Maybe you should stop asking questions and instead seek some answers. There’s no point in constantly walking around pointing at things and asking what’s up with them if you never want to know what deal actually is.

I have become convinced that incessantly asking questions is a defence mechanism. At least a certain kind of questioning. After all, what better way to ward off the truth than by constantly prolonging your journey toward it?

There’s a school of thought that says free will doesn’t exist. It’s a large school, and one populated with more than garden-variety Calvinists. It includes a significant chunk of adult learning theorists, for instance. And Isaac Asimov with his psychohistory to some degree.

You can easily be a deist and deny free will. You have to, of course, believe that the seeds sown at the beginning of time inevitably lead to the same conclusion, but you can do it if you set your mind to it. (Now you have that song in your head. Ta-da!)

I say this all merely to point out that nothing is entirely certain about anything I see. I appear to have free will, but do I really have it? The fact that I can ask that question is interesting. In a way, asking this question is merely a function of following a bunch of hyperlinks. The hyperlinks were a function of my predisposition to read this or that type of article or blog post. My predispositions are a function of the way I was brought up, the people I knew in my youth, the sort of music I was exposed to, the men and women I admired, my social inclusion or seclusion, or whatever innumerable factors you can think of.

In some way, I can look at the universe both ways, and believe both things at the same time. That I do have free will (I have to believe that if I am to function at all), and that I do not (I have to believe that if I am at all intellectually honest). That is to say, I am a study in cognitive dissonance, except that I don’t believe in cognitive dissonance.

You can view this post as my predisposition to ramble. I like tangents. Who doesn’t really?

On Sunday, I had opportunity to think of the universe as a place that invites belief and disbelief at the same time. An interesting concept. The near-void of space, the loneliness of it all, begs at once faith in a beyond and a rational scientific measurement of what can be felt.

The whole ball of wax seems to designed like that. As if God is saying, Believe or don’t believe, the evidence looks both ways depending on what you look at, and how.

The sum of God’s will is laid out in a book. How silly is that?

I believe that book, the scriptures, at face value, when possible. How stupid must I be?

I am convinced God controls things all the way down to the quantum level. I can’t see him. I can’t feel him. I can’t reach out and lay a finger on God. I can’t even begin to understand how God can relate to a person and yet be the brains behind redshift, gravity, strong nuclear forces, dark matter, black holes, spacetime, quantum entanglement, probability, neutrinos, and a billion other completely and ridiculously amazing things I can barely appreciate, much less understand.

But I can write long sentences about them anyway. But in a way, God’s sentences are much longer than mine. The universe is, by any reckoning, many billions of years old. My life, in that expanse of zeroes, is barely a flicker, barely an eye batting, barely an electrical storm somewhere in my brain.

I cannot tell you how pleased I am that God notices me. That he slows himself down far enough to give me the Book, to let me know what precious little I can grasp, to work like a Ghost in my being and bring me to faith.

But there are countless millions who look at that expanse of space and its intricacies and see nothing at all except what is there. This seems to me unspeakably sad, but also quite normal. Gut-wrenching but mundane.

It’s the way God set it up. The most awkward of manoeuvres, creating men and women, seeding the world with us, sending us a Christ to save us from ourselves. The strangest of procedures, to work through the screwed up psychology of humanity. The oddest modus operandi, to pick the weak, the gullible, the broken, the few.

Isn’t that a weird way to go about things?

I remember once saying that I found belief stupendously hard. I always have. Belief; obedience moreso. I cannot have stumbled into this on my own. No way. My head’s too thick. My tendencies too backwards.

You can look at the universe and see a set of laws that just are, or you can see a Glue holding it together. You can see anarchy or design. You can see free will or guide rails or constraint.

The book says this is the Holy Ghost at work. I believe this. I can’t help it. How odd is that?

I’m not particularly wise. I haven’t got a lot of sage words that will twist you around and give your solar plexus a good smack. But I do know what I know, having thought about it quite a lot.

Look, dude. If it’s that difficult, something is wrong.

Can you go on like that for ever? I doubt it. No-one can face the same problems day in and day out, never resolving them or accepting them, without going crazy. No-one should ask themselves — or especially someone else — to do that.

I’m not saying you should drop it at the first sign of trouble. I’m not saying that God can’t stick a finger in an swirl things about. What I am saying is this: don’t actively seek to martyr yourself on a cross of love.

It isn’t worth it.

Your friends can provide you some perspective on this. I’m on the periphery of your acquaintance: I don’t expect you to listen to me. But ask yourself, ask them to be brave, ask them to say what they’re surely thinking.

They’ll probably say that it’s not supposed to be totally easy, but it’s not supposed to be that difficult. It should be a labour of love… not just labour.

You need to decide that for yourself: I could be dead wrong.

Am I?

In viewing popular culture’s recent drift toward considering all religions isotropic, I can’t help an involuntary shudder. If Nietzsche was right, if God is dead and we killed him, then this must be his hell.

There’s this action no-one likes taking, and I mean no-one. It’s not a hard thing, really, but it stings.

Admit you’re the problem, see how that feels, see if I’m right. Look at yourself as clearly as you can — and let’s be honest, not particularly clearly even then — and you will notice this. You’re the problem.

You’re not always the problem, of course: there are genuine instances where you’ve been acted upon and had no fault in it. I’d guess that those instances are rare.

If you call it fault, or blame, or something like that, fine. Call it that. But in doing so, don’t reduce everything to a set of sums, to percentages, to balances and counter-balances. Have you found a way to rightly apportion that force of will that entangles us all? Congratulations; in thinking flawed so deeply, you’re the problem.

But what came before? How did you get to this place? And even, if you could see all the connections, tenuous or otherwise, would your trifling intellect begin to comprehend the permutations? The primaries, the secondaries, the tertiaries (or the framework of numbers forces upon them)?

Sometimes I imagine the world like strings, every man and woman trailing them wherever they walk. Like marionettes with countless hands pulling in countless directions. Like a fabric, maybe, shifting in the present, reaching hesitantly into the near future, somewhere into the far, being laid down in the past.

Can you control the things that come before, that determine what comes after? Can you identify them and disentangle yourself?

Do you have free will?

Sometime in the future you may admit — privately, publicly, it matters not — that you’re the problem. That there’s an answer you need to find to yourself. That you are the only thing you can change. And that when you change you, you change the future.

Or do you?

Maybe you’ll admit you’re the problem and see a tiny gossamer strand reaching back to these words.

But you probably won’t.

You know what weddings are all about? Weddings are all about stress. Let me explain. Yesterday, I left work early, as delivery men from both Sears and Jysk were showing up. Show up they did, both of them late, and I spent the rest of the evening assembling furniture, which isn’t as therapeutic as it may sound. In fact, by the time I had figured out how the TV stand and the couch fit together, I had spent three hours bolting things together, deciphering schematics cleverly encrypted with 128-bit stupidity, and wondering why so much extra hardware had been crammed into the little plastic bags, until I longed for the sweet embrace of death.

Then I got into work to discover everyone calling for their tools, and every tool not done or done wrong. Hyperbole, but it stands. In the midst of this I discovered that money is going to be a little tight for the first few months of marriage because OSAP — predictably, I might add — thinks that we don’t actually need any money for food and whatnot.

Of course, some of you are going to be saying, “Well, then you shouldn’t have bought that bed and that furniture.” But of course they were both a donation from my parents, bless their moneyed souls, and not a cash donation. And I will not beg money from them; things tight, but we’ll survive just fine. For the first time I understand why finances are the ruination of many an otherwise sound relationship.

We will find ourselves, after the honeymoon, in a house full of semi-nice things, with a few thin dimes to rub together. At least for the first few weeks. Add to that the inevitable tension of getting used to — for me at least — having another person around the house whose needs I have to consider, whose well-being I am entrusted with, and you have the makings of a rocky road. It’s scary too: are my shoulders broad enough for this?

Something is going to blind-side us. The time is ripe. I mean, me and Laura love eachother and we’ll make it through whatever comes, but it’s all too simple right now. The challenges seem straightforward, and life seems to generally dislike being straightforward. So I’m waiting to get hit by a bus.

All this to say that I may well be fraying and wearing thin, but this is going to happen. It will, and if I find myself taking a bus in the chest, it will be for love. I’m a big ball of hope that no bus will come, and that the rewards of the tension will be legion, and that in all of this there will be a knot of blessing.

But I still can’t wait for it all to just be… over.

Mind above scripture, or scripture above mind. But it’s not that simple, is it?

It’s easy enough to say that scripture is the rule for life, that there are things in it that are hard to understand and that sometimes don’t come close to making sense.

It’s easy to say that, and I suppose it’s true enough. You submit to it, you put your mind underneath it, you humble yourself. I’m not good at it, but I try to find my intellect keeling, as it were.

I’ve recognised in myself — ever since I was young, even — a talent if not for obfuscation and dissimulation then for at least finding the smallest point of chaos in the most dreadfully ordered patterns. For making even those blisteringly clear things seem a bit clouded. For saying, “Well, it’s not quite that simple…”

So here you go.

Is it really that simple? Is it really this act of will where I take my intellect like a burnt offering and hold it up on a silver platter? Or is there some kind of interplay between the mind and the scripture? There must be; we interpret and equivocate, don’t we? It’s not at all obvious what it all means, not without some clarification, much like archaeology, or some other arcane art. Compare, contrast, dust, tug, push, dig, all these things.

There’s a dialogue there. The mind creates structure — isn’t that what we do with everything? — when reading the scriptures. It’s part of what makes people people, that they find all sorts of patterns and structures and coherence; not to say that scripture doesn’t have any, not at all.

Worse yet, the brain needs to understand the way the brain works. I can recognise that there’s some interplay there between what I read, what I understand, and how I can humble myself before the one who made me to read and understand. But which one is under and which one is above? It’s a good question. Am I humbling myself in front of something I have constructed? Or am I humbling myself in front of the real thing?

This cognitive dissonance is not easily resolved, and probably wouldn’t be, if there was this giant vacuum in which to read the scriptures. Of course there isn’t, though. There isn’t some magical island where you can open up the book and just read free of prejudice and all those other things that come with being a part of the world.

Lots of different things intrude, but maybe the most important is that holy Ghost. Can I say he is the resolution? I believe so. He is not a construct, that much is clear. He is the person above personhood that, when you ask, shoves the right building blocks in the right hole.

That so many of us come to different conclusions when asking for his help is a mystery, isn’t it? You’d think he’d just blind his followers with light and lead them by the hand. He exists, though, and he is near. That much is clear.

You may say, I will listen and you will speak, and you may find the jumbled bits of your thinking falling into place. He is at work, not only there but in other places at well.

You may find that it is, after all, quite simple. Not this mumbo-jumbo about dialogue and over/under. And I may wink and say, We all get there in the end.

But I won’t tell you where. Not here. Not now.

Every time I see someone browsing a celebrity gossip site or reading one of those magazines, I ask myself why people will willingly concern themselves with the private lives of other people, something manifestly none of their business, rather than paying attention to things that directly affect their lives, such as being involved in the workings of government.

I wonder sometimes if stupidity is a disease, or maybe some sort of meme. Yeah I understand that expecting everyone to be smart is a bit of a tall order, and that even the smartest people have issues on which they’re pretty boneheaded; but is it so much to ask that people pay attention to something that actually matters?

Every time I see one of my sisters, especially, I die a little inside. I ask myself if my caring about things is an anomaly. Am I the freak here?

To the victor, the spoils, yes? And one of those spoils is the ability to rewrite the struggle to something other than what it is. Moral superiority. A peace-loving people pushed to the brink by towering foes. A divine call. A regretful but necessary chain of events. Fate. Genetic superiority.

This is why the conquered must be assimilated. Not simply ruled, but assimilated until they have accepted the victor’s version of events, until a few generations forward, their children don’t even know their stories.

They must share your narrative. Or else your narrative is in danger, and if your narrative, then your empire.

This is why we lie to ourselves, sometimes. Because we are inventing a story about this and that to make sense of it, to put it in a particular order, to calm ourselves and believe in structure.

There is a structure to things, yes, but very rarely is it obvious; even then it is good to doubt your own perception. Structure is a thing of belief, yes, despite what you see.

Empires, nations, states, cities, and people all share this. The narrative that we suggest is the cause when really it is simply the effect.

The founders of the USA, for instance, are not the godlike figures that grace history books today: they were complex individuals with mostly economic motivations. The Boston Tea Party was not some great moral statement: it was an instinctive lashing out against monopoly. The War for Independence was not a sweeping revolution borne of righteousness and godly vigour: it was and always will be just another war in a world with a long history of wars, and like every war, it changed the face of history.

The founders of Rome, to give another example, may have been bringing culture to all points of the world, and peace, but their unshaken belief in the superiority of the Roman way of life was, simply, misplaced. They went their way and now the barbarians rule the world.

And no matter what they may have thought of themselves–along with the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Japanese, the Germans–history is unerringly critical. We do not share their narrative.

The spoils are short-lived.

Personal narratives have, in my experience, an even shorter shelf-life. When you ask “why” and invent an answer to that question, remember this; remember that there will come a day when all illusions fail, like you always knew they would.

I can answer to this, because I have created many stories. I’m good at it, really. I may not have the patience for writing anything longer than a few paragraphs, but I am possessed of certain ability to obsess about motivations.

My own, for instance, are not often clear. There are things I suspect, and other things that I have just begun to smell out, but they are like looking in a mirror and not understanding what I am seeing. This is my face, yes it is, but the cone of vision is not large enough: I can focus on a point and it escapes me quickly.

This itself is my narrative, you see. I am telling a story where I am good at telling stories about everyone but myself. But again, this is not entirely true; I am, like the Romans, not quite what I say I am.

Once, when I was young, I punched a hole in the bathroom wall. My parents have laboured under the delusion that I slipped on a wet floor ever since it happened, as that is what I told them happened, and despite themselves, they believed me. This is, of course, not what happened. I simply saw a wall and punched my fist through it.

Can you imagine the stories I came up with? I do not like things that hold me back. I abhor boundaries. I belong in the outdoors, a noble savage. I was angry and could not contain my rage. I went momentarily insane. I will become a boxer. More.

In retrospect things become increasingly twisted until they become suddenly very simple. There was a wall. There was a fist. I wanted to see what would happen, to test the limits of the drywall.

It was not very strong.

That is a story I’ve never before told anyone but Laura. But I still find it interesting. I remember punching it like an experiment, as if I this were some sort of obscene science. Mostly I remember the hole I left and how after I had tried to patch it up it was never very strong, how it kept collapsing in on itself.

I suppose the next owners of that house found that place by accident one day. I don’t know. At this point, I don’t really care.

To the victor, the spoils, then. There’s always this question who’s won and who’s lost. Whenever anyone asks me this question, I always point at them. You.

You have won.

… that most modern artists of almost any stripe, thriving on notoriety as they do, would absolutely love to be censored somehow.

The only problem is that the structure — or lack of it — that they represent is inherently anti-censorship. Meaning that in order for something to be outrageous, is needs a status quo to provoke.

Yet, how often don’t the rebels become the status quo themselves and prove to everyone that they’re just another note in the same old song?