Unabashed

Here’s your Friday morning philosophy, courtesy of Unabashed. Comments are welcome.

The Religion of Boo
     “You live in a college town but you never went to college?” Destina asked, drawing on her cigarette.
     “That’s right,” he said. “Is that a Road Runner?”
     She looked at the cigarette. “Yeah.”
     “Mind?”
     “Help yourself.” She punched the pack across the bar.
     “Thanks.” He pulled one out and lit it.
     “I guess that’s about standard, now that I think about it. I mean, not everyone can go to college. Right?”
     “Well, I could have. I just didn’t.”
     “You’ll have to tell me about it sometime.” The door opened and she walked down to the end of the bar to serve the young couple that came in.
      When their orders were complete, she wandered back up the bar. “You want another?”
     “Don’t mind if I do. Put a little more Tabasco in this one?”
     She raised her eyebrows, “Whatever floats your boat.”
     He sat for a couple moments while she shook up a fresh bloody Mary, then said, “You know what I’d like to see?”
     “What’s that?”
     “A grudge match. Between Allen Iverson, Marshall Mathers, and Sebastian Junger.”
     “I don’t know them.”
     “Well, Allen Iverson is a basketball player. He’s the prototypical crybaby athlete. I remember him best for his tirade against his coach for demanding that he show up for practice. He just went off, went crazy, talking about how he didn’t have to practice to keep his edge, and then, facing elimination from the playoffs, went four for twenty four and went home.”
     “I guess he needed some practice,” Destina said. She was slowly wiping the bar down with a wet towel.
     “Yeah. Makes me sick just to think about him.”
     “Okay. So who’re the other guys?”
     “You know who Marshall Mathers is.”
     “Do I?”
     “Eminem.”
     “That’s right.”
     “The ultimate punk. I remember when he won this award for best rapper. Some guy asked him why he had such hostility toward little Moby. You know Moby?”
     “I know his stuff,” Destina said.
     “Well, little Moby is evidently the only person Mathers will confront on a public stage. They’re at these awards, the MTV awards, and this guy asks him about Moby and he starts calling Moby a little girl. How he’s not afraid to hit a girl with glasses an stuff. All the while he’s got these two giant black guys standing right behind him. Mathers is a bully, pure and simple, but he’s only like four foot nine, so the only person in the entire auditorium that he could pick on was poor vegan Moby. It would be nice to see him get his, that’s all I’m saying.”
     “Vegan?”
     “Yeah. Somebody that won’t eat anything or wear anything made from animals. Won’t even drink milk.”
     “No kidding.”
     “None.” He took a drink. “Mm. Good. The real loser, though, is this guy named Sebastian Junger. He’s the one I most want to see get punked. You know him?”
     “Nope.”
     “He wrote a short story that was made into the movie “Perfect Storm.””
     “Oh, yeah. I know the movie.”
     “Well. Suffice it to say that he’s in more need of getting his than Iverson or Mathers.”
     “What’d he do to you?”
     “Nothing. Why?”
     “You seem to be personally involved in this little vendetta of yours.”
     “So?”
     “Why do you take things so personally?”
     He stared at her for a moment. “It… What?”
     “It just seems like you take all this crap personally.”
     “No. It just makes me…”
     “Mad?”
     He paused. It became obvious she was goading him. “Whatever,” he finally said with a smirk.
     “You act like these people matter. That’s all I’m saying. Like the world is going to change for the worse if Elvis gets fat, but then he does.”
     “Now there’s no reason to start thrashing the King.”
     “Just my point. See? You’ve got your heroes, and you’ve got your villains. You’re just involving yourself at a personal level with both of them. That’s not good.”
     He said nothing for a moment. Then he began to say something, but didn’t, and then he did it again, and then he said, “Well. Whatever.”
     She smiled. “Have one more for the road. On the house.”
     “Make it spicy,” he smirked.
     She served it up. “You know what I’m saying, though, right?”
     “Yeah,” he said. “I get it.”
     “The thing you gotta keep in mind is this: everything is a made up thing. Everything in the world. All the people, the way they are, good or bad, it’s all made up,” she popped an olive in her mouth and leaned onto the bar in front of him, giving him a nice view of her cleavage. “This deal with Eminem? Don’t you think he acts like that on purpose? Don’t you think that basketball player is just a jerk? Why let it bother you? And I don’t even know what’s up with the other guy, the writer, what’s his name?”
     “Sebastian Junger.”
     “Yeah. Junger. Don’t you just feel sorry for a guy with a name like that? Reminds me of Sebastian Bach. I mean, how pathetic do you have to be? Have you seen that guy? Name’s Bach, for Christ’s sake. But you know what? He’s just another thing in the world. Just like everything else. He’s made up, too.”
     “I get it.”
     “Good.”
     She wandered down the bar wiping it down with her towel and served the young couple again. A black man in a cowboy hat came in. His shirt had rhinestones on it. Leon checked his watch: ten a.m.
     “It’s a little early, Tyrone,” Destina said, looking at him while she set a beer before the male portion of the young couple.
     He opened his hands as if to say “not my fault,” and then sat at the bar about three spots down from Leon and four up from the couple down at the end near the door. “I just need a beer and a gin,” he said. His voice was thick and slightly slurred.
     Destina served it up, with a half a lemon. Evidently he’d been there before, Leon thought. Destina made her way back down to him.
     “Take old Tyrone here,” she said, throwing a thumb in his direction. “What do you make of him?”
     “Anybody dressed like that must put on a show of some kind.”
     She shot him with her finger. “Bingo,” she said. “What d’you think he does?”
     He shrugged. “Weatherman?” he smirked.
     She smiled. “Funny boy.”
     He shrugged again.
     “He taps. And he sings. And he eats fire.”
     “Interesting.”
     “Did you hear him speak a minute ago?”
     “Yeah.”
     “Hear how he sounded kind of slurred?”
     “Uh huh.”
     “Know why?”
     “Cause he burned his tongue off?”
     She paused, had that look someone gives you when you’ve taken their punch line. “Right,” she said. “He was standing right over there. His hair burned off, too.”
     Leon looked, eyebrows raised.
     “He was just doing his usual show for the Saturday nighters, and there was this guy in the crowd that had a flask in his jacket full of Moonshine. Serious rotgut, right? Well, he liked watching old Tyrone tap so he offered him a shot of his ‘shine. Tyrone whips one back and next thing I know his whole head is on fire and he’s screaming and everybody’s running out of the bar. It’s hard to put out a man’s head.”
     Leon nodded.
     “So. The million dollar question is: why’d it happen, Grasshopper?” she asked.
     He shrugged. “Because his mouth was full of Everclear?”
     She shook her head. “It happened… because nothing is real. Everything is made up.”
     “What?”
     “What I’m trying to tell you is that everything is made up. Everything. Life, the way we live it, the government, religion, everything. It’s all made up. Welcome to fairytale land.”
     “His tongue still got burned out of his head, though, right?”
     “Sure it did. But only because of a made up thing. It didn’t have to.”
     “But it did. That’s real.” He took a drink.
     “Tyrone was doing his show. A made up thing. If he hadn’t been doing that, he wouldn’t have burned his tongue out.”
     “Yeah, but he’s making a living, right?”
     “Why should he have to? He had to make up something to do to make money, just like you or me.”
     “Because we need money.”
     “Why?”
     “Because that’s the way the world works?”
     She nodded. “Why?”
     “Because…”
     “Because somebody decided that that’s the way we should do it. Somebody wanted something somebody else had. They worked up a trade. Suddenly there’s currency in the world and just because those two jokers made it happen. Now everybody needs currency because those to made it up. See?”
     “Everything is made up.”
     She nodded.
     He said, “I read an essay once this guy wrote that said that if you told the story of one thing–like… like this bar, it’s nice, mahogany or some kind of wood, nice stain–if you told the history of this bar that you’d have to tell the history of the world or it would be incomplete. That to tell the history of any one thing you had to tell the history of everything.”
     She squinted in thought. Popped an olive in her mouth. “I don’t follow, cowboy.”
     “It just means that you can’t tell the story of a single thing in the world without reciting history from that point all the way back to the beginning of time.”
     “What’s the history of this diamond?” she asked, holding up the pendent on her necklace.
     “You bought it at the store.”
     “Right. A clerk sold it to me.”
     “And I guess someone cut it. And a jeweler had to set it…”
     “Sure.”
     “Before that it was probably mined somewhere in Africa by some guy working for dirt.”
     “Right.”
     “Now you’ve got these four people involved in the creation of this piece of finery. In order to know all the details about this diamond, don’t you need to know about those people? Don’t you need to know why they chose their vocations? And to know that you’d have to know everthing about them. Everyone, really, that has ever been associated with that diamond. And everything else, too. You’d have to know about the pressure required to force the basic material of the diamond into its shape, its density. How long did that take? A million years?” He spread his hands open wide. “And what was it before it was a diamond? Just matter, same as it is now, but uncompressed. And now it’s refined, too. It’s shaped, just so. So to know it’s history, you have to know the history of the guy who cut it. And he used a tool to cut it with, right? What about the person that made that tool? And someone else entirely probably invented the tool. Someone else created the standard for the way the diamond was cut. Someone else dug up the gold. Someone else invented the method for purifying it. Now there are literally hundreds of people involved in the creation of that one diamond, and to know everything about them you’d have to know every detail about every person that has ever affected their life, from their mothers to the doctors that delivered them to the blanket they were wrapped in and it’s weaver, all the way back to God.”
     “All that just proves my point,” Destina said.
     “In a way. Yeah.”
     “Everything’s made up. Not just physically, of course everything physical has to be made up, but everything else. The fact that we do anything at all is completely due to the fact that we made something up to be done. Who would get married if we didn’t? Go to church?”
     “Cook dinner…”
     “Sell insurance…”
     “Why is insurance even a thing at all? Somebody made it up.”
     “Buy a house…”
     “Get a job…”
     “If not for the made up stuff we would just be.”
     He faded away, stared off in the distance for a minute, and then said, “I gotta get to work. That cash register ain’t gonna work itself.”
     “Where you work?”
     “Jolly Roger’s on Greensboro.”
     She nodded. “See you ‘round, then.”
     “Yeah.” He laid a five on the bar and walked out the door, feeling new breath being breathed into him. Destina’s philosophy had given him something. It meant something to him. It made sense. He took a deep breath of August air and exhaled it. With a philosophy like that, he could absolve himself of responsibility—any responsibility. If he accepted the truth that nothing was real, then he didn’t have to worry or fear or experience any bad emotion at all. He could just wander through life living it large.
He nodded, knowing that in all his life there was one thing he couldn’t just be forgiven for. There was one thing in his past that he was responsible for that couldn’t be shed so easily as finding a new religion. To lose that weight off his shoulders he would have to seek absolution. He could adopt Destina’s philosophy as his own, maybe even as his religion. He looked up at the sign once he was on the street: “Boo Radley’s” was the name of the place. He snickered and gave a name to the religion he’d just been introduced to: the Religion of Boo. But to offer himself wholly to his new religion he would have to seek a reckoning for the one act from his past so vile that it made him shudder in his shoes. He walked two blocks over to Greensboro smiling all the way. Jolly Roger’s was only four blocks from there.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: philosophy

I find it hard to believe no one’s worshipping the Internet yet as a deity. What’s up with people? As fad-following as people can be, there’s got to be a few folks out there who think the Internet is God. But I can’t find them. I’ve Googled “Internet as religion” and “people who worship on the Internet,” (etc.) but I haven’t found anything yet. This is something I’ve been waiting for for quite some time now, too. It’s an integral part of an idea I’ve been stirring up, about the relationship between humanity and technology, but for the idea to be fulfilled I really need some wackos somewhere out there to form the official Most Holy Church of the Sublime Internet. I’m very disappointed that it hasn’t happened yet. Let me know if you’ve heard of something I haven’t…

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: church, Internet, Religion, web, worship

The Constant Siege has a lovely observation about spirituality that I wish I’d written myself:

It’s the ozone smell of the desert after a summer rainstorm, or the damp magnolia fertility in the air of a New Orleans night. It’s old Puerto Rican men playing dominoes on the sidewalk in Brooklyn, spilled out of their apartments, our public space blended with their private, their women dancing to boombox salsa, their children running for ices, far off police sirens singing chorus.

It’s the atoms in my blood and heart and brain. Atoms that have existed since the dawn of time, and will continue until it never ends. Atoms that have been in the heart of stars, and traveled in comets, and lay in the cold grey dust of the moon. Atoms that have fed great sequoias, and the earthworms underneath them. Atoms that have been breathed by kings and paupers, philosophers and madmen. Atoms that I’m carrying right now, on brief loan, my contribution to their life, and theirs to mine. Pure eternal energy, great and small. It’s being old when young, and young when old, knowing I will die soon, but I’ll never really die.

written by Matt Mitchell

A few years ago I went to a Baptist church with my mother for Easter. This was something she wanted me to do (she’s worried about my soul), so I put on my suit and went. The pastor of the church was a high-ranking official in the Baptist administration in the state, so I at least thought he might give me a thing or two to think about. He definitely didn’t disappoint me. His sermon shook me to the core, infuriated me, made me realize many things…but none of the realizations were of his design. In fact, his sermon impacted me to a degree exactly opposite what I imagine he’d had in mind. But I sat silently, with a sick feeling in my stomach, looking around at the parishioners who were all nodding and saying their amens as the leader of the congregation nailed home the final nail in the coffin that would ultimately drive me away from the church. I have been to church since then, but I find that when I go I am very quick to shut down, to let my mind wander, to just get through this. Lo, I have seen the corruption of the corporate church, and I am sickened by it.

My religious background is muddled with a mixture of influences, from Primitive Baptist to Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, Evangelical, Jewish and even a smattering of atheism. Ultimately, I found that if I was going to enjoy any comfort at all with religion I was going to have to figure things out for myself, because I was getting too, too much conflicting information. First, my disclaimer: I am a believer in a higher power. If that doesn’t jive with your beliefs, or lack thereof, that’s fine; I’m open-minded enough to refrain from criticizing, and I’m not as convinced in the essential rightness of anything to condemn anyone for anything. But it seems a lot of condemnation is handed out freely by a lot of people who think of themselves as righteous, and I’m not just talking about Baptists. It seems like every religion has a certain degree of “we’re right and everyone else is wrong so they’re all going to H-E-double-hockey-sticks.” I find that Jews generally don’t condemn non-believers out of hand, which improves their overall belief system quite a bit in my eyes. So what am I, when it comes right down to it? I’ll only claim non-denominational believer status, and hope that people will leave it at that.

That Easter Sunday might have been the final nail, but it wasn’t the first. It wasn’t even in the top 100. It was only the last. The first happened when I was much younger, much more devout, and much less understanding of the human condition. Maybe I’ll tell that story one day, but for now, I have to tell you what that preacher said to me that was so controversial that it has stuck with me through the three years since and finally made me realize that I simply do not agree with the masses, and that religious doctrine (Baptist, in this case) was inherently wrong. He said: “Only a Christian can truly experience love.” Not only do I disagree whole-heartedly with that statement (and this spoken as a Christian), but I’m even going to go one step further and say that I don’t believe that someone is going to go to hell just because they don’t believe in any specific church’s doctrine. I know, I’m a radical. And I’ll go even further and say that teaching people a dogma based upon principles such as this is tantamount to sin itself.

So what doctrine do I believe in? Well, that’s simple: none of them. At least not if they were written by men (they were all written by men). I believe in a purity of soul, in a sincere well-wishing for our fellow creatures, and in a love that anyone can enjoy, any time the moment moves them. I would get into more specifics, but I’m done with this for today. Maybe one day I’ll share my beliefs in a bit more detail, but for right now I’m ready to let it be.

written by Matt Mitchell

“Anonymous,” an Internet group, have declared war on Scientology, crippling a lot of Scientology websites and promising to stage a protest on February 10. It might not be as interesting as it is if the YouTube statements they’ve released weren’t so creepy.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCbKv9yiLiQ&feature=related[/youtube]

How much better would it have been if Kurt Vonnegut had started a religion instead of L. Ron Hubbard? At least Vonnegut had a sense of humor.

written by Matt Mitchell

From Steve Buccheit:

The Old Year is dead. Long live the New Year … Light fires, burn the Yule log, shout to the heavens, dance, feast, give life to the Sun. Bring in the holly and the ivy, the evergreens to remind us that life is and will be. Light the tree in honor of their everlasting presence. The Wheel has turned, light will return.

Whenever I hear people talking about “getting back to the good ol’ religion,” I’m always reminded of Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth. When Bill Moyer brought up the subject of fundamentalism, Prof. Campbell sang “Give me that Zarathustra, just like we use-ta, oh give me that ol’ time religion.”

This entry of Steve’s makes me think of my own Christmas creed (this would be the beginning of the “Shallow Mind” portion of this post :-)

Remembering the reason for the season, as modern-day observers like to say, goes a bit deeper than most of them would like to admit. Christmas, as with most every other Christian religious celebration, began as a pagan ritual observing Winter Solstice. For me, a part of believing in a higher power is accompanied with a sense of reverence, nothing like the full-throated month-long scream of good will that Christmas has become. But then, I don’t believe it’s very reverential to take a pagan holiday and convert it to suit the desires of the masses. Do I observe Christmas? No, but I do celebrate it, because it’s a fun holiday. But for me it’s not a religious day, because I have seen too many truths to believe that it could be (for me).

From Storytelling Folklore Sourcebook (Livo Rietz, 1991) (incidentally this book was my first ever Amazon.com purchase, on Dec. 12, 1998):

Christmas was a very deliberate invention of the church to supersede the old pagan sun birth holiday (Frazier 1922). Many of the old customs of the pagan birthing festival are practiced at Christmas, including the bringing of living evergreen trees indoors.

The people of Upper Bavaria bring in a living fir tree and hang it with wreaths, flags, and inscriptions. The winter solstice practice of worshipping the seasonal tree of birth is far more ancient than modern Christmas custom, and if one of these habits amounts to the borrowing of another, the decorated tree in the house in December is more than likely an echo of the old habit of celebrating the renewed promise of life by worshipping a tree than it is an invention of the “new” religion. The Christmas tree is a custom descended from the ancient Norse belief in Yggdrasil, the world tree, an immense ash. Its roots were in Hel, the kingdom of death, its branches in heaven. The stars hung in its crown. At the base of the tree, around the sacred well, were the three Nornir, or fates, who decided the course of human events.

Now, I’m not deriding the choice of using a Christmas Tree–I love my Christmas Tree–But I am saying that when dealing with the Everlasting we should be careful how we pay homage. Too often these days people believe that the only thing that matters is the heart, that if the our actions are the result of a pure heart then they will be accepted as they were offered. But I believe there are concequences to making offerings of unwanted gifts no matter how they’re intended and, because we are dealing with the Infinite, they are concequences that we can’t account for. You might say “My tree is just there because it’s pretty, it isn’t a part of my core belief system,” to which I would say, Good for you, but if you’re using Christmas as a religious observance of your diety, you could be sending mixed messages. Is it okay to pray to God on your knees if there’s a golden calf sitting behind you on the dresser, even if the calf is there only because you think it’s pretty?

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: birth, Christ, christmas, folklore, log, pagan, solstice, Winter, yule

This definitely proves that there’s no god. Right? I mean, the guy clearly stated that if there was a god, then he would be saved. And I quote: “God will save me, if he exists” at which point he lowers himself into the pen where the lioness sidles over and promptly severs his carotid artery. Now, I’m not sure if this guy was a Christian or Muslim or (insert religion here), but one thing I never really understood is: Why do religious people think God exists to prove His/Her existence to them? Frankly, I would think that would be way, way back on the list of Things To Do by the Almighty.

“Oh, crap, lately I haven’t given Joe Shmoe proof of my existence, I’d better get right to giving him a miracle he can hang his hat on. Because today, Joe, it’s all about you! Of course, last week I gave Bob proof of my existence and he’s still running around with a sign proclaiming he’s Jesus reincarnated. Dumbass.”

written by Matt Mitchell