I had a religious awakening the other morning.
I came across a picture I'd taken of a snowy egret swallowing a fish. I thought about the fact that life can only sustain itself by consuming life. That fish had a consciousness. Simpler than ours, perhaps (or only different?) but nonetheless it had habits and desires, things it was motivated to do and other things it was motivated to avoid. How else could it choose to swim in one direction and not another? And now it's in the throat of a bird, and dissolving in darkness and terrible pain.
And I thought about the chicken wrap I had at Wendy's last night and how it no doubt came from birds who spent their brief lives in bewildered terror and agony.
And I realized that only a god who wanted to maximize suffering in the universe would create such a state of affairs.
Generally the question of religion revolves around two possibilities.
Either there is no god, and the universe chugs along according to physical rules, or there is one, and he's responsible for all the beauty we see as well as the suffering and ugliness, but the latter is only there because it's the best he can do, or because of human sin, and in any case he has a plan for our ultimate salvation so long as we play by his rules.
God's a good guy who wants the best for us, in other words.
No one (except perhaps Ligotti) considers the third possibility:
God is a sadistic bastard who, for whatever reason, wants as much suffering in the universe as possible.
But the more you look at the natural world, the more it seems this can be the only explanation. Wasps that lay their eggs in caterpillars so they'll hatch and eat them from the inside out. Evolution that proceeds in an arms race between predator and prey, producing animals whose forms are the result of untold billions of murders.
Our own willingness to enslave and exploit for our own profit and comfort is just the end result of this process.
If God was kind, loving, life-affirming, why didn't he just stop with the plants? Absorbing sunlight doesn't hurt anything.
Rapacity, greed, gluttony, lust, violence--these are the impulses that flow from god. We are moral creatures to the extent that we resist them.
I think Jesus was on the right side, though.
Maybe that's why they call him the "son of man." I don't think he really believed he was divine. I think he capitalized on the story of his mother's accidental pregnancy to show those violent desert tribes the possibility of kindness. He had to couch his message in religious claptrap because it was the only way to hold the attention of an audience.
Of course he was doomed to failure, and of course the real god would find a way to twist his message in the following centuries to the purposes of the crusades and the inquisition.
Inasmuch as Christianity gets people working together and talking rather than killing, I think it's still a success, actually. But it's achieved through a trick, using the language of belief to steer people away from the divine malevolence that wants our blood and pain.
I'm still on the fence about the whole "be fruitful and multiply" thing. I'll have to think more about the antinatalism argument (although it certainly won't impact our own decision not to have children). I agree that more sentient life serves god in allowing him to harvest more suffering. But I also think human beings are the only ones capable of properly resisting god. Unless we want to wipe out all carnivorous species (or just go whole-hog and return the planet to a barren rock) our only hope might be in producing more brains capable of comprehending his evil and working against it.
I feel a great sense of peace from this revelation.
The pain in my liver (which comes from stress and not alcohol) has finally started to fade. Once you accept that all the pain and unhappiness and fear in your life comes from god, and is actually part of a divine conspiracy to fill the universe with as much agony as possible, you can finally stop blaming yourself and start letting it go. You can start making changes to reduce the suffering around you, knowing that any changes you make may be meaningless, but at least they're striking a blow against this divinity that feeds off pain. (I don't know if I'm up to going vegetarian, but it would take just a little bit of support away from the slaughterhouses.) You can stop feeling guilt, or worrying about your immortal soul, becuase you're already damned.
You can follow this trajectory of despair right past suicide to, "fuck it, fuck god. We're here, let's have a drink."
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