Day 105

Every so often I'll find myself infinitely frustrated by someone's asking me a question in order to prove their point, the answer to which is too complicated to keep their interest. Conspiracy theories give me this headache all the time. People ask: "well how do you explain all the inconsistencies in the US Govt.'s 9/11 Commission report?"
Well, I frankly can't explain all of them, but I can give people a lengthy explanation for why conspiracy theories in general use flawed logic, and how just because one thing may be false doesn't necessarily mean some other thing is true. But these explanations take ages.

The Jehovah's Witnesses have asked me this many times: "If there's no God, then what's the point of everything?"

Well for fuck's sake how am I supposed to answer a question like that?? So, when I respond with a short awkward silence and some cop-out like "well there's always a natural explanation for the state of things; no need to resort to the supernatural," I get this look from them, a look of "aha!," as though they've exposed the fundamental flaw in my whole worldview.

That flaw, apparently, is that I can't explain everything in the universe off the top of my head.

So, for want of Godly knowledge (har har), I try to explain to the Jehovah's witnesses that saying God did it doesn't really explain anything at all, or if it does, it just shifts the burden of explanation to "God." But this is where the doorstop is kicked out: we can't ask how God came to be, because he always was; we can't ask how he does anything, because he uses supernatural (and thus unexplainable) methods. We can't ask why God does anything without having some ancient and thoroughly unhelpful book handed to us.

And this is the impasse. People love to be in the know, even if they don't know a thing. It is difficult to openly admit that one simply hasn't the foggiest idea about a particular matter. And by that same coin it is easy to latch on to the most pleasing explanation, and look down upon those people who've yet to latch to anything so specific.

And sure, God is pleasing. I'd like there to be an ultimate moral arbiter who sets things right one way or the other, all in due time. If only that were true. I'd like to have a deity watching over me, keeping my back, listening to my prayers and helping out every so often.

But, to be perfectly honest, I cannot imagine believing in such things. I look out at the world and see a kind of divine natural order, but I also see a world that has absolutely no feeling; no interest in any one inhabitant of it. I can try my mightiest to want the world outside to be just, but it simply is not so. The only justice other than that which we periodically manage to cough up on our own accord as humans is that of the equality of death. How and when we go may never be fair, but that we go is universal and equal.

This is, however, a very small consolation.

What I really want to do when I'm asked by people why I seek to be moral in a world without God, all I want to do is inflict some minor pain upon them; a pinch or a stubbed toe. Just a reminder that we are stuck within ourselves for life; that there is an overwhelming significance to experience that cannot be denied or trivialized no matter how hard we may try; I want them to wince, to feel just a bit of pain, of unfairness, of injustice, so I can say "That's why!" triumphantly.