A Short Story of Banishment

Having read some interesting texts concerning a practice that was performed some time ago, I wish now to attempt to pursue it here.

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I had been walking through the field to the south of Mr. Miller's cottage for about an hour, giving myself entirely to my thoughts, when the incident took place. I shall do as best I can to transcribe it here in a manner that preserves both the consequences of the revelation and the horror I felt as I beheld it.

There is a large set of boulders amongst the unused fields of Mr. Miller's more extensive properties. Some have speculated that the rocks were once a mill. Some children in town fancy it to be the ruins of an ancient castle. Indeed, I was wont to fantasy concerning its nature on nights like that of my experience. But something was different about the stones on that evening. A sound like a crying child emanated from amongst them.

The moon was fully out and so I believed that it would be no trouble for me to spot the injured child. After searching amongst the rocks I was dismayed to find nothing but frustration and bafflement. The sounds faded, dodging this way and that, seeping like air from one space into another, and never remaining stationary for long enough to be connected with anything physical in my vicinity. No child was to be found among the boulders.

I looked up into the ghastly and horrified lunar face as it stared its thousand-yard stare into me. Nearly all members of my race had beheld those eyes, the rocky tears streaming from the deadened face. But did they hear sounds emanating from the thing as I did?

I closed my eyes and imagined the moon. What would it be like were it the source of the mournful emanations that permeated my surroundings? What child could it be? I envisioned the hands of the child covering and obscuring the rounded face, the long hair of a little girl falling upon the shoulders of the body wracked by sobs. And words? What words would the moon speak?

"I am sorry," the voice intoned, broken by sighs.

Below the girl were masses of men. There was Abraham, staring up into the teary face and drawing his dagger to strike his son. There was Noah, building his ship to avoid the consequences of deforestation and excessive farming. I looked closer, toward the meek who hid in the shadows. One demanded that those around him change and become as children. He even threatened that it would be better that they drown with millstones tied around their necks than that they should cause a child to do wrong. And yet, that, it seems, was exactly what the child before me had done.

"I am so sorry," the whimpering resumed. "That I made you and turned you loose into this."

Chaos below continued. Wars lashed this way and that, all for want of the favour of the saddened and insatiable child above. When the weeping subsided and I looked again around myself I still found nothing. The moon had, by this time, been obscured behind the passing clouds and so I decided to proceed back home to my house in town.

I had not finished opening the door to my bedroom when I noticed something odd in the darkness, a thing that was quite out of place. I thought I could hear the unmistakable sighing, the occasional soft patter of tears against the wooden floor.

With morbid trepidation at the specter of my home invaded by my whimsical imagination, I reached for the light switch. Flicking the light on, I caught a brief glimpse of a child now standing before me. But at the blink of my eye the apparition was gone. I stepped into my room, believing the matter concluded only to stub my toe against a large rock dropped on the floor in front of me.

I Lost a Pound!

I have just lost one pound of body weight. Perhaps I should rephrase that. Over the past week, I lost one pound. I cannot say that I have been eating very healthily, but perhaps eating even better still will enable me to lose the weight even more quickly.

More reading

The exerpts below are taken from Nietzsche's "Human, All Too Human", original text posted at
http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/nietzsche/nietzsche.php?name=nietzsche.1878.humanalltoohuman.zimmern.indexx

"one speaks of moral feelings, religious feelings, as if they were all unities; in truth they are rivers with a hundred sources and tributaries. As is so often the case, the unity of the word does not guarantee the unity of the thing."
--- Aphorism 14

Interesting point here. I myself have often wondered at the slow conglomeration of thoughts and feelings as one thought gives rise to another.

Of Self Sufficiency

I am an obese man. I am an atheist. I claim that the atheist, or more generally the person who lacks any belief in an entity which has conferred upon him a purpose, may engender that purpose for himself or seek it in others. It is at the former fountainhead that I shall drink now. Or perhaps I should say that I will drink in moderation.

It is my intention to confer upon myself the purpose of losing weight. In doing so, I wish to contend that a person able and willing to take care of himself has also the potential to do so for others. More on that later.

I have an autistic friend who recently lost weight. I chatted with him about it and he said that all he really did was to cut down on the total calories he consumed each day. Then he proceeded to rattle off a plethora of mathematical formulae and rhetoric about negative energy balances. In any case, I told him that what he was describing constituted a diet. Diets for me are stupid because they cause people to regain the weight after they've lost it. "But what other option do you have?" he asked me. Touche.

Right now I weigh 230 pounds. I want to get down to 200. Can I do it? Can I confer upon myself the mission of shedding those 30 pounds? If I can do that, can I then seek greater purposes without recourse to some supernatural deity?

A Short List of Reasons I became an Atheist

1. The God I experienced was a mere emotional complex rather than a relational being.
2. There are a plethora of religions other than Christianity
3. Needed to pick and choose from the Bible in order to maintain my respect for science and my respect for God
4. Multiple interpretations of scripture, suggesting an ambiguity of meaning where a relational being like God ought to have taken more care in ensuring such a cacophony of interpretations didn't arise in the first place
5. The progressive churches like the Meeting House propped up the absolutist claims of Christianity on a language of a rejection of religion. Those other faiths are religions, but we followers of Christ are irreligious. This is both dishonest and downright insulting to the intelligence of the audience.

And this list is by no means complete.

Thanking Goodness

I must say that I appreciated Daniel Dennet's short essay "Thank Goodness", as found in CHristopher HItchens' anthology "The Portable Atheist." What I liked most about it was Denne's suggestion that repaying "goodness" as an abstract notion is not so much paying tribute to an abstract entity (a la God) as continuing to propagate actions which might are themselves good. "If you want to express your gratitude to goodness, you can plant a tree, feed an orphan" or do any number of other things which might benefit humanity as a whole (Daniel Dennet reproduced in Christopher Hitchens. "The Portable Atheist" Philidelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007, 281).

More from Thomas Cleary's Translation of Liu I-Ming

p. 29 Further similarity to platonic dualism in the author's description of the mind as master of the body.

p. 31 Discussions of humility similar to those of Christianity: "...the more elevated the path the humbler the mind." Also on this page, interesting ideas about responding to events and situations as they are, rather than according to how you hope them to be.

p. 32 Miraculous effects ensuing over time as people worship effigies/idols. Could this be a description of the kind of thing that happens in some worship services today?

The text talks a lot of concentrating on the real while getting rid of the artificial. I wonder if the writer would have thought the same of some of the philosophical dilemmas presented in modern western philosophy. For example, would this philosophy of being bothered only with the real have had any patience for such problems as those of demonstrating the reality of things in and of themselves? See, for example p. 29, 32-33

p. 35f Paradoxical statements of what is desirable in human behaviour. For example, "...tranquil and unstirring yet sensitive and effective, sensitive and effective yet tranquil and unstirring..." One wonders if the author is trying to capture the often nonsensical nature of the real world and then write a manual for how to act like the world out there.