Four am ... all's not well.

Several times this week I’ve woken while it’s still dark. The same two bright stars have been framed in my bedroom window each morning. In that fanciful state in which the human mind can find itself at 4 am, I thought of them as ‘light Braille’ — their message one of both extreme simplicity and extreme complexity.

Here’s the simple version: there is no meaning to everything, anything, all there is. It all just is.

This is just so clear and clean, neat and complete it makes a mockery of man’s flailing about in a frantic search for the ‘why’.

The complexity? It has nothing to do with meaning and everything to do with the extraordinary and dazzling nature of the universe. It’s about the almost miraculous existence of a human mind having the consciousness and intellect to observe itself observing its own place in that complexity.

This ‘light Braille’ moment is one of unusual calm and understanding.

Before I went to bed last night, I felt sorry for myself. I had a cold and felt stuffy, headachy and miserable. But it wasn’t only my body that was full of snot. My mind was clagged with nasty stuff too. Not long after I woke the reality of the sorry state of both soon saw off any lingering star-induced tranquillity. 

Over the years I’ve come to accept that I’m an obsessive. What captivates me today will be different to last year’s or last month’s obsession and in a no time at all I’ll be zooming in on something new and compelling. I don’t make giant sidesteps; there’s an elasticky thread that leads me from one thing to another. I’m only telling you this so you don’t assume I’m leaping about all over the place with no pattern at all to the leaping.

I guess it’s my compulsion to become deeply embroiled in an idea and for that idea to take over much of my thinking that leads to me writing about it all. I have to unload.

So I want to unload this morning about my current obsession and why, last night, it led to me going to bed depressed.

Let’s start with Twitter. I find this constant stream of short messages utterly fascinating. It’s so immediate. It’s possible to find one’s clan here, to feel comfortable with like minds or to actively seek out confrontation and a clash of ideas. On the days when I feel strong enough to cope, I seek the confrontational. If it gets too intense, one click and I’m out of there.

I’m currently on an atheistic twitterfest. There’s a counter-crusade going on here. One or two atheists I follow are hunting down the religious, trawling Twitter for signs of their presence using the telltale hashtags #god, #prayer, #jesus and the ever-fruitful #teamjesus. The idea is not to destroy the quarry but to at least plant a seed of doubt.

Sometimes the target turns out to be a believer who can give the hunter a decent conversation. More often, though, it’s someone far less challenging. Read back through the stream of their tweets and you get a picture of person who has inherited their faith. They believe because their parents believe. Their tweet stream paints a thumbnail picture of their banal lives sketched one or two words at a time: bored, bitches, lust, cake, niggah, LULZ. Lives of quiet desperation.

Their faith tweets are alien to me: ‘My life would be nothing without God’, ‘Jesus is my Lord, ’Re-tweet this if Jesus changed your life’. They’re quarry for other hunters, too: ‘Our automated Prayer Request Box is available 24/7. Take a look. It is simple and easy’. And no doubt you can use your (already heavily-burdened) credit card to direct-msg the Almighty whose closer attention to your needs will be secured via the Box.

For these Twitterers — many of them female, young, black and American — the idea of a personal god who loves them and takes an interest in their lives is a drug that’s free and widely available. Your standing in the community is enhanced when you acknowledge you’re addicted to god’s love. They would be appalled if you called their dedication a form of slavery for they love their shackles. Do I dare to suggest that some of these good folk might be Latter Day Uncle Toms for God?

But I’ve digressed, haven’t I?

Between sneezing, snotting and tweeting I picked up a book lent to me by an acquaintance. I’d heard of Joe Bageant but not read anything of his until yesterday. It was a moment of convergence. Having just read a multiplicity of naïve ‘jesus tweets’ I opened Joe’s book Waltzing At The Doomsday Ball to his essay ‘The Covert Kingdom’, written in 2004. He’s an engaging writer and this piece slotted right into the thread of my twitter reading.

Talk about seeing people in a different light. I have no way, right now, of knowing whether Joe has painted an accurate picture of fundamentalist christianity in the United States. But if he’s right, the godbotherers twittering away online about their faith and their love for god are tiny, stuttering portents of something bigger, far uglier and very much to be feared.

Bageant’s take is of a massive, countrywide belief in The Rapture: that time when the blond and blue-eyed Saviour will pluck the god-fearing — simpering with praise — into the sky where they will be seated comfortably on clouds. From their well-deserved observation post they will be able to watch as the  unrighteous remain earthbound, plunged into a thousand-year holocaust with a plague of boils for starters.

 The fundies not only believe its just about to happen, they yearn for it. There’s even a website with a Rapture Index that attempts, by monitoring the size and frequency of both natural and man-made disasters, to keep the faithful informed on the likely date for kick-off.

I am astonished to discover that these believers in the prophecies of Revelations not only accept the scientific evidence of rapidly increasing global warming but rejoice in the human suffering that will result . What a peculiar alliance between rational science, working to avert disaster, and the loony who drool at the thought of the imminent horrors of Armageddon.

The last of all Last Warnings has been issued. We are reminded that an RI of more than 160 is ‘Fasten Your Seatbelts’ time. As of today the Rapture Index stands at 179. While this may be cause for glad anticipation amongst the weirdos they’ll have to be patient: the index is down five points from its all-time high of 184 on 8^th August last year.

There is no consolation for the rational in believing that all fundies are idiots because according to Bageant they’re not. Some are as cunning as they are callous. They know that in order to do the Lord’s work in bringing about the wars that are a necessary ingredient for the fulfilment of prophecy they must hold positions of power and influence. To this end, there are (oxymoronic) pulpit-pounding places of higher education where christian-home-schooled kids can move on from learning that god hates fags to “strategic government intelligence, legal training, and foreign policy, all with a strict, Bible-based ’Christian worldview’ ”. Here the necessary learning can be acquired but not the wisdom or morality to understand that their whole schema is wrong, wrong, wrong.

As I sit here, at the keyboard, in the midst of sublime tranquillity  — midday sunshine, not a sound to be heard apart from the birds squabbling over who has the right to a bountiful supply of nectar, and a soft autumnal breeze — it’s almost impossible to comprehend this madness that’s bubbling and fermenting away on the same planet.

I have a feeling I’ll be awake at 4am tomorrow, looking for those pinpoints of light in the dark.


[This post is very much like my first. I'm feeling my way here. Poking topics from more than one direction. I may even contradict myself. Not sure I need to care.]