Because the universe loves a good objective correlative, I guess.
Keats used to talk about
negative capability. I wish I had the ability, when presented with something mysterious or even just plain fucking ridiculously insane, to endure my
'doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason' as Keats so exhorted. It's the heart of what I consider my personal philosophy, the ability to hold doubt without feeling it necessary to solve it, but unfortunately in real life you don't always get this option.
Today at the SotD, I was purchasing the usual caffeine and sundries when the first of two really irritating incidents happened. The first reminded me of why so many atheists are so hostile towards people who profess a religion or another. I walked with my small basket of items to the express line to discover two grey haired women of indeterminate age discussing something in hushed tones while purchasing 15 cakes.
Yes, 15 cakes. Big, frosted cakes, apparently all some variation of chocolate or another. I don't know why they felt the need to go to Safeway and buy 15 cakes. Now, if I could have done as Keats suggested for art and simply allowed this mystery to exist without that old irritable reaching after fact and reason, I could have left without the sincere pain in my head that followed.
Curious as to why there would be such a purchase of cakes, I leaned forward to attempt to eavesdrop on them. This was my prime error: all further error flows from this one lapse in tact and politeness. For I overheard "...I know Denise is sold on him but he's just one of
those people and I can't trust them."
Those people? A whole host of possibilities followed: was it a racial issue? Perhaps one of sexual orientation or politics or nationality? Her companion, rather than busting out with anything I might have expected like, say, "grow up" or what have you, simply replied "Oh? How long has he been one?"
This made me assume it couldn't be race or nationality, because, well, the answer would presumably be "His whole life" and so the question would be almost aggressively stupid. Since they were wearing clothing that didn't look like someone else had to put on them, I assumed they couldn't be that stupid. (I turn out to maybe have been optimistic here.)
"Oh, I don't recall, but you know what they're like. Thinking that Froed-er-ech Nitchee" yes that's how she said it "killed Jesus."
So yeah. Not only was the universe fucking with me in grand style, it was doing so through the mechanism of two women who apparently believe that the average atheist is of the opinion that
Nietzsche took out Jesus in a knife fight. I have no idea how they got onto this subject while on their great cake buying expedition, but I made the mistake of loudly snorting here.
"As if. Jesus was a carpenter and Nietzsche was a philosophically minded syphilitic." (I know the syphilis diagnosis is very disputed, but fuck me if I was gonna bring that up in the checkout line.) "Jesus would have shanked Freddie on his way back from flipping over moneylender tables, no problem." For some strange reason, the two cake eaters didn't find this immediately moving and inched away from me as far as they could get while the cashier made a face that clearly said she'd be telling this story while getting extremely drunk or high tonight.
As an aside, the idea that one's belief or disbelief in God makes one moral or immoral is almost as ridiculous as the idea that many Christians seem to hold that in order to be good and moral one merely needs to believe in God: no actual good behavior is necessary, and it's acceptable to be rude, condescending, even an outright deluded liar who rejects the true and factual in order to substitute one's own preferred version of what is true.
The idea that an atheist is untrustworthy is as absurd as the idea that all one has to do to be trustworthy is to believe really hard in Jehova. It's like arguing that I'm a good, moral person entirely because I've chosen to believe Superman is real. Now, if I actually patterned my morality on Superman's, I'd have a few issues (you know, like destroying all the cars in a city to force people to drive more safely) but I'd have at least as good a claim to good, moral behavior by doing so as a Christian does by patterning his or her life after Jesus, and in either case it would still be a more active choice than simply believing that you're done with everything you need to be a good person simply by saying "Yeah, okay, that all happened" to a book, whatever book it is.
These are the thoughts that haunted me as I walked home. It's as if I read Watership Down and decided it really happened, and that decision made me automatically moral and you automatically immoral simply because you didn't believe Watership Down happened. They don't even have to live by the strictures of their chosen book... after all, there they were in the Safeway of Impending Doom, buying 15 cakes (gluttony) while wearing artificial fibers and casting the first stone despite their not being without sin... they just have to believe it to be true and they're done. The entire world is divided into good (those who believe what we believe) and evil (those that don't) in so stark a boundary that anything they choose to do, think or say is automatically a good thing purely because it comes from them.
So they can lie and, when confronted by evidence of the untruth of their statements, will retort with "Well, that's not my truth" and expect the debate to be over, much as a woman recently did to my wife when my wife pointed out that despite her declaration that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, there's plenty of evidence that he was. She simply responded with "Well, that's not my truth." Great. Keats would have loved this woman's ability to dismiss fact and reason, boy. (No, he really wouldn't have, I'm torturing negative capability to death here.)
However, my musings were interrupted (I was up to exactly where Organized Supermanity would consider the Supermanic Scriptures closed... would they stop at the Death of Superman? Would people who believed in the Electric Superman be like the Mormons of Supermanity?) by a crowd of 20 or so small children being led about by four very frazzled adults. The lead child took one look at me, my head down, glowering and chewing on my lip while debating if Mon-El serves as Superman's John the Baptist or Simon Magus figure, and screamed, running behind one of the adults legs and cowering. I felt bad, but before I could even try and be reassuring several of the children asked me where I got my beard.
"They gave it to me when I turned 18."
"How come Daddy doesn't have one?"
"He's probably not an adult yet." They all seemed very interested in tales of my beard, but I beat feet out of there and got myself home. We have no cake, unfortunately.