Dear Mlle. Philostopherette --
Where to we come from? who are we? These are all questions to keep us cogitating as we make our way towards the cemetery. And if and when we find out the answers, what then? That we are part of a universe that includes snails, or perhaps elements of that Big Note that made the snails is troubling. God or someone like her is a stand-in, a substitute for das energie while religion gives it a focus. We're bigger than snails, smaller than whales, more sentient than rocks (some of us and I'm qualifying that of course). What we are is arrogant to think that what we know is what exclusively the product of our five senses. Scientists now getting out onto the dance floor are worried about quarks and quantifying consciousness, perhaps these new particles with their five flavors, spins, colors and characteristics, "charmed" I'm sure are the answers though humankind is far from charming these days.
I prefer to think of God is less grandiose terms. I'm looking at a short story by Par Lagerkvist, a Nobel Prize winning writer, called The Eternal Smile about a group of souls who are sitting around heaven and wondering about their existence. After aeons of grumbling and bitching, they decide they've had it, and an answer is wanted. After more aeons, they arise en masse and go looking for God to finally get THE ANSWER to THE QUESTION.
"...at last they saw far off a feeble light. It shone steadily...it was a little lantern with dusty glasses, casting a quiet shadow around it. Under it stood an old man swing wood. They could see that it was God.
”He was bent and short, but strongly built. His hands were rough like those of a man who has worked all his life long at one and the same thing without resting. His face was furrowed, full of toil and a mild seriousness.
"You are God?" they asked. "What have you meant by us?"
"I am a simple man. I didn't intend life as anything remarkable. I have done the best I could do. I have worked untiringly. I have stood by my work day after day for as long as I know. I have demanded nothing. Neither joy nor sorrow, neither faith nor doubt, nothing.
"I only intended that you need never be content with nothing."
(italics added)
A frail old man sawing wood for eternity, what could be more appropriate a characterization for God. Asking questions is what differentiates us from rocks I suppose, but perhaps rocks have their own form of sentience, like plant's secret lives. Science's only problem is that it supposes that their "thoughts" are not relevant, that's where the arrogance of SCIENCE comes from. But as we merrily roll along and the periphery of our ignorance keeps expanding, those "voices singing each to each" are better being heard and, more than that, comprehended.
Consciousness is the key assuredly, who made it, to what end is of less importance in our present tense as we'll have plenty of time to debate it in the Hereinafter however we choose to define it. The trick is, I suppose, to see the Infinite in the Finite, see the Infinite as echoes, waves in Uncle Franz's terms.
The only problem with the Internet is that few people care enough to make the distinction between information and knowledge. The former is like collecting baseball cards or cookie jars, just stuff (downloadable files, etc.). Knowledge implies discernment which is not taught by our public school educational system; consumerism in the form of specific answers is substituted, and no thought is given, nor efforts taken, to how the answers are derived. My friends who teach in college are distressed that their students in science only are interested in the answer to a problem. But life presents us with a series of questions which our living helps us to comprehend, no? The Internet supplies undifferentiated factoids which the user has to put together himself with varying results. If the users have no tools to do so, we have problems, and any perusal at the garden variety homepage or chat-line bears out that observation.
If indeed this is a new and powerful tool for the development of group consciousness which is the current hype, there needs to be more of us out there with our buckets and mops to police the area, true. Yes, it's a democracy of sorts, but how will those "chariots of fire" which Carpenter describes be known if everyone is talking all at once and everyone has forgotten how to listen?
My, that was a tasty thought!
Free the Indianapolis 500!
David
My dear Mr. Carpenter --
I liked your story about God as a benign old putterer. Unfortunately, if he'd sawed less wood and paid a little more attention to is marionettes in the theatre below, maybe they wouldn't have run amok and gone raping and pillaging.
I've always had a vision of God as being an expandable concept. The Hindus think he's a cow; the capitalists view him as the Almighty Dollar, or Mammon; Lautreamont figured he was evil incarnate; feminists put 'him' in the form of the Goddess; and of course Uncle Franz had Him puffing His stogie on His fat maroon sofa and watching His girlfriend commit degenerate acts with a swine. Why? Why not? If we think of God conceptually as the sum total of human information everything from the most enlightened musings to the most degraded superstitions filtered through our consciousness in an attempt to relate the parts to a whole, then just maybe the internet is a Godhead.
Think about it. Religions invariably start out chaotically, with some key concept that inevitably gets buried in massive schisms, factions, and contradictory doctrines. Only when a politically motivated individual, like the Apostle Paul, comes along do we see these ambiguous concepts assembled into a doctrine, following which the doctrine is formally adopted by an orthodoxy. If you want to join the club, you have to abide by the bylaws. If anyone is likely to be blind to the arrival of the "chariot of fire", it's the hidebound religionist, who is convinced he or she knows all the signs of the Second Coming.
There's a lot of this kind of activity on the Internet. The original idea of the net was simple: links between computers. Sort of like your nice old God sawing wood. No politics (you have to discount the fact that the net was originally conceptualized by your pals at the Pentagon), no Big Brother watching you just a wide open network with wide open possibilities.
As the net grew, though, the entropy increased as more and more people came on line. Now we're seeing all sorts of cyber-materialism corporations running Web sites with subliminal messages to consume, consume, consume; and, on the lower level, a sort of HTML arms race my Web site is bigger/slicker/faster loading/more garish than yours. And we're seeing orthodoxy creep in. Corporations with mega-budgets set the tone for graphics and (lack of) content on the net; individuals on Usenet chat groups determine the doctrine and cut out anyone who disagrees, even if it is in the guise of give-and-take interchanges.
This, I agree, is a sorry state of affairs. It will be even sorrier if the government steps in and begins to control the net under the guise of keeping it clean for Middle America. But there's a funny thing about anarchy: it inevitably seems to resolve into domination by the most organized i.e, the most right-wing elements. No one else cares about controlling things. Nobody else has the resources. God as the nice old putterer cannot continue to exist in our universe. There's too much danger that his laissez-faire benignity will be overthrown by Islamic jihad mullahs or the keepersoftheflame on alt.fan.fz megalomaniacal orthodoxists who are so confident they have the One Truth, they're willing to kill/maim/flame anyone else who doesn't.
The other day as I was driving someplace I saw a little church with a banner hanging in front of it. I didn't have my glasses on, so I misread what was on it. It actually said "PROBLEMS? GOD IS THE ANSWER". I saw it as "GOD IS THE PROBLEM". I have my glasses on now, but I still stand by the original misstatement. For the human race, "God" as a concept *is* the problem. We need to quit relying on some dotty old imbecile, however well meaning, and think for ourselves. Because if we don't, the True Believers will be dictating everything we're allowed to do, think, and feel. The Internet is a powerful tool for self expression no more, no less. We must protect it from the orthodoxy, whether that orthodoxy is ConGlomCoNet, Uncle Sam, or the flamers on alt.fan.fz.
Yours,
Molly Maguire
Religion: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
