.

And, injecting theology into physics, what if there was already sentience existing in the pre-Big Bang singularity? Like, maybe the Singularity was Eden, or even Heaven, and the angels at first decided to share power and run things democratically. But then the big players, like Sammael and Lucifer, got sick of each other and wanted to run things their own way, so they got everyone to agree to a Partition. Sammael would takes this part of the Universe, Lucifer would get some other part, and the other archangels would get their own piece of the pie. So they decided to sunder the Singularity, and hence the Big Bang.

But, like all well-made plans, things didn’t turn out so well. Instead of peacefully splitting the Singularity into equal parts, it simply exploded, and dark energy spread everything widely apart (hence, Inflation) and threatened to break everything into elementary particles. The single unified force broke into the four (and maybe more) forces that we understand as strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravity. And the only thing that kept everything from blowing away into quark and lepton dust was dark matter, sort of the husk of the Singularity, the dead and broken shell of the embryonic, seed-like universe.

Thermodynamics predicts that entropy will triumph, and likely dark energy will succeed in turning the entire universe into near-vacuum, with nothing but singular quarks and leptons floating in an enormous void, with the occasional virtual particle-pair popping in and out of existence.

Maybe the Big Bang was the war, and my side, the side of life and creativity, has already lost.

The forces that break things apart—that which is dark energy—have won, or will win, and the survivors of this calamity eke out their existence in the pathetic remnants of the Singularity (what we might term ordinary matter) which wil slowly decay into nothingness, into randomness. Despite having lost, life still tries to self-organize, tries to bind itself together into complexities that were common place in the Singularity. Despite adversity and knowing that we will fall victim to the voracious emptiness of the dark energy void of entropy, life and my God carry-on. I think of the warriors of Maldan, the soldiers of Corregidor, fighting battles that they know are futile, and yet they fight anyway, because this is what we have left, this is what we crave—connection in a world that blows everything apart.

But Jesus Christ himself said that the most conspicuous worshippers are the ones who aren’t true to his Father. These guys, the Pharisees and the Sadducees of his time, and the Christian, Islamic, or Jewish fundamentalists of ours, probably worship someone like Sammael, and not the True Way, hungry for power.

I remember a metaphor. It’s a little like bald men fighting over a comb. The universe was lost a long time ago, before Adam and Eve were even created. Religion has become a mere tool for the powerful to hold sway over the weak. And knowledge of the True God who wants us to live and be happy and stay connected has practically all but disappeared into the interstices, into the dark voids of the universe occupied by only dark matter or dark energy.

In that Scripture class, I learned an elegant definition of Sin: that which sunders. Specifically, that which damages or breaks one’s relationship with one’s self, with other sentient beings, with Nature, or with the True God. (Whether it merely damages or whether it actually completely breaks is the distinction between venal and mortal sin.) So in this moral framework, it is obvious that hatred of any kind, intolerance of any kind, is Sin. So all you racists and gay-bashers and misogynists, all you haters out there, no matter how many times you go to Church or pray the rosary or whatever other stupid ritual of Sammael you perform, without actually facing your wounded relationship with the universe, everything you do is Sin. So there.

Then again, maybe this is all random, and we do live in successive illusory worlds where there is a false memory of the universe persisting, powered by nothing more than statistical chance and the laws of thermodynamics.

The most I can say is that I am an agnostic who is trying to master the Way.

I just watched “The Da Vinci Code” and while the idea that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were married or at least were lovers is a popular one that has made it to the big screen on more than one occasion, it made me think of another unorthodox (and actually quite heretical) idea that I remember hearing sometime ago (although for the life of me I can’t find it on Google.)

Now some scholars believe that the historical Christ was an amalgamation of various Jewish holy men whose stories became the basis for the original Q source of the Gospels. It is questionable as to whether there really was one guy named Yeshu’a bar-Yosef. But even more interesting, what if the Christ were a woman?

Now, you would think something like this would be easy to spot. If Christ were a woman, you think it would’ve been obvious. However, maybe we’re just projecting our 21st century sensibilities to the ancient era. In a society where women were little more than property, it would’ve been impossible for a woman to be taken seriously. When one reads the Gospel of Mary, the misogyny present in Jewish (and Roman) culture at the time is hardly invisible.

I wish I had the actual source to this, but I think it might’ve actually been a Roman Catholic priest (naturally, a Jesuit) who once mentioned to me the theory that Jesus was in fact a woman (which actually makes a lot of sense if you want to literally believe in virgin birth—parthenogenesis can result only female offspring.) Naturally, in the misogynist society of the ancient era, this would never have become a popular religion, so the Church fathers decided to change things around a bit. I guess the rest of the idea is merely quibbling over details. One idea is that Mary of Magdala herself was the actual Christ; the other is that the reason why Mary of Magdala was so close to the Savior was because he was actually a she.

Now I know the historical basis of misogyny, but the more I think about it, the more I am saddened by the Roman Catholic Church’s refusal to let all of humanity participate fully in the mysteries of God. It is clear in the Gospels, after all, that there were many women who were involved in Jesus’ ministry (although confusingly too many of them are named Mary) and it is clear that there were many female disciples. I think it fits well with Jesus’ tradition-challenging teachings that he tended to be very inclusive. After all, he hung out with the drunkards, thieves, and prostitutes, and the Apostles mostly proselytized among the heathen Gentiles. Also telling is that, if Jesus wasn’t an Essene, he certainly had many teachings in common to this particular sect of Judaism, and one of the things they believed in was that the Divinity had a distinctly female aspect to it (sometimes associated with the term Shekinah, which is a concept that seems to closely resemble the formulation of the Holy Spirit.)

So there is something appealing about the idea that the early Church actively suppressed the teachings of women. But the more likely story is that they simply acted out their ingrained prejudices, and those they preached to reacted to their stories with their own ingrained prejudices, and even if there were truth-sayers in that time, it is likely that very few actually took them seriously.

Bah, I am reminded of the reasons why I am wary of organized religion in the first place.

This meme suddenly popped up on the blogosphere, but has also been published in The New York Times: ‘Gospel of Judas’ Surfaces After 1,700 Years. [original text of the Gospel of Judas][the coptic ps.gospel of judas]

The gospel is steeped in Gnosticism (a branch of early Christianity that believed that it is the hidden, secret scriptures that allow humanity to be saved.) I was first truly introduced to concepts of Gnoticism by Phillip K. Dick (the author of Blade Runner and Minority Report) in his book Valis[amazon.com][wikipedia][philipkdick.com][google], which is in fact the first book of a trilogy which includes Divine Invasion[amazon.com] and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer[amazon.com][wikipedia][google]. One of the interesting concepts he divulges is the idea that this world we live in is actually the creation of a mad god named Samael, who is blind and does not realize that he created the universe at the behest of the One True God. This is apparently derived directly from Gnosticism, although Dick added his own spin to it. Samael has also been identified with Satan, although it is by no means clear cut, and various scriptures have identified Samael with both the Fallen and the Faithful, performing both acts of good and evil. However, Samael also has the name Yaltabaoth and Saklas (which are the different aspects of the Demiurge.) Saklas is the name that is mentioned in the Gospel of Judas and referred to as the false god that most people worship out of fear and/or in hope of gaining favor.

I have always been intrigued by stories with complex characters who end up betraying the protagonist of the story. For example, there is Lancelot in the Arthurian Legend, Brutus in (specifically Shakespeare’s version of) the life of Julius Caesar, Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, and of course Judas Iscariot. Mainly what is intriguing is how they don’t truly hate the person they are betraying, but are instead driven by some other cause. In the case of Lancelot, it was lust, in the case of Brutus, he felt he needed to save the Republic. In the case of Gollum, he was driven by the madness of the Ring. The scene where Gollum ponders what he is going to do next, where he is just watching Frodo and has feelings of regret has always haunted me because Tolkien did a good job of making him like someone who was indeed redeemable, and then Sam arrives, snapping Gollum out of it, and allowing him to continue on his plan to betray Frodo.

Judas, though, has always been a mystery. I have actually pondered his fate for a while, and I doubt that it was sheer greed that led him to betray Jesus. After all, he was an apostle for a long time, and it would seem that he would be friends with Jesus. I don’t know what 30 pieces of silver are actually worth, but it really doesn’t seem like a realistic motivator. It doesn’t evoke enough pathos.

What I found satisfying as an explanation is the Sin of Pride, specifically, thinking that you know exactly what is supposed to happen next. Perhaps he began believing that Jesus was leading them to dangerous territory, so to speak, believing that Jesus was going make their mission fail, and in the process, get them all killed. Maybe Judas really believed in Jesus’ ministry, but perhaps thought that it was Jesus who was straying from the True Path.

I then stumble into less clear ideas. I had been taught that the Israelites believed that the Messiah would save them from the Romans, and some were expecting a military leader or a prophet who would use their supernatural powers to expel the invader, so many who heard that Jesus was being proclaimed the Messiah were disgusted and refused to believe. Maybe deep in his heart Judas thought that Jesus would lead them to salvation in this life and betrayed him because he was bitterly disappointed.

Of course, the thing that seems most supported by the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John is the idea that Judas’ betrayal was preordained, that it had to be so that Jesus could die for us, and that Judas’ motivation probably doesn’t matter. However, this is simply made more explicit in the Gospel of Judas, stating plainly that Jesus actually instructed Judas to do it.

But the thing that I like most about this gospel is that it elucidates how Jesus feels about hypocrisy and supposed “holiness” and “righteousness.” Truly, this feeling is present in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, what with his constant clashes with the Pharisees, who followed their religion in as so much as it didn’t clash with their comfortable lifestyles and in as much as being religious gained them the esteem of their fellows, or with the Saducees, who upheld the forms of the sacred rituals but often did not follow the spirit of them—the difference between observing the letter of the law or actually following the spirit of the law. How Jesus throws out the merchants from the Temple is also illustrative of this. And in the Gospel of Judas, Jesus explicitly prophesies that a new religion will be founded in his Name, and even they will continue the hypocrisy of simply following the form but not the spirit of his ministry, and that many people simply worship out of fear of punishment, or because they are trying to curry favor from God.

And 2,000 years later, his prophesies are sadly true. There are people who use the name of God, and in the effort to save life, will actually kill people. There are those who are more interested in damning the unbelievers instead of saving them. There are those who follow their religion only to conform to the accepted norm, but in reality do not follow basic tenets of Jesus’ message. I, of course, speak of Christian fundamentalists and also Republicans who talk a lot about how this Nation is supposed to be a Christian Nation, and yet espouse such hateful ideas as making it a crime to help a fellow human being simply because he does not have the proper papers, or by cutting funding to help the poor.

Personally, I distrust people who wear their religion on their sleeve. I am always reminded of this passage from Matthew (which also happens to contain the Lord’s Prayer):

“Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. “So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

“And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

“Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

“And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. —Matthew 6:1-18, New Revised Standard Version

From what I learned in 12 years of Catholic school, the essence of the ministry of Jesus is based in love, in humility, and in inclusivity. So anyone who espouses hate, believes that what he/she thinks is right and what everyone else thinks is wrong, or uses their faith to exclude people and take away their rights and dignity as human beings—these people in my eyes are doers of Evil, and while it is not for me to Judge, and while it is wrong for me to be hateful, I really wouldn’t mind if they were wiped from the face of the earth.

(Interestingly, as I wrote this little screed, I had the TV to a show that was describing the Big Bang Theory, and how this theory seems to actually prove intelligent design and the existence of God. I have issues with their assertion that the universe is well structured, because as far as I can see, the universe is weirdly clumpy and non-homogenous. And while it is incredibly beautiful, it is not what I imagine when I think of order and structure. What is more convincing, perhaps, is their explication of the Strong Anthropic Principle which I suppose does smack of intelligent design. If the fundamentalists clung to this idea instead of the laughable notion that the world is only 6,000 years old, implying that human beings and dinosaurs lived side by side in the Garden of Eden (a discussion which apparently was incorporated into an episode of “The Sopranos”), then I think there would be fruitful discussion. What really interested me was that this TV program names Allah as the creator of the universe. Turns out that I was watching Malaysian television, making me think again about Southeast Asia, but anyway.)

Days like this I feel like I am trapped in some kind of existential loop, a la “Groundhog Day,” forced to live and relive excruciatingly painful parts of my life. I suppose it is simply the fact that I really haven’t learned any of the lessons I was supposed to have learned, so I haven’t really learned to avoid these situations that make me want to weep, and maybe even sometimes writhe in agony.

So for some bizarre reason today, my thoughts strayed to the movie “Donnie Darko,” of which I’d written about some time ago (and since it is quite the non-linear narrative, and if you don’t have the time or patience to actually watch it, wikipedia has a pretty good synopsis, including commentary from the director which I wasn’t aware of before.

As you may have guessed from the allusions in my intro, this movie discusses temporal loops, or more specifically, pocket universes. As the director explains, what happens is that a tangent universe spontaneously arises from the pre-existing timeline. Unfortunately, most tangent universes are extraordinarily unstable, and this one happens to have a finite lifespan of 28 days. The goal of the protagonist is to close off the tangent universe before it destabilizes and destroys the pre-existing timeline.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, there is the allusion to “The Last Temptation of Christ”. Given my recently ramblings-on regarding religion [1][2], perhaps this is the thread that my mind chased.

Interestingly, another time-loop I have been obsessed with is Phillip K Dick’s conceptualization of the Black Iron Prison, which, briefly, is Dick’s concept that a tangent universe arose sometime shortly after the Death of Christ, and which continued until the Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. So Dick acknowledges the existence of this time-loop by stating that “The Empire never ended,” which can be taken to mean the Roman Empire specifically, but can be easily read to include all forms of state-sponsored tyranny. (Of note, one can say that the U.S. is the heir of the Roman Empire through two routes: the British and the Spanish, which were both great empires in their day, and which were once provinces of Rome) It is somewhat disquieting to see that the spirit of Nixon doesn’t seem to be completely defeated, and apparently lives on in the current Bush administration, but that is a topic for another blog post.

In any case, the trigger to collapse the tangent universe is the destruction of the Empire, which, despite Dick pinning it to Nixon’s fall, may still be some time in the future. Until then, we essentially live in an unreal world stuck in apostolic times, still waiting for the Second Coming™

But I kind of wonder if the First Coming wasn’t itself a way to collapse a tangent universe. What if Jesus Christ had to die by the Cross so that we wouldn’t be stuck in a temporal loop caused by Adam and Eve’s (and Satan’s) Sin of Pride? What if that is what the Old Testament is? A narrative of the tangent universe, the Unreal universe, in which reality is distorted, in which God is misrepresented and the Original Sin™ is obscured?

Interestingly, these Gnostic ideas pervade “The Matrix”, which is perhaps the only redeeming quality of the sequels, but I digress.

But I don’t know, I guess I’ve also been mulling over the nature of time for a while now. In simplistic terms, it is ever the conflict between the Western idea of linear time and the Eastern idea of cyclic time, and much like the dual wave-particle nature of matter, the reality is probably that time is both linear and cyclic.

It is interesting that the reason why the Western idea is sometimes decried is because of its effect on colonial thinking and the way it touches upon the concept of the White Man’s Burden. The idea of linear time (in the Victorian Age that was obsessed with the Great Chain of Being) was that time meant “progress” and advancement, which many interpreted as meaning “primitive” is “bad,” and “modern” is “good,” something which this post-modern age proves to be wrong. (Can we say impending nuclear apocalypse, global warming, perturbed weather patterns, non-sustainable urban growth and development, chemical and biologic warfare, designer illicit substances?) In truth, linear time in of itself does not necessarily bear any of these connotations, but if you contextualize it within humanities and social sciences, this is what you end up conveying.

So. Time is in many ways cyclic. History is doomed to repeat itself. And yet, and yet, Time continues to run out.

I have been thinking about God a lot lately. Which is interesting because I have been experiencing a severe crisis of faith for the past five years at least, and it has only become worse and worse and worse, to the point where I have considered becoming completely atheist.

But I suppose the decision to become atheist reeks too much of the Sin of Pride for me, because, how can you be sure? How can you prove the non-existence of a benign intelligence at the root of the universe? Oh, there are plenty of examples suggesting the non-existence of God (the existence of hate-filled fundamentalist Christians and Muslims being one of the most convincing), but there are plenty of counter-examples, too.

I suppose that my stance is less radical and considerably verbose: I believe that all organized religion is corrupt, but I believe that there are beneficent intelligences that exist in the universe whose form we cannot perceive and whom we cannot understand, who are much greater than us, and who try to strive for peace and harmony. Now I realize this could include anything from God to ancient extraterrestrial civilizations, but I can’t help but believe that there is something greater than human barbarism.

Maybe it’s all just wishful thinking, but I think sometimes you’ve got to hold on to your fantasies.

In any case, I stumbled upon this little blurb on kottke.org, asking the question: If God does exist, is He a jerk?, a question which has often come to my mind more than once.

But the example used is perhaps a bad example. My take on the whole Garden of Eden thing is squarely against humanity.

For one thing, since, despite supposed divine intervention, the Bible was still written by human beings, it goes without saying that the author probably tried to spin things to make humanity not look so bad. So I think the account is suspect at best.

But I think that when God created the Universe, he made a big deal about Free Will™. Nevermind the whole problem of being Omniscient and all that. That is another topic that requires more thought on my part and I’m not going to address it here.

Although as an aside, it makes me think of something that frequently happens to physicians who have long discussions with their patients regarding life altering interventions so that the patient can make informed consent. Not uncommonly, something goes wrong in the intervention, and the patient complains that they would never have agreed to undergo the therapy if they knew that this could possibly go wrong (assuming that what went wrong wasn’t that they died.) Sometimes it happens that it’s true, that the physician failed to mention this particular possible outcome, but sometimes the patient simply wasn’t paying attention the first time it was mentioned.

So I’m kind of wondering if that’s what really went down during the whole Garden of Eden debacle. Because it strikes me as cruel and not a little irrational to plant a thing called The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil™ and then expressly forbid eating from it.

What I think happened is that God put this tree there and told Adam and Eve: Look, you can skip this tree and just live here happy and carefree, or you can eat from it, gain the ability to discern Good from Evil and all the responsibilities inherent within. I leave it up to you.

So, not really understanding what those responsibilities were, they went ahead and ate from it, and then suddenly everything changed.

The point being: every action has consequences, and even if someone, even God, tries to discuss what those consequences are, chances are, you won’t understand them until they actually happen.

And I think that God makes it a point not to press the shiny-red History Eraser Button™. (The story of Noah and his Ark notwithstanding, but I tend to parse the Old Testament with a lot of skepticism—especially that part about an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, something expressly repudiated by good ol’ J.C.) I mean, if I had been working on something for 15 billion years, and then someone involved in the project makes a decision that has dire consequences, and they ask “hey, I screwed up, can I have a redo?” and this redo would require screwing around with the very basis of your project, well, I think I would be a little reticent about screwing around with the basic structure of the universe, but, well that’s just me.

I think that God, more than anything, wanted people who could make their own decisions without him or her having to tell them what to do, and simply fixing their mistakes is not what a good parent or creator does, as much as we’d like him/her to.

So what about the part that states that we are all doomed, and can’t be saved without God’s intervention? I don’t know. Given my current mindset, I think that the Afterlife was invented by human beings as an afterthought. I think that humans as a whole are simply incapable of understanding nonexistence, so they made up all these loony theories about what happens after we die.

Personally, I believe that my ancestors’ thoughts regarding this dilemma are the most realistic. Before they were converted by the Arabs or conquered by the Spanish, they believed that when we died, our lifeforce was released back to the universe. The life we live is all there is, there ain’t no mo’. This is also consonant with such philosophies as Taoism which I have been in the process of learning about.

In any case, I think that the concept of the Afterlife has been exploited to allow or cause great Evil. For one thing, it can be used to justify the suffering of the unfortunate: sure they’re suffering now, but they’ll be fine in the World to Come™. I think this idea has driven European History for more than a millenia, and has been implicitly responsible for such atrocities such as serfdom, slavery, colonization, and outright genocide. (I am reminded Arnaud Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux, who in his campaign to flush out heretics is said to have uttered the oft repeated words: “Slay them all. God will know his own,” often quoted as “Kill them all and let God decide.”) Or take, for example, the horrific idea of being rewarded with hundreds of virgins for killing as many people as you possibly can by, for example, flying a plane into a building.

So here I agree wholeheartedly with the atheists: this life is all you’ve got, don’t piss it all away. This actually fits rather well with my view of God as someone who refuses to hit the history eraser button, even if it means the humiliating torture and killing of his only Son.

So yeah: the Garden of Eden: we were given a choice, and now we have to live with it. The Sin of Pride can be taken to mean the idea that Adam and Eve felt they wanted God-like powers, or it could be the idea that they could simply do whatever they wanted and that God would fix whatever they screwed up, or finally, blaming God for the decisions they made, despite the fact that they have free-will.

I don’t know. Maybe God isn’t omniscient. Or, even better, maybe he/she can be omniscient, but refuses to be so, so as not to interfere with Free Will.

I was walking through the Science Fiction and Fantasy section of the Borders in Glendale when a totally random thought occurred to me. I think what brought it to my mind is the question: what is the cause of evil? I was flipping through random fantasy novels where characters are neatly pigeon-holed into Good or Evil, and clearly in the real world nothing is that obvious.

And since I was born and raised Roman Catholic, I had no choice but to go back to my roots, and when you look at the Genesis and various apocrypha regarding Lucifer, it becomes quite clear that the first and the second sin is Pride.

I think that Islam makes it even more explicit that this is the sin of Iblis, and I think John Milton catches this sentiment very well in the line from Paradise Lost: “Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”

So Satan’s rejection of God is the first sin: a sin borne of Pride, of thinking that you understand the pattern of the Universe better than anyone else. And so is Adam and Eve’s disobedience with regards to eating the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Some argue that they thought that they could usurp the knowledge of God themselves, once again demonstrating the attitude that they think they know better than anyone else.

And I think that this is a pretty accurate depiction of where Evil comes from: the unbending, insolent insistence that you of all people know exactly what the right thing to do is, and that everyone else is dead wrong.

You see this kind of sin well-evident in some Christian fundamentalists who insist that they hold the only key to salvation and that everyone else is just damned, not to mention their Islamic fundamentalist counterparts who will actually kill other people in the name of God, which is the ultimate blasphemy if you ask me. You see this level of arrogance in the Bush Administration, who, despite continuous setbacks and failures, simply refuse to admit that they made a mistake and that they are wrong.

The irony is that this kind of sinful pride is exactly what Jesus Christ rails against in the Gospels. He constantly mocks the Saducees and the Pharisees who insist that they are righteous and uphold the laws of God and would rather destroy Christ and his followers than admit to the possibility that there are other ways. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if Fundamentalist Christians and greedy Republicans who claim to be Christian simply read a different Bible than I do.

Now maybe it’s misleading to call this sin “Pride” since the term actually has quite a few connotations in English. After all, you are supposed to be proud of yourself and your accomplishments, right? And it’s equally misleading to use the term “Shame,” which, while related, has a completely different connotation in English.

In Tagalog, the word hiya, while commonly translated as “shame,” probably better encompasses what I’m trying to say. One can also translate hiya as “shyness,” or perhaps even “humility.” This relates to a common Tagalog phrase that is used to deride another person: walang hiya, commonly translated as “without shame,” but probably more accurately meaning “without humility.” I know you can say the phrase “without humility” in English just as well, but it simply doesn’t have the negative connotation that walang hiya has. Being walang hiya is considered a definite character fault.

And so I can’t help but agree that Pride itself is the cause of all Evil in the world. As soon as someone begins to believe that they are the end-all, be-all of all answers, that they havev the Final Solution™, all sorts of hell breaks loose.

Which touches upon a pet topic of mine: the mistaken identification of Faith with Certainty. I remember this lesson well, which was given to me in high school by the Jesuits. Faith is not Certainty. Faith is about Doubt. If you cannot experience Doubt, than you cannot have Faith. Faith is never about knowing exactly what is going to happen next. It is precisely about not knowing, and perhaps about being afraid of the future, and yet still trusting to God that whatever needs to be will happen.

Or, to put it more succinctly, if you think you know all the answers, then what do you need God for?

And notice that it has nothing to do about everything turning out all right. Some of the most Faithful men and women in human history have outright been violated and massacred, and yet I do not think this at all degrades the nature of their Faith in God, nor God’s Faith in them. It all comes down to Jesus praying in the Garden at Gethsemane (Matthew 26:39): “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want, but as You want.” This is the core of Faith, to put your life in God’s hands, even if it might mean being tortured and killed for doing what you think is right.

The Fundamentalists and religious extremists, the terrorists and the Bush Administration show none of this character of humility, and frankly, every time they talk about God, I feel they are outright blaspheming.

But what do I know.

Interestingly, the only Fantasy writer I’ve read who explicitly uses the Sin of Pride as the Source of All Evil is J.R.R. Tolkien. Now, this is probably not surprising since he was Catholic. Morgoth is clearly his interpretation of Satan. But it is interesting how many of his characters fall in The Lord of the Rings. Saruman starts believing more in his own craft and wisdom than in his mission for the Valar. Denethor trusts more to the foresight he gleans from the palantir than he does in the strength of his own people. Boromir is undone because he thinks that he can actually wield the One Ring against Sauron. All these people fall from grace because they think that they know exactly what the right thing to do is, trusting to their own devices instead of understanding their context in the world. Sauron himself falls precisely because of the folly of his own pride, unable to countenance the idea that his enemy would send such humble folk as hobbits into his land to destroy the One Ring rather than try to wield it against him. Then of course there are the Sins of Pride committed by both Elves and Men as depicted in The Silmarillion: Fëanor’s doom-laden Oath to retrieve the Silmarils at all cost in defiance of the Valar, destroying anyone in his way, even if it meant killing his own kin, and Ar-Pharazon’s attempt to land in Aman with the thought of wresting immortality from the Valar.

Now I lie, the two other major fantasy series that I’ve read Memory, Thorn, and Sorrow by Tad Williams and The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan likewise touch upon the Sin of Pride as the Source of All Evil. However, Williams’ world of Osten Ard is essentially a transcription of real-world human cultures to geography resembling Middle Earth, although his character of Ineluki the Storm King, who defied the rules of Nature in order to destroy his enemies at the cost of the lives of his kin and his own soul, is rather interesting. The Creation of the Sword Sorrow seems to be a rather nice allegory to the creation of nuclear weapons, although I would not accuse Williams of being intentionally allegorical. (The same allegory charge has been made with regard to Tolkien’s One Ring, which he vehemently denied.) And while Jordan’s story of the Westlands has become mired in such complexity far rivalling and far more tangled than Tolkien’s lucid intricacies, Sha’itan is simply a very thinly veiled version of Satan himself.

Then there is Ursula Le Guin’s completion of her Earthsea Cycle with The Other Wind. Le Guin prefers to keep Evil more realistic, and never relegates its Source to a single focal point like how most fantasy writers do. And given the Taoistic aura of Earthsea, Le Guin is more interested in discussing disorder and imbalance, from which both Evil and Good may arise. Still, the greatest source of disorder and imbalance in the world is again caused by a transgression of Pride, with Wizards attempting to obtain immortality by cheating the Dragons, and ending up perverting the very nature of Life and Death instead.

Now I don’t claim to be a holy person myself. The judgements I render are the judgements of a flawed person. And I realize that there are plenty of problems with living continuously in a sea of uncertainty. Sinful pride is unfortunately often confused with simple confidence, and without at least some confidence, it is extremely difficult to live in this world.

Interestingly, science itself however agrees with reality as being, by its nature uncertain. Despite Einstein’s wishful thought that “God does not play with dice,” the elucidation of the principles of quantum mechanics as embodied by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle makes it quite obvious that it is not within our abilities to determine the exact state of reality. We can’t even be completely sure about things in completely theoretical realms, thanks to Gödel’s theorem of incompleteness.

Which simply leads me to this conclusion: Beware of anyone who is too sure of themself. Healthy amounts of doubt should be considered a virtue (although I agree that radical skepticism has its profound limitations.) Anyone without doubt should be watched closely, since they are likely to commit quite Evil acts in the name of Good.

Of course, even in my lifetime, it has become obvious that not enough people understand or even know history to prevent it from repeating itself. (As George Santayana notes: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”) But I suppose all we can do is hope.