If “God” is essentially a word-concept to explain all that we do not know or understand, then I choose to use the word Dytemwanple for all that I do not know or understand. I could say I believe in Dytemwanple. But, if Dytemwanple is just a random, arbitrary word I chose to represent what I don’t know, then am I not really just believing in all that I don’t know, whether I call “it” something or not?
It’s kind of impossible to believe in, let alone talk about, what you don’t have knowledge of, isn’t it? It’s like trying to talk positively about “nothing.” What is that if not delusion? Don’t we lock people in asylums for just that kind of thing? Think about it.
What are you really believing in? What does it mean, to “believe in” something? If you are really doing nothing more than believing in your own ignorance, then you are possibly on the right track; why assign it a name and then make up a bunch of malarkey to justify it when you are really believing in that which you do not know? Why not just have the courage to say that you do not know? Why the need to give a name and human-based characteristics to that which is unknown?
How arrogant is it not only to believe that things exist as you (think you) know them, but that this “thing” (which is stupid itself, to talk positively about a negative) that you don’t know exists and is the supposed creator of everything? (From where did you get this idea that anything was created at all, in the first place?) That’s not just arrogant, it’s loony.
Unknown by anyone or anything who ever lived is another concept for doesn’t exist in a way for us to talk about at all because we don’t fucking know about it, at least in any way that isn’t irrational and delusional. It’s just not there. Like the Easter Bunny. How many Christians would advocate a religion based on the existence of the Easter Bunny? Hardly any, I’m sure. Why? The Easter Bunny doesn’t exist. It’s just made-up. But, that’s exactly what they are a part of; just substitute “God” for “Easter Bunny” and go to town. Hey, while we’re at it, why not believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus “on the basis of the absurd“? That sounds valid and sane, too.
By labeling that which we do not know, we limit it for ourselves and thus make it that much more difficult to understand “it” as it really is.
The more I know the less I know. In fact, the more I think about and understand life, existence, the cosmos—whatever—the more I realize that I really do not know anything at all; rather, I think and wonder a lot of things, but that is different than the assertion of knowledge, “knowing” something as opposed to thinking it or wondering about it.
Thus, there is a hell of a lot that I do not know. But I am not going to call it “Sally,” because if I have learned anything along the way, it is that whatever it is that I do not know, it’s probably not Sally, or any other name I choose to call it—it is what it is, not what I call it. My name for something is not what it is, but is rather my name for it, whatever it is. For me to label and limit it simply because I do not understand it is as absurd as Columbus labeling the native peoples of this continent “Indians.” By giving them that name, that label, all he did was demonstrate his own vast ignorance, arrogance, and ethnocentrism. He also made them (in the minds of those who were not them) into something they simply were not.
If you want to give your ignorance a name, then go ahead; it just doesn’t seem very productive to me.
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From my personal notes, 12/8/99.
