"When I first learned that Hitchens was diagnosed with an excruciating and terminal cancer, it caused me to doubt my atheism." - Norman Finkelstein
Expostulate about the pointlessness
Duplicated but self-referential
Viciously futile and in that sense
It spreads and spreads
Nothing useful may do something harmful
It survives simply because it survives
Fundamentally suggesting only the arrangements
The world willy-nilly
Mischievous or evil
By-products or symptoms
Sometimes manifestations of pure malice
Designed to kill us or make us suffer
People humming and whirring
The whole elaborate paraphernalia
Is enough to understand
First that every second is identical
Who manufactures those humans?
Elephants, cherry trees, and mice?
Flowers put into the world?
We are closing in on a definitive answer
You will understand that I wish to leave you
More roundabout, analogous
An essential part of the efficient
Execution of message
^^^That's a poem I wrote awhile ago when I was fascinated with word collages. Specifically, building a collage out of bits and pieces of sentences found in a prose work by another author. I would rearrange these bits and pieces, putting them together in a way that seemed euphonious to me, creating new meaning. That's my job as a human, I figure: creating new meaning.
No, I don't expect a raise anytime soon.
Anyway, the poem above is taken from one of Christopher Hitchen's books. He died, by the way, vanishing forever into nothingness—or so he would have us believe.
In the book, I remember him railing against the creationists, and I agreed right along with him. Ridiculous to think that an all-powerful entity created the universe. Then, later on in the book, he was talking about the big bang and the "actual" beginning of the universe, and I realized he was a goofball.
There is no difference between the creation of the universe and the beginning of the universe. For the atheist, I suddenly realized, it takes an act of faith to believe the universe just began randomly, for no reason at all, just as it takes an act of faith to believe the universe was created by a god.
"God can't be proven, therefore there is no god" is a fallacy. It can easily be turned around. The absence of a god can't be proven, therefore there is a god. x=y, y=x. Sorry, but you can't define one unknown by another. Well, you can if you want, but all you get is the UNKNOWN, so you haven't defined anything.
Recently, I have enjoyed picking on atheists, ever since my discovery that their belief system is faith-based, and I have always enjoyed getting under the skin of the devout. Lately, however, I'm no longer seeing much of a difference between them.
The problem with science is that it walks around in the universe with blinders on, and the problem with religion is that it surrenders human thinking over to shit like church and dogma.
I imagine the scientist sitting in a darkened theater trying to figure out cinematography. He watches the images on the screen. He makes notes about them, measures them, times them, discovers patterns, colors and nuances of colors. He learns a lot, but not about cinematography. He'll never learn about it, either, until he turns around and looks at the projector.
I imagine the religious person—religious in the traditional way, mind you—as staring vacantly into space with a smile plastered on his face. He has turned his thinking over to someone or something else. He's nothing more than a cell in the Borg Collective of God.
Science is merely a tool and we are wrong to use it for metaphysical work. Doing so renders us religious, even if we insist we're not. It's nothing more than a wrench and we should stop ascribing to it the powers of a trained mechanic.
So what's next? That's what I wanna know.
