Suck My Dick

I would really, really appreciate it if the lot of you would suck my dick. While I do understand that individuals have individual ideas, opinions and "ways of thinking" about things, I must stop myself and say: Fuck You.

That, my friends, is my individual. That, my friends, is my way of saying "fuck you" (to reiterate). That, my friends, is the only liberty a fag can pretend to have these days. And you - or should I say "You" - can stop pretending to be my friend.

I despise your sympathy, because it's not real. I loath to hear myself "included" in some part of your "community," because it's not real. And I HATE - HATE, to reiterate - the way you dickwads try to console me -: because it's not real.

I am, and I am the way I am. If you think there's a problem there, speak up. I want to hear you, I want to understand you, I want to crush you. Because there isn't a problem there. There's just ME. Your problem, my friend, is only and simply that: your fucking problem.

Gnome Chawmskee

I do believe I made a bit of a Facebook row by posting a description courte of my feelings for Mr. Noam Chomsky. I offer this, then, as an attempt at clarification.

My distaste with Chomsky - my disgust, really - stems from the same problem I have with Richard Dawkins, Jean-Paul Sartre and a number of other "leading intellectuals" - namely, that they have all used their well-deserved renown to peddle some anti-intellectual agenda that, in the case of Chomsky and Dawkins, runs quite contrary to the work that earned them their renown in the first place.

Let's take Dawkins: a brilliant scientist who has single-handedly made some of the greatest advances in the theory of evolution that have ever been made. And what do we find him doing now? What have all his rigorous, admirable contributions to the empirical method of observation brought him to? Well, he's now made a name for himself in the anti-scientific, anti-empirical field of theology: he is attacking "god."

Now it should be recognized that intellectual integrity forbids a genius of such rank to engage in argumentation with minds that are so absolutely deprived of the ability for critical thinking, analysis and logical continuity as those with which Dawkins debates - the entire spectacle is really just comical, and does a great injustice to the scientific work he has produced. What is abhorrent, however, is the nature of his new "line of work." To see a man, whose unflenching adherance to the scientific method of discovery is so widely applauded, suddenly become engaged in arguments for and against the existence of God; to watch the spirit of Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Berkeley put to use in service of the spirits Tarsus, Augustine and Aquinas - this, my friends, is not comical in the least, but tragic.

So what is my problem with Chomsky? Well it's just this: the destruction of rational, meaningful discourse by the very mind that threw so much light on the structure, possibility and origin of rational, meaningful discourse; the rhetorical, unintelligable mashing-up of facts (to use a musical term) by a man whose best work was meant to illuminate, standardize and concretize the very concept "fact." The problem I have with Chomsky is that he has sacrificed reason to passion - and what makes it all the worse for the wear is that he has no sense of style.

I mean really: it's all good and well to renounce one's adolescent preoccupations with words in favor of more suitable "adult" themes - politics, injustice, consumerism, etc. But if one is going to commit themselves to discussing such garbage, one could at least be pretty about it.

Grandstanding for Nihilism

I doth object: to the mind-numbing timeliness of every movement, work of art or piece of legislation; to the way our society seems to run down an unflinching track of cause and effect, thesis and antithesis, without ever bothering to stop off and change the oil; to the unbearable smugness with which men condemn the culpable and criticize all that is ripe for criticism - and all of this, as though we should applaud! "On your knees, boys and girls!" they cry. "I have come to demonstrate once and for all the hollowness of your institutions, the banality of your interests, the meanness of your idols - my words will be that breath of fresh air you seek, and the revolution you await!"

In all honesty and good conscience, we cannot pretend that we are any more than entertained by such demonstrations - no more, at least, than they can pretend away their hollowness, meanness and yes: their banality.

Absolutist Atheism..(?)

I find it baffling that the first philosopher to be an outspoken atheist should describe the entire inner being of our world as will. For those of you who don't know, I'm referring to Arthur Schopenhauer: 19th century "pessimist" philosopher, who believed that the reality we are aware of is merely an "appearance" (and that derived from Immanuel Kant), and that the other side of things - the reality of which we're not aware - is a seething, undifferentiated mass of will.

What's so puzzling to me is this: to be called an atheist, one must have renounced the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful totality of being that would normally be called "God." Granted, Schopenhauer did describe that underlying "will" as blind (i.e. it is not "all-knowing") - but the implications of the way he describes reality are in a very obvious sense theistic.

This all brings to mind an idea that I and many others have had, namely that human nature is actually incapable of true atheism. It may be that Schopenhauer outgrew the idea of "God" in the Judeo-Christian sense of the term, or that Richard Dawkins renounces the idea of "God" in any of its multi-cultural manifestations - but did not Schopenhauer simply replace God with will? Has Dawkins actually conquered the metaphysical need for absolute reality - or has he simply filled this need with science instead of God? Considering the nature of what we call "God," it's easy to see that one "God" has simply been replaced by another: no man can do without.

I suppose the real purpose of writing this down is to warn my fellow men: the idea of a "practicing atheist" is truly absurd. Try and find one - at best, you will find some decadent excuse for a neo-nihilist that wants some good-old-fashioned attention. In all honesty, an "atheist" is nothing more than someone who has replaced the Christian "God" with some other absolute principle or ruling idea - in other words, someone who has found a new God. Unfortunately for us (and them), they've yet to find anything better.

Demystification: Phase One

Scientific atheists and Christian theologians alike contend that the crux of Christianity rests on the belief in Christ's resurrection - it's become the modern day litmus test that will once and for all establish whether someone is a Christian or not. 

I, for one, pose to both parties this question: since when did belief in someone's teachings require belief in said teacher's immortality? The first Christians - those who accompanied Christ before his death - were obviously oblivious to the "fact" that he would rise from the dead - and yet they were still Christians. Similarly, your present-day Cartesians, Darwinists, Marxists and Maoists entertain no illusions concerning the death of their respective idols - must we then say that Cartesians are not "true Cartesians," because they have not enough faith in Descartes to believe that he transcended death? Must the Maoists believe that their portly premier still haunts the streets of Beijing in order to call themselves Maoists? I think not. 

The fact that the Roman Catholic Church has set up a series of requirements that believers must meet before they can call themselves Christians has no bearing on the true meaning of the word "Christian" - to be a Christian is to adhere to (or at least attempt to adhere to) the teachings of Jesus Christ. Proving that corpses do not reanimate in no way disproves that humility is a good quality to have, or that love of one's neighbor is generally a good thing; and conversely, a man is not made humble and loving simply because he places his belief in a physical impossibility. A Christian is first and foremost a follower of Christ - the superstition is no more than icing on the cake. If you believe it, that is. 

Aside: A Word to a Loved One

I suppose it's something like luck that brings friends into our lives, and cruel fate that takes them out again. A man can never do enough planning, make enough efforts, or arrange enough circumstance to establish a relationship with someone; similarly, he cannot fight hard enough, work long enough, or give more than enough to maintain a relationship that's running through his fingers. The only thing over which he does have control is the place he makes in his heart for those central figures in his life he calls friends - and he should take care not to misplace them. But then I'm telling the moral before the story:

I knew somehow, and long before we met, that you would be a part of my life. I knew somehow, when we did meet, that you would mean more to me than anyone else I'd ever known. And I knew, after you'd stepped away, that I'd shown you too much. I let you know exactly what role you played in my life, and you weren't happy with the part; I let you know how much you meant to me, and you were overwhelmed with the responsibility; and I let you know that, in spite of all your shortcomings, I still loved you. That, I think, is when you realized exactly what it meant to take advantage of people - and you felt guilty for doing it.

It would be wrong to say that I begrudge you all the insipidity, insult and indifference that you've shown me over the years; in fact, I do believe I've grown from them. At the very least I can say that I've come to know a little better exactly what place in my heart you must occupy (it's somewhere near the ground floor, most probably in the maintenance closet) - perhaps the role suits you better? Come now, and do be honest: is that not the room I occupy in yours?

Faith vs. Reason: An Attempt at Reconciliation

This post is an extension of a train of thought begun in the post "Reasonable Rhetoric," and followed upon in "Specificity Contra Art." The upside-down, read-from-top-to-bottom, inverse-Chinese aspect of the blog's chronological layout means that the commencement of this argument is to be found somewhere below this one. I would change that, if I knew how.

The apparent manifestation of the "unscientific backlash," as we will call it, directs us back to our concern with the New Synthesis of faith and reason. It's quite obvious that these two world-views have time and time again established paradigms in every field of human activity; that they have been all-too-often paraded as mutually exclusive criteria for Truth, despite the intrinsic mutual dependency that exists between them; and that contemporary social phenomena evidence a strong inclination towards the reconciliation between their adherents. All that is left to be done is to bring some of these exemplary phenomena to light, so that the hypocrisy that feeds the perpetual battle between the two might be exposed and eliminated.

Reason in Faith: Let's begin with the adherents of faith. The Roman Catholic Church is the most influential faith-based institution in the world, and as such represents the greatest threat to reason that has ever existed: I refer you all to the fates of Galileo and Descartes, whose scientific milestones were assailed with the stinking muck of heresy, insubordination and atheism before finally reaching their public's awareness. More importantly, I ask you to examine the "dogma" that stands as a prerequisite to the "profession of faith": it includes such bizarreries as Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception and Resurrection After Death. Obviously, none of us were there to witness these miracles - we are instructed to accept them upon faith alone. 

But then what, according to the instructors, is this faith? From what I have seen, their "faith" consists of argumentation, syllogism and vast cobwebs of cold, calculated, often circular - reason. Take a listen, if you will, to the subterranean rumblings emanating from the caves of the Vatican: you will hear an army of apologentsia, devising rudimentary Aristotlean equations in order to prove that Christ rose from the dead, after having been conceived by a Virgin. They are out to devise geometrical proofs for the very mysteries that are to be accepted upon faith, and the laboratories in which they work are of a decidedly Frankenseinean nature. 

It should be clear to anyone without conceptual cataracts that the miracle-mystery dogmatism of the Catholic Church is nothing more than a crooked spinning wheel of social control, designed to keep even the most astute intellects occupied so that the political pressure-cooker might go on boiling undetected. But what concerns us here is the fact that reason has been employed to buttress faith - even in cases where the faith has gone bad. Despite their cries against the scientific community for trying to introduce reason where reason doesn't belong, the bedrock of Christian dogmatism is being reinforced with logical rebar. 

Faith in Reason: The scientific community represents humanity's immense investment in the power of reason; let us then address their method, for as we will discover, faith plays a critical role therein. 

The first assumption - that reason is capable of arriving at Truth - is an assumption which must be accepted upon faith alone. There is no way to prove that the products of reason are in any way congruent with what we call Truth, no more than we can prove that Truth actually exists independent of human consciousness. The attempt to drive out faith from the scientific realm is a pipe-dream; if this purging were actually realized, the vast bodies of knowledge that science has accumulated would fall into the same irreparable senselessness in which the theologians anguish daily. We require an immense amount of faith in our own reason to even arrive at the possibility of employing the scientific method.

The second assumption - that the Truth arrived at by reason is justified by experimentation - is also a faith-based assumption. In order to assert that, for instance, the theory of relativity correctly predicts the bending of light around high-mass astronomical bodies, one has to put a great deal of faith in one's eyes and instruments - how else would we then know that we are even witnessing an eclipse? What in the hell would the term "observation" mean, if we didn't trust the proper functionality of our cornea-lens-retina-nervous-system combo? The entire undertaking which we call "experimentation" has been constructed on these two basic assumptions - that reason leads to Truth, and that our observations of the world are reliable. And I thought I heard the scientists say that assumptions were to be left to the religious..?

The Backlash of Irrationality: It is clear (I hope) that the two most prevalent world-views, pronounced the one by the other to be antithetical and mutually incompatible, are indeed intertwined in ways that would lead us to believe that they are in fact mutually dependent - i.e. faith cannot exist without reason, and vise versa. The eventual synthesis of these two perspectives has already begun - has been underway, perhaps, since their conception - but is being achieved through a number of successive oscillations, at the extremes of which one of the two is demonized, and the other glorified. At the moment, as I stated in a previous post, we are witnessing a shift away from the cold logic of the twentieth century to a more aesthetic perspective that values the multifarious, the vague, and the ability to interpret. What I hope to have shown here is that, even during the periods of extreme faithfulness (during which rationality is demonized), there is a great deal of rationalization employed in the service of faith; and conversely, that when rationality is held to be the only method of attaining Truth (to the exclusion of belief), there is much faith required to justify that position. 

I cannot at this point determine whether or not these two tendencies will ever coalesce into one unified paradigm from which we may move beyond their respective limits; nor can I really imagine what such a paradigm might resemble, or what will be raised up against it as the New Antithesis. All I can ask - and I ask this of the Scientist, the Priest, the Politician and the Everyman - is that the idea of a synthesis be seriously entertained. With all the current limitations on knowledge and epistemology, it seems reasonable to assume that an alternative criteria for Truth would be welcomed.