Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Freedom of the will

A prescient deity would be fixed in the timeline just like us. Seeing ahead means being behind. But the center of time is outside the line.
All things all at once. And yet.
What difference could anything we do possibly make?
Unless there's layers there too.
And what we're taught to see as God is an impostor.
A little impostor.
A little desperate impostor who depends on belief and obedience to exist.
The closed system of our choices means we act out the inevitable. So that choosing isn't any more than bud and bloom. This much sun, that much rain, and there you go.
Unless there's more.
Unless there's a lot more.
A quick glance around shows opportunists in every nook and cranny pretending to be this, pretending to be that, in order to procure the energy of the credulous.
And for the credulous, the safety and security of pretending not to see, as well.
The givens always give it away.
The assumption is the Biblical God is what's there. Because he says so, or rather because the Bible says he says so. The tautology of mightiness. The chain of command arcs with lightning from a roiling sky. The unknowable has no advocacy in the arena of forensic publicity.
This life matters, this life is meaningless.
Would that choosing alone could make it so.
What is it all by itself? Without our prejudice, without our propaganda and cunning?
Ask a cow stumbling toward the ramp.
The answer's in the twinkling fractals of the micro-infinite. I really believe that.
Negative proof in the persistence of identity below the nominative threshold. I am sort of, in a way that's not stuck in the mirror of name and face. And my being proves something, you too. I think. We are. There's proof in that.
And in the scornful snorts of the priest/scientists confronting the childlike wonder of the uninitiated questioning and contemplating that one observable infinity we all can point toward.
The stars below us.

Tuesday, March 7, 2006

Dear South Dakota, you're fired.

It is called a grey area. You religious twits insist on making it a black and white issue for everyone and pushing your moral agenda in to law. I don't believe what you believe but I allow you to make descisions for yourself. All I ask is that same courtesy in return. You keep your personal hang ups out of my business and government.
We can all agree that killing a new born baby is murder. The baby is alive. Its autonomic nervous system is firing, it lungs can process the air that fills them, the heart pumps that air and nutrients around the body. That is life.
Most of us can agree that everytime a woman has her period instead of getting fertilized or every time a guy jerks off in to a sock instead of a woman, they aren't committing murder (except you Catholics and your Onan story but by your logic, God should be striking me down every damn day. Still here). Everything in between is subject to grey areas of religion and basic human morality -- do un to others and all that jazz. Leave it alone. Not everyone believes a soul enters the cells as soon as the mitotic cells join up. I think people who go around killing animals when there are other perfectly good food sources around are violent hypocrits but I don't get in anyones face about it. Wouldn't you be pissed off if I got the government involved and made eating meat illegal? Yes, people who get abortions are irrisponsible for needing one (for reasons other than personal health or rape) but those people have to live with there actions. It doesn't affect anyone outside of the two people who screwed up and got pregnant.
So, South Dakota. You push the supreme court to overturn Roe V Wade. I will make it my peronsal mission to remove every religious symbol from every piece of public property starting with the money in my wallet. To borrow from Steven Colbert; South Dakota, you are dead to me.