For me, wanting things is much healthier than thinking I “should” do them.

Wanting and getting is good for me. I am extremely inexperienced at it. I have, like I said recently, been far more likely to just adapt to existing conditions than I am to change them to better suit me.

There is a very deep fear in me, and a terrible kind of weakness that stems from it, that rots my soul down to its very roots, and makes it very hard for me to resist the urge to abandon my goals and escape when faced with even minor difficulty.

I call it the “collapse and run” response. And it is my default. My most relied upon coping technique and not just by a little but by a lot.

Nothing else comes even close.

And the thing is, getting what you want requires the exact kind of backbone I lack. You have to be able to stand up for yourself and push and push to get whatever it is and maintain a solid, rigid form until you get it.

And as patient readers know, I am goo. I can take almost any form but there is no rigidity or solidity to me, or at least not for very long.

That’s certainly helped me in some ways. For instance, I am pretty sure that my ability to remember facts with so little effort relies on my ability to make my mind completely pliable and receptive, like wax waiting to take the impression of a key.

This impression then becomes a part of me. A part of the tightly integrated model of the world that is always running in my mind and is constantly being refreshed, correlated, cross referenced, and error checked.

Sounds like a hell of a lot of work, doesn’t it? And I suppose it is. But it all takes place at the cognitive level, automatically, so it just seems normal to me.

So I have gotten a lot out of being gooey. It gives me a very flexible and powerful mind that form itself into whatever tool it needs at that moment then revert back into the goo state to await the next challenge.

But it’s no way to go through life. It makes wanting things and getting them nearly impossible because it is always far easier to simply adapt.

Not better. Just easier.

And I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t know how one reverses a lifetime of flaccid malleability in order to develop some internal solidity.

The mere thought of trying to do it gives me the prickly sweats. If someone else gives me situations to adapt to, I can do anything.

But I can’t be the mold and fill the mold at the same time. You can’t make a Jell-O bowl out of Jell-O. There has to be a more rigid element involved.

At times I feel like a genie, with vast cosmic powers that are absolutely useless without someone else’s wishes to give me focus and purpose.

Even the most amazing puppet ever is useless without a puppeteer.

It’s all so god damned tragic. 🙁

More after the break.

What is faith?

Yup, it’s another deep dive into religion from a sympathetic outsider’s perspective.

As far as I can tell, religious faith is an escape hatch to reality. It acts as a set of rules to follow that acts as a control mechanism for the dangerous business of hacking one’s own sense of reality.

We need this mechanism in order to deal with the harsh emotional realities of life. With faith underwriting the psyche, a hard limit to just how bad you can feel can be set so that if unassisted reality would take your mood to dangerously low levels, your faith can react to give you whatever emotional inputs you need to stay afloat.

Like I have said before, I believe this mechanism to be the main thing religion gives to people, and it does it so well that the mechanism can remain even after the religion and all its dogma are gone.

The exact form it takes is irrelevant. As long as it enables people to believe in magic (so to speak), it is doing its job, whether the magic is the Ascension of Jesus or the miracle of Chanukah or Buddhist mysticism.

All it has to do is support the idea that objective reality isn’t all there is.

And then fools like me come along and insist that there is no such thing as magic and that things either exist and are bound by the laws of physics or don’t exist at all.

There is no third category for things that are whatever we need them to be whether that makes sense or not.

And the thing is, we’re not wrong. Our statements are factually correct. All these religions and faiths are selling full blown patent pending bullshit.

The mistake is in thinking that this means you have slain the demon known as FAITH and you can pat yourself on the back because everyone knows that when you prove something is wrong, that means you win, and the other party now has to do what you want them to do.

But none of that keeps people from needing faith. All you have done is upset people who mean you no harm and forced them to rearrange their beliefs a bit and made them feel like you hate them.

Why else would you attack the very thing which gives them hope?

So fuck your angry atheism. Yes, it’s all ultimately bullshit. So what? If I can draw moral guidance and comfort from an episode of Star Trek, which is fiction and therefore also bullshit, what is so different about drawing it from the Bible?

Public atheism is a defensive game only. We preserve freedom of religion for all, even the people who consider the worst people on Earth, and we make sure that everyone can believe, and not believe, whatever suits them best.

We do not attack. We are not at war with religion. We are not at the beck and call of hatemongers like Bill Maher and Neil DeGrasse Tyson who whip our hate into a frothing rage at their rallies and their mob events.

We reject hate and prejudice and bigotry in all forms.

Even, and especially, when it is coming from us.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.