Inevitablilty

Baudelairean Satanism.

There, I said it.

[#nevermind]

Canon and Theme: Notes on Belief and the Loss of Magic

“What do you think is become of the art of forcing the thunder and celestial fire down, which the wise Prometheus had formerly invented? ‘Tis most certain you have lost it; ’tis no more on your hemisphere; but here below we have it. And without a cause you sometimes wonder to see whole towns burned and destroyed by lightning and ethereal fire, and are at a loss about knowing from whom, by whom, and to what end those dreadful mischiefs were sent. Now, they are familiar and useful to us; and your philosophers who complain that the ancients have left them nothing to write of or to invent, are very much mistaken. Those phenomena which you see in the sky, whatever the surface of the earth affords you, and the sea, and every river contain, is not to be compared with what is hid within the bowels of the earth.”

―Rabelais, 1534

†

“There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.”

―H. P. Lovecraft, 1922

†

“It had taken him years, and much conniving, to get access to the mighty, and more trickery still to learn which of them had dreams of magic. When pressed. He’d used the jacket, seducing those who fawned upon potentates into revealing all they knew. Many had no tales to tell, their masters made no sign of mourning a lost world. But for every atheist there was at least one who believed; one prone to moping over lost dreams of childhood, or to midnight confessions on how their search for Heaven had ended only in tears and gold.”

―Clive Barker, 1987

†

“See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.”

―Robert R. McCammon, 1991

Something About Today I Can’t Explain

The infinite condition is itself a paradox, as it must necessarily include its own finite limitations, lest it create finite limitation through exclusion.

Just an (ahem!) internal memorandum, sort of. It’s an abstract notion sometimes manifesting in applied logical argumentation, but only in finite and situational considerations. The formulation that struck was that, The infinite must necessarily include its own limitations. Which is, of course, a problematic notion.

Nor can I claim any sense of originality; the statistical likelihood that I am the first person to tread into this realm is precisely measurable: exactly zero. And while it is unclear what role exactly we might ascribe, it is also true that Radiolab visited Gödel during last night’s broadcast.

At any rate, this clumsy paradox exists somewhere in the record, and in much more refined expression. In turn, refined expression is crucial because application of such a crude tool invites catastrophic potentials. The point is remembering to chase it down, lest the idea strike again sometime in the future, and meet similar apathy.

Sieveheads

“Whether or not God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.”

—Denis Diderot

I have long rejected atheism as an identity—though not as a legitimate philosophical or religious outlook—not because I “believe” in God, but because, well, frankly, it’s embarrassing. That is, I get the underlying proposition that there is no God, but atheists never really seem to get past that. It’s almost as if they want to be critics of something, don’t want to put the effort into having a half a clue what they’re talking about, and have rolled out the best excuse they can find for their ill-conceived, uneducated Crusades.

It’s a long list of complaints that have built up over the last twenty years, since I first adopted an atheistic outlook and then abandoned it in the face of a dysfunctional nihilistic demand that requires one’s skepticism be artificially limited exclusively to religion in order to escape, and at no time has the rising atheistic movement offered any real relief. Indeed, the ever-growing body of uninformed mockery the atheistic movement has hurled at religious movements reminds that it really isn’t about whether or not God exists, but finding an excuse to be hateful toward one’s fellow human beings. It’s more about empowerment; they don’t simply want to break the traditional religious power structures in society, they wish to usurp those influences. Thus, even though atheists are supposedly better educated, far too many continue to act just like the idiotic religious neighbors they so need to mock.

Take the new poster boy for the International Association of Atheistic Idiots, one Lukáš Nový, as an example:

A man who wears a sieve on his head for religious reasons has been allowed to wear his bizarre headgear on his official identity card.

Prankster Lukas Novy, from Brno in the Czech Republic, claims that his Pastafarian faith means he has to wear the sieve at all times.

Officials ruled that turning down Novy’s request would be a breach of the country’s religious equality laws.

Brno City Hall spokesman Pavel Zara explained: ‘The application complies with the laws of the Czech Republic where headgear for religious or medical reasons is permitted if it does not hide the face.’

Novy claims to be a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, when emerged in the USA as spoof on organised religion.

According to its tongue-in-cheek website their ‘only dogma … is the rejection of dogma’.

—Williams

To the one, the Daily Mail article demonstrates just how stupid Czech officials are, but, to the other, it also reminds us just how sleazy the organized atheism movement actually is.

And more than anything, it’s the sleaze factor that really screws the movement. Then again, it’s what they want. Much like many organized religions, it’s a job-security racket, to deliberately raise demons in order to publicly play the hero and slay them.