ihavebeenfloated

Warning: This post is bound to piss someone off.

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On the drive back from Los Angeles, Tiffany slept. By the time we left Greg’s house, she had been up for about twenty-three hours so she was tired. This allowed me perform stupid driving maneuvers on the 140 mile drive home without her bitching at me, which was pretty cool.

The only thing I really did that was remotely stupid is antagonize one of those assholes who pulls up on your ass for no reason. He got up behind me, really close, and flashed his high-beams at me. I was going 75, and I knew there was traffic up ahead that I would catch up to if I went any faster, but I sped up to 80 anyway. This wasn’t good enough for him, so he peeled around me, got in front of me, and then we immediately hit a wall of traffic.

I pulled up on his ass, two inches from it, and flashed my high beams twice at him. Then I pulled two lanes over to the right, sped up, and got back over one lane into the left, right as he got over into the lane to get in front of the traffic, landing me right in front of him at the last possible second. He flashed his high beams at me, and I sped up to about 95, leaving his ass behind. He caught up to me and we continued back-and-forth outrunning for a few miles. It helped keep me awake.

I told Tiffany this when she woke up, and she said, “I’m glad I trust you while I sleep.” She said something else, eventually leading up to, “One of these days you’re going to kill us.”

I said, “Hon, the only way I could hurt us would be to do it on purpose, and I’d never hurt you on purpose. I am protected by God on high,” I said this half jokingly, then realized I felt it was true.

“Oh, shut up.”

“No, really, God and I have a pact—” She cut me off.

“You don’t realize that’s a very sensitive subject, and I don’t believe in what you believe and I don’t care what you believe and what I believe, and I don’t want to hear about it anymore.”

“Hey, apparently you do care, because if you didn’t, then it wouldn’t bother you.”

This has been a conversational problem for us many times now. I’m sure any habitual reader of this site is familiar with how I feel about God and maybe even a bit familiar in exactly what I believe, though it is changing all the time. For those unaware, I’ll summarize briefly how I feel right now. (*Editor’s Note*: This “briefly” present in this last sentence is apparently a word that I do not understand.)

I was never a religious person until the last year or so. I wasn’t technically raised religiously, though I went to Christian (Quaker denomination) Sunday school until I was twelve or something. If you asked me to remember any of that crap, I don’t, except fucking around when they were trying to get me to pronounce Corinthians properly. God was never a big part of my life, and I ended up feeling a bit of a chip on my shoulder about the whole Bible thing. I would even proclaim the inexistence of God and Jesus outright, though I’m not sure if I fully believed in my disbelief of it.

The problem is that I know that when you grow up in a society that is pretty much solely centered around a single religion or concept, even if you don’t try, part of it is forced so deep into your psyche that you can’t escape it. So even though I think the whole of the Bible (and the “Gnostic Gospels”) is all bullshit, a part of me just craves to believe in it. This is why the Gnostic Gospels were so freeing to me, because they put Christianity into terms that I understood. They took Christianity, stripped away all the retarded shit, and made it a bit believable.

So, Gnosticism is responsible for my belief in a God, practically. Responsible as well for my potential confused belief in Jesus. (The Passion of the Christ is also partially responsible for that as well, because when you combine the effects of society, and then watching someone be brutally beaten to death for two hours, it’s hard not to believe. If that makes any sort of sense, kudos to you for being as crazy as me!)

But my belief in God is very different then most people, certainly any run-of-the-mill Christian, and certainly, apparently, different than Tiffany’s, though she wont tell me exactly what her deal is.

The problem with Gnosticism is that, in my experience, it teaches you to love God as if it were your parent, best friend, and, hey, even your lover. (Why not?) This does not mean that God is the parent that beats you, the best friend that deserts you, and the lover that cheats on you. This means that God is the parent that loves and protects you, the best friend that is always there for you, and the lover that shows nothing but affection for only you. This concept should already seem completely foreign to most fairweather Bible thumpers.

God is a friend of mine. God is the parrot on my shoulder, though I am not egotistical enough to think that God is only on my shoulder. That’s the trick, God is a friend of everyone. People say things like, “Why would God have enough time, or care enough, to watch over everyone specifically? I’m sure God can’t possibly do that.”

Uh, people, here’s some news for you… God is, uh, God. You know, omnipotent, all seeing, all knowing, that sort of shit. God only created us, you know, supposedly. It’s only fair to assume that God could potentially have the power to be everyone’s friend. Cool, huh? I mean, really, give the deity a little credit.

So when I say that I am protected by God, or that God and I are good friends who have a mutual understanding of each other, (and I insist that we do), I’m trying to explain to a God fearing nation that God is not something to be afraid of. Christians seem to want to believe that God is this big scary dude upstairs who will come down and beat you if you misbehave, or worse, send you to the basement. I don’t get this, really. Life is too short to live in fear.

Personally, if I created an entire planet worth of people, I’d want them to like me. I’d want them to be happy. You don’t buy a dog and then want it to be miserable, right? (Hopefully.) You buy a dog, you take it home, and you buy all sorts of shit to make it really comfortable. Maybe a dog bed, definitely some food, a water dish, etc. You get it some balls and chew toys so it can entertain itself. In return, you expect the dog not to piss on the floor, and to listen to you from time to time, maybe playing fetch and doing tricks for your friends. You’ll even try to keep your dog out of danger, take him to the veterinarian when he needs healing, etc.

Why don’t we view God as our owner, and we as his pets?

This is something I just thought of a few hours ago, back in the car, after Tiffany yelled at me. I was trying to justify the feeling of being protected by God, but comprehend why God would have us die in horrible fiery car crashes if the time came.

God is the owner in this situation. God “bought” me. God took me “home”. God set me up in this great little planet (sure, it’s got a few gaps in the fence, or holes I could fall into, but overall it’s not that bad) with a bunch of other people. There’s the water bowl, the food dish, and the challenges God sends me every day of my life are the toys that God would like me to play with, and the tricks God would like me to perform. This makes great sense to me, since I have always felt throughout my entire life that I was performing for an audience. God is my audience, I am performing for God. My life is God’s entertainment, but so is everyone else’s life.

God will protect me if necessary to continue my existence. I consider every time that I have avoided death in my car to be God protecting me. I could take credit for it as me kicking ass, and most of the time I do take credit for it, but I know that at any time, his wanting me to jump through a flaming hoop could override my ass kicking, and he could have me fall into something horrible.

I do feel, sometimes, like I am the only person on earth who truly knows and understands God. This is where my belief turns into possible schizophrenic psychosis. God doesn’t talk to me, I just feel that I have an understanding of God that is beyond most people’s comprehension. What I think of God feels so right in my head and in my heart that I don’t believe it’s true, I just know it’s true. A major part of me feels that this knowledge gives me an advantage over other people, which is where I know I falter. Though I would like to believe God will favor me over other people because I know this, I understand that this believe is false and that if the time came, God would choose against me. I still like to believe that I am in God’s favor, though.

Tiffany is bothered by this. I’m not sure why. I can’t manage to pull out of her exactly how she was raised so afraid of God, but she was born and raised in Louisiana and I’m just assuming they do things a bit differently out there. Every time I say something like, “Goddamn,” or “Man, I’m pissed at you today, God!” she gets all agitated, and acts like that a bolt of lightning is going to come down straight from heaven and strike me directly, and get her by means of association. I don’t get it, it really bugs me.

I ended up ranting at one point about it. “Imagine, Tiffany, that there are entire nations on this planet, entire nations full of hundreds of thousands of people, that believe in the religion that doesn’t fear their creator. Just imagine! Nations full of people who are actually allowed to love their creator. Imagine what life is like for those people, being able to move through their lives unafraid that some big angry deity isn’t going to strike them down for being themselves! Just imagine, that must be something else.”

She just shook her head and wouldn’t look at me.

I really don’t get it. What is so appealing about being afraid all the time? There are so many questions I would have for an orthodox Christian if I could ask them and know they would give me a true answer. Here’s a list of them.

(*Note*: Up to this point you will notice that I never refer to God with a gender inflection, but from this point onward, in posing questions of orthodox Christians, I refer to God as a male form. This is due to the fact that I believe God is genderless, or at least androgynous, but most orthodox believe that God is male.)

Why do you find nothing wrong with fearing God? Why can’t you view God as someone to think of as a loving parent who would never purposefully hurt you without reason? (I say “without reason” because in order for us to learn, sometimes pain must be involved.)

Why do you worship a symbol that, for all intents and purposes, symbolizes the place where your Savior was beaten to death and hung up to die painfully all alone, by humans? Doesn’t that seem a little morbid to you? Don’t know about you, but I’d hate to remind myself of our “big mistake” over and over again? (Not counting that whole ridiculous “we beat the life out of him so he could ensure our entry into heaven!” bit because that makes so much sense.)

If you created an entire planet of people, wouldn’t you want them to be happy? Wouldn’t you want them to like you?

Do you honestly believe that our Creator, our almighty Lord in Heaven, and all that nonsense, would actually allow for a Hell to exist? Why would he want to punish us? I know that you silly Orthodox have that whole “we bit into that apple and fell from grace” thing, but disregarding that, assuming God created us exactly the way we are, why would he want to allow us to come to harm? Why would he purposefully send us to Hell? Technically, if you believe in all that is the Bible as far as most denominations go, Jesus died for your sins, so you are protected for your entire life by Jesus, so that any sin you commit is forgotten when you step up to the pearly gates, so, really, you have no reason to be afraid of anything. I don’t remember Jesus explaining that he died to save us, but still, assuming that part is all true, Jesus died so that you can be yourself, with no fear of God in your life. What do you think about that?

I guess every other question I would have would mostly deal specifically with the interplay of fear in modern Christianity. We already live in a nation composed almost solely of controlling people through fear, why does our religion have to be about it as well? (Oh, yeah, because then Georgie wouldn’t be able to bring up the word God in his speeches to convince even more people that launching more death showers on foreign countries is a good idea.)

In closing…

Why does everyone want to be afraid?

Can’t we just live life and be happy about it?