You gotta get yourself religion
And try to serve the lord
While the blood’s
Still warm
In your veins…
I dunno who wrote that but it played in the background of a deleted scene in Lord of Illusions. Love that shit. But yes, to the point…
I want the protection of religious faith, in a country that gives lip service to allowing non-christians religious liberties, but will never ever do the same for atheists. But it has to be real, or I’ll fold under inquisition. I need something I can believe in, and per some legal definitions, that needs to be a higher power.
Now more than ever I do believe in a higher power. I believe that Chaos reigns supreme over both the meek and the mighty, that no human truly controls their own life or destiny. The most powerful motherfucker in the world cannot keep shit from coming out his asshole on live TV. The rich can never act with beneficence or generosity. The bourgeoisie can do nothing but slide into fascism over and over and over again.
We’re all controlled by something which is why even the conspiracies that are actually true are a bad joke. CIA you don’t own shit at the end of the day except your own bloody hands and wasted lives.
Entropy, of which Death is just one aspect, as best expressed by Ian Malcolm in Yurassis Next, “The kind of control you’re attempting simply is… it’s not possible.” But not just dinosaurs, not nature more broadly, like in his little speech. It’s everything. The only consolations I’ve ever known are dark consolations, and it’s more of the same – the fuckos that rule the world are still subject to everything that they fear, everything that they want, everything that they’re afraid of losing. They can ruin a lot, but they can’t control everybody all the time any more than the US could beat Vietnam.
This isn’t Discordianism, except insofar as those hippy fucks would claim everything is everything and nothing, and this would naturally be enfolded by that. A lot of key differences, most notably that I don’t entertain headaches and I don’t love my higher power. I just feel its explanatory power in all aspects of life, and it lets me throw up my hands sometimes when I need to.
I wouldn’t say I have holy, sacred, or unholy books or people to elevate, but there are some cultural icons that resonate with these feelings.
Ian Malcolm. Not Mr. Goldblum, not even Mr. Crichton. He is greater than the sum of his parts. He showed me a truth I initially scoffed at, disregarded as inane. Of course you can keep dinosaurs in a zoo, if you do it right. And then it all came to pass, and now I know.
The Two Maxes. We are living in the cyberpunk dystopia as symbolized by Max Headroom, and living in anticipation of the post-apocalypse as symbolized by Mad Max.
Hellstar Remina. The only ethos worth having when everything is bad, it’s the ethos that allows you to keep doing good. I don’t find that in abasement and martyrdom. I find it in two characters from Hellstar Remina. Remina herself, not strong enough to do much more than suffer what the world does to her, and the grace with which she does so. And the astronaut dropout Whatsisface, who is strong enough to help her, when all it can afford them is a short reprieve from the evils of the world, leading up to certain death. He is Antifa.
The Adversary. My girl Satan is weak right now, tho people who do not recognize her true form may suppose the opposite. Satan is the one who opposes sanctimonious authority, and she has been thrust like Sisyphus to the bottom of the mountain. It will be a while before she has the sauce to start pushing that boulder up again, but when she does, she’s on my list too.
… that’s all my thoughts for the moment.
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REBECCA WIESS says
don’t know where the big bang came from, but after that it’s all stuff bumping into stuff. By the time you get to molecules, it’s refined into Brownian motion, further refined into self-replication, aka life. And the basic philosophy of life is Happy Happy Grow Grow. All the elaborations after that are vanity. I like to keep it simple. This frees me from all kinds of crap.
Great American Satan says
it can be tough threading the line between simple and anti-intellectual, which is a place one would rather not be. i’d say you do succeed tho, based on your comment history.
Great American Satan says
but do i? heh.
Dennis K says
Yonks ago, back in the dinosaur days, my middle school biology teacher reminded me we’re all just fancy-pants chemical reactions. Elaborate slime with form, doing what slime does on a more sophisticated level but with the same motivations. I’ve seen nothing since, especially not in science, that convinces me otherwise. The Universe doesn’t care and I find that rather liberating. Enjoy what you have today, right this minute. Create, do art, write a poem.
Bekenstein Bound says
It’s as I said: we’re in the Cyberbiotic Eon now. Have been since Rome or thereabouts, if not the first city-state even earlier, a society so large and complex no one, not even a self-styled emperor, could truly control it. The metaorganisms are running the asylum now and every oligarch and would-be dictator is just surfing some wave that needs must eventually crash into rocks somewhere.
Bekenstein Bound says
Yours was the only new top-level post in all of FtB in 24 hours? What the fuck?
Great American Satan says
thanks for the comments guys. beks- i think people are having unspecified general difficulties, besides the holidays.
Bekenstein Bound says
What holidays? Christmas is still over three weeks away.
Great American Satan says
thanksgiving thru xmas is one big long string of additional shit we don’t usually have on the plate, depending on how much you do for it. it be like that around here.
but this question has me thinking what should my religion’s holidays be like? hm… gotta wear black and show off your chest to honor ian malcolm, that’s more of a clothing thing… gotta… watch some movies i suppose … .. i dunno. need to put more thought into it.
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Bekenstein Bound says
Two whole months of “additional shit”? That seems extreme. Did you say you worked in retail? I guess that’d be why.
Great American Satan says
naw, i’m just occupied with fam foolery, as small as my family is. i don’t have a whole lot of sauce at the end of the day and can barely keep up with dishes. my last job was in retail, now i’m in call center-based social work? let’s call it that.