The God Pot

Hopi Bowl

I do not worship gods. I am neither theist or atheist. Theism like atheism, is philosophical quicksand.

My life is a flicker of light - too short for the ball and chain of theism or atheism.

Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
― Stephen Stills

Attributing human features and foibles to a deity is naive and absurdly human-centric. My theist friends ascribe human traits to deities. It's inexcusable, but I still love you.

A leap of faith is antithetical to critical thinking. Theists, while otherwise lovable, charitable, or admirable, are disqualified as critical thinkers.

Atheists fancy themselves critical thinkers. Atheists are typically smart people trapped by the same narrow thinking as theists. Theists and atheists are the A and B sides of the same vinyl record.

Atheists often quote Epicurus as argument against the existence of god.

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
― Epicurus, 341–270 B.C

Shang Dynasty Pot

Note the personification of god. Benevolent god or malevolent god, why bother? It's drivel.

The notion of a benevolent god or a malevolent god is not a particularly illuminating tack. Existence and non-existence arguments are the pet topics of blowhards and gas-bags, neither of whom are particularly good observers or listeners.

So What Then?

If pushed to arrange my existential thoughts into a framework, it would be a framework consisting of two classes of stuff:

1. Stuff that's well-understood like the earth-bound erosion and transport of big rocks into smaller and smaller rocks, or the laws of earth-bound thermodynamics, and 
2. Stuff that's not well-understood like particle physics or human consciousness. 

A personal tendency, more for convenience than out of reverence, worship, or fear, is to relegate all of the not well-understood stuff into the god pot for further review and study.

Humanity's god pot holds all the stuff humans don't understand.

The god pot has indescribable volume. We cannot know its extent. That's why it exists - for further review and study. It is precisely this absurd pursuit that keeps us alive. This, it seems, is our quest. We want to feel like we're adding, however inconsequentially, to the pot of human knowledge.

One might be tempted to hypothesize that over the short blip of humanity, the pursuit of knowledge, the quest to know that which is knowable, would have rendered the contents of the god pot infinitesimally smaller. But no dice. That line of thinking is also naively human-centric.

Anasazi Bowl

So here we are.

I, for one, am unwilling to commit to a leap of faith. Nevertheless like most of my species, I have notions. Notions are like superstitions. Everyone has them.

My chief notion is that knowledge is like the conservation of energy. I suspect the sum or volume of all knowledge is constant. Also like the conservation of energy, knowledge cannot be created or destroyed, rather it changes state within the context of humanity.

Insomuch as there is an indescribable amount unknown, our god pot remains constant. When we learn something individually or collectively, we remove something from the god pot, but the void quickly fills with another unknown.

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
― Carl Sagan

Humanity's god pot is as real as our collective ignorance. In the human mind, god exists.

"When I joined the band I didn't know any of the tunes, and when I left the band I didn't know any of the tunes!"
― Keith Jarrett reflecting on playing in Miles Davis's band

Cynicism and Sentimentality

Can we measure the arc of our lives by where we are in the continuum between cynicism and sentimentality?

Take the tune Mona Lisa. Many musicians have covered the tune, from Nat King Cole to Bruddah Iz.

I'm partial to Mona Lisa covers performed by Tony Bennett and Willie Nelson.

Willie Nelson's rendition is particularly plaintive, expressing of poetic sort of melancholy only appreciated at some threshold of aggregated experiences.

There was a time I would have thought any rendition of Mona Lisa was insipid, pop schlock. Now I dig crooner tunes - the mellifluous voices and the poetry of romantic lyrics.

There's a romantic pop tune sung by Tony Bennett called You're All the World to Me. How do the lyrics in a song like You're All the World to Me go from romantic schlock to profundity as we age? It is because the expression of poetic melancholy is only gradually understood over the landscape of a lifetime.

An early dawn back in my 50th year, I was listening to Bennett's You're All the World to Me driving by our local golf course. The profound melancholy I felt, that I wouldn't have felt in my virile twenties, inspired this poem about the love of my life:

Something Ordinary

Saint Paul, 21 April 2007

to Cindy You're like Paris in April and May You're New York on a silvery day. A Swiss Alp as the sun grows fainter, You're Loch Lomond when autumn is the painter. ~ from You’re all the World to Me, sung by Tony Bennett

On the moonless day break of late winter Snow is a sand trap on the municipal back nine We’re awakened by contradictions in darkness Roused to light that defies description This must be the hour when painters paint But if our passions have already been painted Stay with me to find something so ordinary no one will bother to sing a song

When does a line like "A Swiss Alp as the sun grows fainter" cease being a cliche? It's in the next line "You're Loch Lomond when autumn is the painter".

I remain cynical about things, but I feel swells of sentimentality washing over much of my cynicism.

Does critical thinking methodically degrade to sentimental mush, or does understanding aggregated over a lifetime simply change our frame of reference?