wandering thoughts.

Subtitle: "About the existence of God" or "Why it doesn't matter" or "Why it, in a pragmatic sense, shouldn't matter" or "Why did I use the word 'pragmatic' instead of 'practical'?"

Let me begin with a story about AP Furlong class.

Mr. Furlong loved Edline. Why he did, I don't know, but he loved Edline. For those who are reading this from random other blogpost sites (Blogspot.com does show all of its blogs on its main page in some fashion or something), Edline is a service (except it's not a service because you have to pay for the system; why do we use the word service in this context?) that schools integrate in order that teachers be able to upload assignments, grades, and supplementary other things for their students. It's annoying and always asks you if you've changed your email address when you log in. It's also the harbinger (not "har-bringer") of death assignments like a 6-9 page essay on one of the Canterbury Tales. In any case, it's Edline. He basically expected people to log into Edline all the time to check on stuff. Or did he? I guess he knew that people didn't log into Edline all the time. Without mentioning it in class, he posted on the front page of his Edline site a picture of Michaelangelo's painting on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. He said that 5 points would be added to the quarterly average of whoever successfully demonstrated a connection between the painting and the section of Paradise Lost we were covering in class. Tim Smith successfully demonstrated the connection.

And what was the connection?

That God and Man have this fundamental separation between them that perhaps must remain.

Perhaps, perchance. Actually, the word "perchance" is interesting in this case. But I'll get to that later if I get to it at all.

It's interesting that people believe in God without knowing what God is, especially when it's such an apparently important concept. (Don't mistake my tone for skeptic here, because it's not.) Huston Smith wrote about how Hindus begin to define God (or was it how Buddhists define God?) by what God is not. But all the religions seem to acknowledge that God is a form of infinity. So you believe in infinity. But you don't know what infinity is.

Or not. I mean, or people don't believe in an infinity version of God. But most people after the age of 16 let go of the idea that God is a man in the sky, so I mean the scope increases to something approaching the infinite. But in any case

See, I'm writing right now because I think I just decided on a pre-established concept of God that I am closest to agreeing with, but I can't even remember what it is. I guess that's what one's thoughts about God are-- wandering thoughts. No. That's what they are right now. In other times, they are pervading thoughts.

---In any case, I think I believe in an existing God. If I didn't then I couldn't really discuss the topic as widely. But what I believe in is different. I believe in the concepts of entropy and the human spirit and some random wave bounce thing in the middle of that that creates something magical though I don't want to use that word and something beyond our scope that we can't control but that we can manifest. My belief is disorganized, but I believe in something fundamentally disorganized (for the moment), and it's better to believe in a complex lot of things then in a simple nothing. Yeah. I used to be a nihilist, kind of. Or that was just my searching phase. Whatever. I'm still searching. I always will. Hopefully, you always will. If you don't, dude, "take Xanarol and get back in the game"! or if you found your answer, heh, what'll you do then?

The transcendentalists were right. More appropriately, the transcendentalists are right. Their spirit lives on. Thoreau never married; I guess it didn't really matter for him in terms of carrying on a legacy. But let me get to why the transcendentalists were and are right. They talked about men and women restarting from themselves and then transcending their world so that they might be a better part of the world or that they might feel the world better. I don't know how this differs from existentialism, unless existentialism goes nowhere, which I guess it does (since Grendel was supposed to be Sir Existentialist). That's how we really discover what the world is like when it's at its maximum potential. Or when we're at our maximum potential. We have to realize that we can make our own world, our own creation. That's what my valedictory address addresses, in a way. In a way.

But right now I think there is a fundamental separation from God. He's still there, and you might know how and you might not, but there is a separation, and it's pretty hard to reach God. Buddhism and Hinduism both say you go on living until you reach God, but they say it takes awhile for most people. "People with strands of finite desire go on in other lives," or something like that, is the Buddhist belief, according to Huston "can't write" Smith. If you transcend by way of establishing your own world of creation, you can reach the greatest, and whatever God is---I don't know---it must be something in the category of "greatest."

But why does the concept of a worshippable God matter so much? Why can't we just talk about the greatest possibility out there, the greatest thing we can accomplish for everyone and everything, and use that as our home plate to begin at and to circle back to? What matters is not whether something you imagine or conjure up in your head exists. What matters is trying to find greater and greater things. [Note: Greater things are not necessarily found in the complex things. They could be (and probably are, by what we've seen from people becoming simpler and hence greater) found in the simple things.] Pragmatically, it shouldn't matter. If we're going to pain too much over it (which we do... there's the religion wars, of course, but there's also the petty conflicts that amount to more than the religion wars sometimes) then let's give it a break for as long as we need to

...and let's just be good.