“My belicosa has a first name, it’s J E S U S …” That’s as far as I got. It’s hard to fit Fuego into the Oscar Meyer song. I had to rearrange my humidor as I bought a divorce celebration of Fuentes Hemmingway series, the short story. This isn’t an entry about tobacco though kids. Speed kills. So does tobacco it just takes a lot longer. Whenever a colleague caught me leaning against a wall smoking with the thousand yard stare they’d invariable say ‘that stuff gives you cancer’ and I’d invariably say ‘Not near fast enough.’
No, I think this entry is about Jesus. Not Jesus Fuego who makes a damn fine cigar, the other guy, more specially his baby daddy.
I haven’t talked to the anarchist since last winter, I’m afraid we might have had a soft falling out, one I’m not fully aware of. The last time we did talk, face to face, was very close to a year ago. He had spent six of the seven years required for ordination in a seminary then left and did other things. I asked him about his faith. He told me he was an atheist. He anticipated the next question, knowing full well I am the least likely ombudsman for the Catholic Church.
His explanation was more poetic than prosaic and to try and recreate it is too much of a test for me at this, or any other, hour. Basically he was saying he was a political atheist, that he believed the politics of the church was damaging in all aspects of human endeavor. Saying ‘You’re preaching to the choir’ would be Hollywood irony, the reason Europeans think Americans have no sense of irony, it’s not irony if it’s a punch-line it’s just a punch-line with a thin veneer of irony. He didn’t ever say one way or the other if he believed in god.
When I say I’m an agnostic I’m really politely saying I think organized religions are bullshit. I’m saying there is no Caucasian in the sky with a beard and a list of who’s been naughty or nice, no seventy virgins and a hookah, no transcending enlightenment at the end of a seven fold path, et cetera et cetera et cetera (I insist you say it out loud like Yul Brenner in the King and I). I’m pretty sure; however, there is something like a god, the existence of which or whom is moot.
I mean Greed, for instance, does not exist in an objective sense, you can’t grab a hold of it, you can’t hold it up by the scruff of the neck and say ‘This is Greed’. Not Love, Jealously or any other of the noble and ugly aspects of the neural pathways we call emotions, personality, souls. They are abstractions, feelings we’ve given names, personified, are quick to wave a bony finger and say “there it is!” when we see it manifest in someone else. Sure there are scents every mammal gives off with fear or lust, but not, say, greed or pride or love. And yes, you can map the effect of some of these emotions in the brain, but a darker color or a lit up area when the subject sees a puppy or a pile of gold; these are greed or love, these are the reaction this subject has to the stimuli. Actual greed and love have no map.
I think God is like that. I think we are hard wired for god to be that, I mean I don’t think there’s an external force, or rather the external force is the other six billion humans on the planet wired the same way that not only affect the very nature of reality but affect our perceptions to the point where we aid and abet.
Most religions have, somewhere either buried deep or at the forefront, that God is Love. I think they got that part right. They twist it kind of funny so that it winds up being that god is the only source of love and without the good nature of the personified deity we are seriously fucked. I think God is exactly love and jealousy and greed and all those other things fairly unique to humans, hard wired, part of the process that put us at the top of the food chain.
I’m an agnostic in that I don’t know if there is an objective god; I’m convinced there is a subjective one the way there is subjective greed and subjective love and that I’d much rather hang out with the crowd that nurtures the nobler aspects than the uglier ones. Again that god doesn’t need to exist in an empirical sense. Most of our perceptions of the world are either fitting round pegs into square holes (e.g. calling that one collection of molecules which are made up primarily of space, bonded atoms made up of even more space and with components that flit in and out of existence --- oh, sorry, run on. Calling that one collection of molecules a table, the other a cup, the third coffee, and we sit at the table and drink coffee from a cup because we perceive these are things) or involve things that are not empirical. I mean you can call mascara and aqua-marine eye shadow empirical if you want, the reason to cake it on though? --- not so empirical.
I know a little bit about a lot of things. I know a little bit about religion. I know a lot about humans and a lot about god and one of the things I know about them both is they are awfully difficult to pin down, to hold up by the scruff of the neck and say “This is God” or “This is Humanity”. That’s what makes religions seem so awfully ignorant, even though there are many very intelligent adherents. They try to put a face and a name on an ever shifting, ever influenced conflagration of neural networks. Both science and religion poison the well every time they offer you a dipper of cool cool water. The observer IS the subject.
EDIT
I was reading some random diary --- I really dislike that phrase, that modern usage of random. The diary wasn’t random at all; to the author it’s the most specific diary on this site, the only one, unique in this respect, that it mentions his or her loved ones, petty arguments and life affirming joy. I say his or her because I forgot already and the author isn’t the point. That it was a diary I chose to read because it popped up on a list of recent entries still doesn’t make it random. The modern usage of the word seems to suggest either an event atypical to the viewer’s observations or a choice made with a predetermined outcome.
T’any rate the entry was about some shit or other but included in the explanation of causality was another diarist who started a journal, according to the author, to chronicle the events of some budding romance. The entry was written with workmanship competence (that is to say nothing popped out as profound or quotable but it was readable and at no point did I shout at my monitor “Jesus Christ on A fuck Biscuit with Holy Country Gravy! English is your first language, use it for shits sweet and savory sake, l mean a trained monkey --- is at least fucking trained!”). It’s an interesting perspective.
Interesting in that I could be convinced with very little to no work that the idea of chronicling important life events is a primary motivation for keeping a journal, online or otherwise. And yet over the years the friends I’ve gathered, kept, lost, misplaced on online journaling sites hardly fit that profile. I don’t know, maybe they do and I just want to read some sub text into their journals that isn’t really there. I’m mostly attracted to innovation in voice or outrageous gaining and losing and recouping fortune, fate, whatever you want to call it; large piles of coins or tickling of fancies. Some I am attracted to not for what they write but for how they interact. Sometimes I’m attracted solely because in real life at least one of us would scare the shit out of the other or bore the shit out the other or, somehow in some way, a lot of shit would be coming out of the other, that I might be the other I am concerned about losing my shit.
The author was setting up the basis of a friendship, perhaps, I don’t recall, maybe they knew one another and the shared interest in journaling kindled some deeper level of friendship.
Yeah. I should probably step away from the keyboard.
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