Human Machine

"…yet still my hunger turns to greed."

With little better to do with the internet as of late, I recently decided to take up a debate with an all-too-eager atheist on a web board, just for laughs. The desire to do so came after noticing a certain rash of outspoken atheism, in the traditional form of fundamentalist Christianity, all over the web…and a bitter desire to smash anyone who presumes to know anything about anything’s face into the ground, and grind it therein with my heel. The door opened, and the fellow came out of the box swinging like a mad-man, loaded with gusto and energy…though in his ineptness, he failed to read my motives accurately, and instead pegged me as a standard advocate of Christianity. So, with this fine display of his pathetic weapon cache, I decided that the best argument to make, in order to invoke the highest possible levels of frustration and confoundedness, would be to accuse him of being exactly what he hates; an argument made all the more easy by the simple fact that it was true– outspoken atheists and fundamentalist Christians are exactly the same when viewed from one step up on the perspective ladder. And boy was it effective…

His goal, as stated by him, was to spread awareness of atheism, and prove that it was the more peaceful and rewarding existence, in comparison to Christianity. My goal, to simply irritate the shit out of him, was kept thoroughly hidden…despite his persistent questions regarding what I "believed," information that seemed to be rather important to him, as it would then give him a target to shoot at, instead of just dodging or absorbing bullets in the fog. Eventually it got to the point that if I answered one more question with a question, it would result in his abandonment of the battle field, so I permitted him to know that I simply had no opinion on the matter. This seemed to infuriate him more than anything, for some reason, prompting him to call me just the worst kind of person ever simply for failing to have an opinion on the matter. I needed this distinction, however, to prove the point that I had been making from the start– atheists and Christians are unified in their unfound conviction, and inability to accept any form of gray area. They don’t know how to not have an opinion of something, an attribute that lies at the heart of what makes them so goddamn annoying.

Having accidentally found this distinction between myself and a vast majority of the population, I decided to cross check it for merits and pitfalls, and discovered a few more points of interest; as accurate perception can only occur in the suspension of judgment, the act of forming an opinion of anything makes one wrong instantly, by default (point of distinction- "water is wet" is a fact, not an opinion). Now, this philosophy comes with the handy element of self-termination, as the opinion that to have an opinion is to be wrong, is in and of itself subject to invalidity, and can not be accepted as a genuine truth, thereby leaving the possibility of any opinion being accurate, as well as the one I just mentioned.

Here is where the subconscious genius of the human mind comes into play. Typically, people choose a philosophy or mind-set that suits their life, rather than a life that suits their mind-set, as mind-sets are significantly easier to adjust to circumstance, rather than the other way around. A selfless person will feel the need for a God (or in the atheist’s case, the need for a lack of a God, as both the atheist and the Christian consider themselves fundamentally worthless), while a selfish person will feel the need to justify their inconsiderate-of-others actions to themselves, and so on. By adapting a perspective that suits what is most important to us, often by choosing a pre-ordered system of beliefs that best resembles what suits our preference, we also take on the intrinsic flaws that accompany each particular merit– freedom at the cost of isolation, safety at the cost of restriction, etc. You need only look to your own virtues and consequential laments to understand exactly what I mean.

Now, the trick is to accept all perspectives as both possible and impossible, as true and false, perpetually, and from this gray cloud one can reach down and pluck the particular angles that allow them the strengths they want, and negate the weaknesses they don’t, on a flexible and ever-fluctuating basis. It’s a bit like warfare, in a way– a strategic campaign must be able to adapt to the enemy, and the unknown. Any one pre-set strategy will always be doomed to fail…