Seinfeld and Colbert "on" the comforts of our cosmic insignificance

For the past year or so, I’ve spent a good amount of my free time late at night (after the kids are finally asleep) “researching” nihilism and existentialism. Watching documentaries and interviews. Reading texts online and in print. On Monday I told this to a best friend with whom I hadn’t communicated in a few months. His response was less than enthusiastic and later that night, I immediately read an interview that essentially regurgitated the expressed sentiment. 

The book is called “Sick in the Head” and it’s a compilation of interviews [comedy movie-writer/producer/director] Judd Apatow did fairly recently with 40 super-famous comedians.

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JuddApatow: I read a lot of Zen but it ultimately makes me unhappy because I don’t want to be one drop in the ocean.

JerrySeinfeld: I do.

JuddApatow:  How do you get over that hump?

JerrySeinfeld: You look at some pictures from the HubbleTelescope™ and you snap out of it. I used to keep pictures of the Hubble™ on the wall of the writing room at Seinfeld™. It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important.

JuddApatow:  See, I go the other way with that. That makes me depressed. 

JerrySeinfeld: Most people would say that. People always say it makes them feel insignificant, but I don’t find being insignificant depressing. I find it uplifting.  

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Not long after reading this, I read another interview in the book where the interviewee essentially utilized the same anxiety-reducing technique albeit the terminology was decidedly more religious:

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StephenColbert: But also, when I was a kid, we had a tragedy in my family. My father and two of my brothers, Peter&Paul, the two closest in age to me, died in a plane crash. I was ten years old, and my mother, who had always been a very religious person — not overtly related to their death — would say to me — if anything was wrong with my life, if anything was going wrong — she would say, “Look at this in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity?” In other words, don’t worry about this little thing.

JuddApatow: Okay.

StephenColbert:  And that light of eternity is another way of looking at everything. See it in the light of eternity. Don’t see this as your momentary worry. So, that helped me to not worry, and because my father and brothers had died, what could worry you more than that? From that point on, I never worried in school again. I maybe did my homework six times from age ten to eighteen.

JuddApatow: Wow.

StephenColbert: I barely graduated. I just read a lot of books, so I incidentally learned enough to bullshit by. There was no threat that anyone could hold over me. Nothing seemed important. So that made me think differently about almost everything that normally happened to a child. What are you going to threaten me with? What could a teacher possibly threaten me with?

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If I desired to be an AssholeTroll™, I could go all reducto ad absurdum on this perspective (because you can do that with ANY perspective), but I personally find comfort in the same sort of mental gymnastics utilizing this axiom of insignificance. As a writer who can think myself in circles and imagine scenarios from infinite perspectives, second-guessing myself and ridiculing my own self-worth comes second nature to me. And perhaps while it could be helpful to roll myself inside a rug and flail about my galactic meaninglessness, inevitable death, and tremendous impotence to affect human activity as a whole, I find it calming and liberating to surrender to this notion of insignificance. And thus able to decide my own values and not allow others (or my imagination of others' judgements) to yank me around.

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This summer I read and watched a lot of media regarding nihilism and existentialism. I got into all the mathematicians who went insane and starved themselves who (prior that that) brought forth evidence of the shaky bedrock of nigh emptiness upon which mathematics and logic resides.

After years of being (#1) a Roman Catholic apologists, (#2) a dues-paying member of AmnestyInternationalUSA™, and (#3) an advocate of lesser organized utopian principles, it has become clear to me that it is totally pointless to argue with someone with whom you don’t agree. They have their magical axioms with which they deeply identify. You attack it and they respond with fight-or-flight. But without smashing a brick in their face, ruining them economically, and/or threatening the death of their entire family, they are not going to concede defeat.

I have become so nihilistic that I could care less to what religion someone supposedly ascribes. There are the things people say they believe (or we assume they believe based on their affiliation with certain communities of Faith™ and/or sects) and how they actually operate in real life. When a doctor on the playground tells me he’s Mormon, I know every argument against Mormonism and I employ none of them nor have any desire to challenge their belief. Because it’s all pointless, so who the fuck cares?

Nonetheless, I do have axioms that dictate my behavior. Anchor me. For example, I have two young children. I want them to be happy and develop as healthily as possible. Become smart and capable. Thus, I interact with them in a certain way. We sacrifice expendable income to pay for private schooling that is very lenient on a child’s personal autonomy, whilst teaching the children social skills so they’re not a lousy snotty ultra-violent fuck that nobody likes.

And there other axioms of course, that cause this thus and thus and thus and thus. Like my desire to be a good writer that people read. Thus, my writing this stupid bullshit that only GoogleBots will actually read.

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StandToReason™ continued post...

So I read what Greg Kookl has to say about Moral Relativism in his article "Moral Relativism Self-Destructs." (http://www.str.org/articles/relativism-self-destructs#.VYsPwabRxzo) This is what he boils it down to near the end of the article:

If morals are entirely relative, there are no grounds for determining if any moral standard is deficient or unreasonable or unsound or if it's better or if it's barbaric or unacceptable. Those things are gone. In a relativistic world view, others' views--no matter how offensive to our intuitive sense of right or wrong-- can't be critiqued, they can't be challenged, they can't be praised, and they can't be faulted. And this is true of the opposing view that moral truth is absolute. If relativism is true then moral education becomes impossible and moral discussions become incoherent. 

In response, I googled Moral Relativism and found a lengthy "encyclopedic" article regarding the subject written by someone who promotes/explains moral relativism as a philosophy (http://www.iep.utm.edu/moral-re/). What follows is an adept rejoinder to Kookl's issue with moral relativism.

The fact that one moral outlook cannot be conclusively proved superior to another does not mean, however, that it cannot be judged superior; nor does it imply that one cannot give reasons for preferring it.

I think it's important to point out that our actions do not occur in a vacuum. If my son has his feelings hurt, he may want to spit in someone's face or he may want to meekly inform them in a verbal manner how they've hurt his feelings. Either action might be equivalent in the rating of "objective morality" but that does not mean I do not prefer him to take the latter action. Nor that I won't use my parental might and intellect to attempt to coerce him to regularly respond in that fashion. It's not about "objective morality", it's that I've found or believe -- in my middle-class USA white-skinned upbringing under the behavioral modeling of my late father -- that being cordial to others and not creating enemies elicits an easier life. Or I suppose. But that's a hell of a lot different than declaring that's how everyone should behave in every situation.

While driving across the state of Ohio (and back) to deliver my niece to a basketball camp, I stumbled upon some talk radio put on by an organization called StandToReason™ (str.org). They’re essentially a Christian™ apologetic organization. The guy talking, whom I believe was Greg Koukl, seemed pretty intelligent and adept at talking logic. I listened to him for a couple hours.

I went to the StandToReason website. I read an article by Greg Kookl on the morality of homosexuality. Like many moral arguments, there are words and words, sentences and sentences, paragraphs and paragraphs. But with astute eyes, one can boil down arguments to a single or handful of bases from which the argument stems.

http://www.str.org/articles/why-is-homosexuality-bad-in-itself#.VYgVmqbRxzo

“The simple answer to why homosexuality itself is bad is because it is a perversion of God’s provision regarding a deep and profound aspect of the created order. God made things one way because He's in charge. He created the world to function a certain way. There's teleology, a purpose to it, and when the purpose is fulfilled it's a beautiful thing.”

Human reproduction happens sexually, of course, but the offspring that have come from that sexual reproduction — in every generation — have operated in a myriad of different sexual behaviors and activities. And some of those activities lead to sexual reproduction amongst a heterosexual monogamously married couple — but most of them don’t. If Greg agreed that this is the “certain way” God created the world to function, then I’d have no qualms about what he’s arguing. But he’s not. He’s saying that only some of these behaviors/activities are God-ordained (I’m not sure of the nitty-gritty specifics since he’s not a Roman Catholic) while the others are perversions. And he’s got his reasons for his distinctions of what to put in the box of “appropriate sexuality”, but I argue it’s a totally human, artificial construct.

At this point, my mind's imaginary model of Greg Kookl outs me as a Moral Relativist. He rushes to the ReductioAdAbsurdum™ that selfless sacrifice to help the destitute is objectively the moral equivalent to a group of men gang-raping animals to death. And sure, objectively, it might be the moral equivalent, but it does not follow that I want that to happen. Or that I don’t want laws to prohibit such behavior. And the imaginary Greg says: “but what right do you have to cease that behavior?” And my response is that we don’t need objective-moral justifications for legally barring behavior, we simply need a strong enough manifestation of the WillToPower to bar such behavior (or punish/correct it post-act). And likewise, we haven’t needed moral justifications to bar gay marriage or legalize gay marriage, simply a stronger manifestation of the WillToPower. And in the past, that has been the case for why gay marriage wasn't allowed: because proponents for HeterosexualMarriageOnly™ were politically stronger.  But not for much longer, it seems.

Once I wrote a song with a band about wanting to fuck Jesus.

In another era and geographic location, this would've gotten me burned at the stake.

Today in my era, it gets a shrug, perhaps a laugh. Mostly ignored.

If I said it about another religion's [model of ideal behavior], I could've had my head cut off.

Why write  a song like this? Well, your bandmates start playing music and I come up with lyrics. My lyrics aren't initially about wanting to sexually arouse the Jesus. I'd been listening to some of the good singles from Marilyn Manson, such as where he sings "I'm not a slave to a god that doesn't exist." And I also had enjoyed "Jesus Freak" by DC Talk, when I was a devout believer in the Christian faith back in high school. So I started singing, "we're the freak; we're the freaks, if you know what I mean," along with some lyrics like "love your enemies like Jesus toppled tables; [something something] about Cain killing Abel; and all your prophets and all their glory are hindered by the fact that they're hopelessly so boring."

None of those lyrics got in. Instead, my bandmate sang his verse about sexual lust for Jesus and only wanting to give it up to this [ideal]; this concept made more sense for our band, so the lyrics changed.

But why write this song? Well, you have to fill in the emptiness of the days somehow, and when your bandmates have a musical score, you fill in the lyrics somehow. It's funny -- haha homophonic polysemy: freak has that second sexual meaning. One is supposed to love Jesus, but obviously NOT IN THAT WAY, ha haha ha haha, the laugh ejaculates.

Due to the homophobic nature of the predominate modern Christian church, I think it was my way of sticking up a middle finger to all those individuals who under the Christian cloth would shame people for being queer (in whatever form that may be: sexual orientation or gender identity).

I found this card, circa 2014, on the bathroom sink at a gas station // firework store called "Nervous Charlie's" in Nashville TN.

church signs

When I drive into Springfield (OH), there is a church sign that currently reads "Jesus is comming soon" [sic] at Beatty Freewill Baptist Church. On both sides. Was the misspelling intentional to get me to pay extra attention to it? It's been there for weeks. For over a year this sign read, "Visitors Welcome; Members Expected."

When driving into Yellow Springs, Bethel Lutheran Church has had their sign reading: "God's plan is bigger than your plan," which I suppose is supposed to be consolation when your plans crash and burn. Another rendition could be "God is totally callous to your plan." Or one could challenge there even being a plan (or, of course, there even being a God).

The anthropomorphizing of God is fascinating to me. Humans make plans and carry them forward (in hopes of fruition), so God must do the same. I am equally fascinated by the ceiling and limitations of our imagination. For example, you cannot imagine a color you've never seen before. A sense you've never perceived. Those born blind, dream in only the senses they experience. The closest one can give to the blind kid to describe color is metaphor ("[this thing you've never experienced] is like [this thing you've experienced] in this certain aspect"). The difference being, of course, we are humans describing God to other human, like two blind kids trying to explain color to one another. Or humans trying to explain the experience of having some perceptual capability another animal possesses that we humans might not even know about.

So here we are.
What to do?
While we wait, the heart keeps pumping blood and the lungs keep breathing oxygen.
Whatever we do, the heart keeps pumping blood that the lungs load with oxygen.
 Until they don't.

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RomanCatholicChurch™ hate on the Buddhism

In high school, I was deeply into the RomanCatholicChurch™, primarily because I was born into it and secondly because I attended a "non-denominational Christian" middle school that, unbeknownst to me upon enrollment, was vehemently anti-Catholic (and thus caused a rebound effect).

Like many good Catholics, I was confirmed in ritualistic fashion and then very quickly stopped attending Sunday mass.

Like a cliché, I ventured into Eastern philosophy/religion. For a while, I was a very big proponent of Buddhism, giving all that talk about it being a "worldview" rather than a "religion". Which is totally rubbish if you read any history. Nonetheless, I often find it amusing to view a Catholic critique against Buddhism.

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Some have proposed the analogy of the world’s religions being as different roads winding up a tall mountain, with God in a cloud at the top awaiting our arrival. The paths are supposedly all man-made conventions reaching to heaven, so no one religion is really any better than the others. However, this misconception overlooks one enormous truth. One religion’s path was not paved by man [UNPROVABLE AXIOM] from the bottom of the mountain to the top, but was paved by God down the mountain to man. That road is Christianity, and it is arrogant [NAME-CALLING] to prefer a man’s path to the one blazed for our sake by God himself. 

Buddhism, by contrast, teaches that there is no God and that human destiny lies in reincarnating to suffer until we use the Eightfold Path to kill our individual identity.
[NEGATIVE CONNOTATION-CLUSTERBOMBS]
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Well, glad that's settled, aren't we?

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You were not there for The Beginning. You will not be there for The End… Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative…

— Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

I crashlanded onto this planet earth with no manual other than what my parents and brothers told me to be true. Then you get other kids' perspectives, television messages, and those inked on the insides of books and outsides of cereal boxes.

Initially I accepted axioms/postulates given to me by seemingly reputable/familiar sources. Jesus is the OnlySonOfGod™ whose crucifixion rendered sins forgivable and he resurrected before ascending into the Heavens, where he'll be until he returns for the FinalJudgement™ at the end of the world. Another story: Satan (a.k.a. Luci[ph]er) was once God's most prized angel until pride made him think he was more terrific than God, thus leading to an attempted coup d'état. For some reason that earned him the right to rule the Damned™.

Asking lots questions will crack up most any axiom/postulate/narrative like these. And when you read a lot of books, you start being able to poke holes and chisel away the solidity of almost any axiom. Thus, flat-worlders, GlobalWarmingDenial, HollowEarthTheory, and whatnot. Just refuse to accept the axioms that they present. Nevermind all the unquestioned axioms you hold over there.

I feel very uncertain about a lot in life. I have much doubt that there is a "right" way to live and wonder if I'm simply falling into the path of least resistance. One that is generally accepted to be moral: that of raising children with loving intention and support, supporting the wife, building the home, developing capital and wealth for financial security, to get rid of debt, pay for kids' current and future educational expenses. Being home all the time. Reading too many books and developing writing skills (for what purpose?).

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”

~~~ Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian

Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in the Grand Inquisitor scene of Brothers Karamazov:

“If God does not exist, everything is permitted."

Of course, even if every action is morally equivalent does not mean that every action has an equal result. There is cause and effect, as capricious, fickle, uncertain, and inconsistent as it may be in many cases. You may be morally permitted to dance in front of a hungry tiger, but that doesn't mean one won't receive a nasty life-ending result.

 

“You don’t believe in Him, do you?”
“No.”
“Things to me wouldn’t make sense without Him.”
“They don’t make sense to me with him.”

— Quiet American by Graham Greene

When I was young, I was the first character speaking. Now that I'm older, the second makes most sense. The belief in an all-powerful all-benevolent creatures does not square up with the acts in existence. A watch may imply a watchmaker, but it does not imply an omnipotent watchmaker; a child may imply a father, but it implies neither an omnipotent father nor an all-benevolent one.

We lack understanding,
so we daydream of an all-understanding being.
We lack total benevolence,
so we daydream of a totally benevolent being.
We lack [...]
[et cetra et cetra]

You say this metaphor is more fitting. I say that metaphor is more fitting. We point at the others' metaphor and scream false equivalency, but in the end it's all conjecture and there lays an inability to prove with totality. So it goes, I suppose.

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Last summer, I checked out the Yellow Springs United Methodist Church.

Within sects/denominations/religions, there often is a great spectrum. My experience in the Methodist Church exemplifies that: I was a youth coordinator at a LGBTQ-friendly church whose doctrine of "Creation Spirituality" essentially declared that the divine is in everything and thus was accepting of all various beliefs. People at my church could be essentially atheists and view the Bible as a text created by humans with their own personal/cultural flaws and biases. While becoming a youth coordinator, I went to a youth coordinator seminar at a different Methodist church, where they had us join in their worship, which involved people talking in highly evangelical terms, glorifying the blood of Jesus (penal substitution atonement) and stating his unique "only only" specialness in being a vehicle to posthumous salvation and thinking LGBTQ lifestyles were evil.

All in the same denomination. In the same state. Fifteen miles from each other.

So reading the Yellow Springs United Methodist Church's website, one cannot know what one is really getting into. Am I read coded language that they're LGBTQ-friendly (the code term in the Methodist Church is being a "reconciling church")? They are in Yellow Springs, after all. After attending, I'm still not sure. But I am sure of one thing: within the first couple sentences of the sermon, I knew this was not the place for me.

The minister began speaking about the "growing numbers of Christians in China" in glowing terms. Personally, I couldn't give a shit about how many "Christians" there are in China. Not because I don't care about China, but because I think that it doesn't matter how many people self-identify as "Christians" or "Confucians" or "Buddhists". The title one gives oneself is not important to me. I am not on TeamChristian™. I don't believe Christians to be inherently better than other religions. There are great people in all religions. And there are sloppy, lazy, mean-spirited and/or hypocritical people in all religions too.


Another element that is a problem at these Yellow Springs' churches is a lack of childcare. At this particular church, during the summer at least, they don't have any childcare during the services. So you take your children upstairs in the childcare room, let them play, while you can look out the window at the service happening in the chapel with speakers piping in whatever is caught on the microphones. Sort of like watching TV.

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