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Friday, November 08, 2019

"Deal with it."

Standing outside, looking down the street, and I remembered doing the same thing when I was a college student, still living here with my mom. My sister had moved away and I was between boyfriends and I had been diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease - I was depressed. I had the premonition that when I was old I would still be living here and be poor, sick, and alone. I didn't really think that would happen - it was a worst case scenario - but uh oh it did. When I was more religious I told myself it didn't matter how bad things got or what others thought of me, because God knew who I really was. But now I find it hard to believe anymore.

This makes me think of a part of the book Ready Player One in which Wade tries to deal with his unrealistic hopes and his actual unhappy state ...

“I wish someone had just told me the truth right up front, as soon as I was old enough to understand it. I wish someone had just said: “Here’s the deal, Wade. You’re something called a ‘human being.’ That’s a really smart kind of animal. Like every other animal on this planet, we’re descended from a single-celled organism that lived millions of years ago. This happened by a process called evolution, and you’ll learn more about it But trust me, that’s really how we all got here. There’s proof of it everywhere, buried in the rocks. That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling one another for thousands of years. We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. “Oh, and by the way … there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid. Deal with it.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

Where's the chocolate! ;)

2 Comments:

Blogger Katherine Nielsen said...

I believe in evolution. I believe in God too. The process is mysterious. The complexity of simple organisms, not to mention our own bodies, is such that I don't see how randomness or chance could explain it. Physics wasn't my field, but I do remember one thing about it: the principle of entropy. All systems tend to disorder, left on their own.

10:37 AM  
Blogger crystal said...

Hi Katherine. Yeah, I think the writer of that book had the character as an atheist. I'm not there yet but I seem to be sliding in that direction. I remember a few years back when there was a stir about a Jesuit, he former head of the Vatican Observatory, George Coyne, who got in trouble for speaking against intelligent design in an article in The Tablet ... https://www.vofoundation.org/faith-and-science/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/God-Chance-Creation.pdf

9:20 PM  

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