Jesus doesn’t play dice with Magic 8-balls

 Right next to the south end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge is a distinctive apartment block called the "Sirius".   The apartments look like little boxes stacked on each other.   I would kill to live there, but there’s no chance in hell of it ever happening, so the closest I get to that is to spend a few minutes at the end standing on the pedestrian walkway, looking at the people I can see in the windows, watching them go about their lives.  The only thing missing is a broken leg, some binoculars and a murder mystery.  

One of the apartment windows is easily recognisable because it always has its curtains drawn, with a sign up reading "One Way Jesus".  One day while I was other coveting people’s real estate and urban lifestyles, I got really involved in a daydream about scoring a Sirius apartment and finding out that it happened to be the One Way Jesus apartment, complete with the sign still there.   I decided I would want to keep the One Way Jesus sign up because it’s been there for a long time, and for some sentimental reason that means it would be disappointing if it changed.   I appreciate seeing the sign there, so I’m sure other people do too. And it would be funny having people drive past, seeing the sign still there, and assuming some nutty Christian lived inside when actually it would be a nutty atheist behind the curtains.  Or behind the aluminium foil rather, which is what it looks like they have up there.

But then I imagined what would happen if someone was coming across the bridge – driving, cycling, on a train, whatever – while in a crisis of faith, and they asked their god or the universe for a sign to show them the right way… and at that moment they look up and see "One Way Jesus" with the west-facing glass windows around it gleaming, reflecting a beautiful sunset.  In that moment, they’d realise that Jesus is the Way, the only way.  By keeping that sign up there, I could be responsible for a turning point in someone’s life, for planting the seed for whom they later become.  I could be responsible for them becoming a born again Christian, maybe even joining a religious order, leaving their family and friends behind.  Shit, they might have been Hindu until they saw my sign.  This, to me, is catastrophic.

It’s not that I hate people becoming Christians so much, but who wants to be the reason someone commits their life to something you’d consider a lie?    OK, lie is probably too ugly a word – I guess I mean something I doubt too much to recommend it to anyone.  Given Christians use the word "truth" a lot, it seems just as important to them as it is to me, so it’s a disservice to us both.  If I were Christian, I wouldn’t want to be the one who convinces someone to become Buddhist or Wiccan.   Sort of intriguing though – coming to the "truth" through a lie.  

I imagine I would feel sad taking down the sign, not to mention guilty about everyone getting pissed off that I’ve changed the landscape
, but then I realised that taking it down would still make me just as indirectly responsible as leaving it up would.  If someone asks for a sign and there’s no sign there… they won’t have their conversion.  Instead the sun might shine off my empty window into their face, hurting their eyes, making them all angry.   They might start thinking: "fuck the sun… the sun isn’t a miracle, it’s just annoying."   What if I have my curtains open and they just look into my dark dreary apartment which symbolises to them that life has no inherent meaning?   Maybe they see me standing there naked and it’ll be the second time I’ve made a cyclist scream out "THERE IS NO GOD!!!"   Do I really want to be responsible for creating an atheist on the spur of the moment, without any rational dialogue going on between us?  If it’s not the right reason for them to believe in god, then how is it the right reason for them not to believe?  

Are the reasons we believe something not  important – or is it only the conclusions that matter?   

Sure, that kind of thing could happen any old day at any old place, but this is the apartment that otherwise would say "One Way Jesus", and I would be the one who made the choice to not keep the sign.  I’m the bystander in the trolley problem who diverts the train away from the orphanage only to run over the fat guy.  (That’s how the trolley problem goes, right?  I forget.)

Then again, maybe they’ll misinterpret the sign to mean that Jesus is One Way, like a one way street.  That seems kind of ominous.  You can check in but you can never leave.   

Then what if I’m the person crossing the bridge, asking for a sign from God.  Bridge-me would not be aware of the two alternate timelines that apartment-me can see.   Bridge-me can’t see the temporal forest for the momentary trees.  What happens next – from my perspective on the bridge -is simply meant to be; it doesn’t look like some fluke decided by the whims of some earthly pedestrian.  Even if I knew that was how the sign came to be there or not there, it would simply being the mystical means by which the message is sent.  This business of relying on signs is just silly – if a sign happens, it only means that "someone is out there" if you assume that it wasn’t coincidence, that it was a message from someone out there… which is begging the question.  And if nothing happens, that doesn’t tell you something, it tells you nothing.  Argh, brain tangle.

I guess if you’re left with no other way to make a choice, this is as good as  asking a stranger to pick a number between 1 and 10.  Technically that person is indirectly responsible for your subsequent actions but would you say it’s their fault?   It’s their fault you bought shares in Enron instead being an investor in Facebook because they picked 7 instead of 3?   I wonder, has anyone ever tried to sue the company that makes Magic 8-balls?

And what if I ask for a sign on whether I should keep the sign up, and right at that moment the blu-tak fails because the quality assurance worker at the blu-tak factory was thinking about Jesus instead of the blu-tak and missed a dodgy batch? If the sign falls down it could be taken as a sign that the sign should stay down.   Is the blu-tak worker then indirectly responsible for my indirect responsibility for making people think there is no god?  If everything is so deterministic then it’s everyone’s fault and yet no one’s fault at the same time.   Jesus is right then – everyone is a sinner but everyone can be forgiven.

So the excrutiatingly long-winded meandering point is:  I could just leave the One Way Jesus sign up until I got bored of it or I wanted to be able to stare at people out of my window, and I could sleep at night not caring about the random irrational interpretations people make of it.   I would be indirectly responsible for countless untold events, but I wouldn’t be at fault.  Unless I start chucking rocks at  people out of my window.  That would be my fault.  

Also, asking for signs is lame. 

Apologies to the internets for stealing other people’s pictures. I’m a bad person.  But at least I didn’t convert anyone today.  Or… unless…  shit.