I Know It Ain't And So Do You

I'm not really a "miracle" person, as you have to go into it accepting that there's a force out there somewhere, external to yourself and your experience, that has the ability to intervene in the first place. Sure, I'm happy to accept serendipity and fortunate accidents and saving rolls against your Luck attribute, but an actual miracle means an intrusion of the ethereal sublime into this disordered, profane, meat-centered existence with intent and purpose to, I don't know, spare you from a tornado or dissuade you from buying those Big Baller Brand shoes just in the nick of time.

But even then, every disaster averted for one person is a calamity for someone else. Some babies make unexpected recoveries from terminal baby cancer, sure, but if you attribute that recovery to your god, you have to sort of back up to the question of "what kind of a god invented baby cancer in the first place?" Otherwise your monotheism centered on an omnipotent creator is either an unexamined self-denying farce or an outright sham or just, I guess, modern evangelical American Christianity. COME ON, YOU KNEW THAT'S WHERE THIS WAS GOING.

I'm an agnostic, not an atheist. It's a coward's distinction I guess, but if you asked me the number one reason why I don't go full atheist, the answer would obviously be: because I'm a giant coward. There's a blurry tautology to it I suppose, but that's how all the actual faiths work anyway.

Look, we exist despite a universe determined to sterilize itself against bacilli like us. We're these weird, squishy closed systems that can ONLY exist on this, the most perfect of planets, with virtually no temperature variation* (on a cosmological scale) and a thick, cushy magnetosphere. Literally anywhere--anywhere--in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE outside our own atmosphere (and even in spots too high or too low within it on our own native planet) and we pop, like water balloons filled with red bean paste. Empty space will suffocate and freeze and irradiate you and boil your blood, all at the same time. And most of it is made up of Dark Matter, which for all we know is just a bunch of knives.

The trouble with agnosticism is probably an inability really to personalize a cosmology in a way that equals any kind of coherence. But maybe the incoherence is the system. Shit down here keeps getting more sideways every day, which can be terrifying I guess, but not if you understand things like evil and the old theodicy that wrestles with it aren't really crises. They're baked right into the plot. Is it nihilism to understand "negative" events as a misreading of an indifferent universe just as happy to chug along, speeding away from itself in all directions without reference to whether or not Florida is under water?

Maybe or maybe not, but one thing I am pretty sure about: this is the worst symptom of all this Trump shit. Half-ass fake perspective galaxy-brain horseshit philosophizing. It's a pure defensive reaction of a fragile psyche exhausted past the point of reason. The only safe space a liberal snowflake can find is in a mind-palace floating in space. If nothing else I think I understand now the recent successes in the weed business.

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*And look at us, even making that into a crisis.