Shaken, not stirred…
And thus alcohol makes philosophers of us all..
What goes better with high-end chinese food and martinis than a little existential angst? Tonight Ed and I went to round up some grub at Feng Shui in Chelmsford, and somewhere along the line, we stumbled face first into a conversation about the calamity of extraordinary circumstance, that cosmic set up comic flubbs that ordain we should exist as we do right now. We talked about intelligent design, the alternate forms and functions our world could have, and before we signed the credit card slip, the biggest question of all: Where does that leave us?
It’s a fairly well-known fact that although I generally dislike the term “atheist”, I don’t believe in God (or as Einstein put it, perhaps I believe in “Spinoza’s God” - the God *is* the world, not separate from it.) I have this conversation with my aunt every so often, and she is quite concerned that I’ll be spending my afterlife somewhere unpleasant. I try to reassure her that I would keep the heat in the house at a constant 85 degrees if I were allowed, so perhaps a warm climate might suit me. She’s not usually amused by this thought.
Somewhere in the conversation, we inevitably come to the place where she’s tired of arguing with me, and says “Just! Well… just… believe.”
I got to thinking about this concept tonight, while drinking a particularly good Choya plum martini. How does one “just” believe. Isn’t that like arguing with someone looking at one of those 3-D eye-trick pictures to “just” see the sailboat? Will impelling someone to belief, especially one so important as the belief in God, really garner the desired result? How can that possibly work? Can the individual forcefully will themselves to believe in the existence of a non-corporeal being who intervenes personally into the lives of his “creations”? Isn’t that sort of like lying? If I don’t see the sailboat in the hologram, does that mean it’s not there to be seen?
For someone who ditched the daily sojourn to church at the age of ten, I’m sot so sure that simple “fake it ’til you make it” belief is adequate for covering the great “how” of why we are here. I am fresh out of ideas on this one, but if anyone has an answer, I’m all ears.
