What really gives more meaning?

What really gives more meaning? That you were created for some specific fate (arbitrarily decided by some creator)? Or that you exist, for whatever reason, and must find and create your own meaning?

Words

I've always loved words.

I love their texture, their taste, the way they roll off my tongue. I love the way you can sense the kinship between related words, through their sound or their spelling or structure - that you can almost trace the history of a word a few generations down. Words can sometimes seem alive that way - with their own family history and descendants waiting in the aisles as the language grows and changes - branching out into an, as yet, undetermined future.

I like playing with them and breaking them and putting them together again. I like them swirling around and melting into each other. I like the sound of that choice word going splat against the wall. And I love picking up the squishy little pile of whatwasonceaword and moulding its mangled form into something beautiful.

I love subverting them - taking a word and making it do my bidding, giving it meanings no one would ever impute. You can make words dance, if your soul sings them right. And you can sing to other souls. You can calm your own disturbed thoughts by putting them to word. You can stroke lovingly at another's angst till it is soothed and goes to rest.

Then, there's the subtle melting of a word into a meaning it might just have in just the right context, a juxtaposition of meaning, form and sound to make it play the games you want it to, to make it tease at your senses - looking like one thing, sounding like another, meaning something else altogether or maybe just its motion, as it leaves your tongue, conjuring up visions of things unsaid.

I Finally Signed Up

I've been an atheist for a while. And I'd been a Catholic struggling to keep his faith for even longer.

What I haven't been for a long time is a vocal atheist. Up until the beginning of last year, I'd not had the courage to come out about my lack of faith to my family, although a number of close friends knew, though funnily enough, one of my best friends was still in the dark about my waning faith.

I'd never really seen a need to be vocal about god's existence or lack thereof. That's when Richard Dawkins' God Delusion plopped into my lap and shook me up. That book came at just the right time in my deconversion and helped me move from closet atheist (almost apologetic that I couldn't have faith in a God) to someone convinced that it's important to let people know how much bigger life has become ever since I decided to believe in something bigger than an anthropomorphic single-planet-focused god.

So, in that vein... I've finally added the symbol:

On the Creationist Museum

Not into posting links normally, but this one is hilarious...

The Article

"There’s a room that has all the stuff God made on each day; the exhibit looks like holiday photographs or the brochure for an eco-safari. Included with the birds of the air are, apparently, the bats, who are mammals and will be annoyed. But we don’t have time to nitpick. What is truly awe-inspiring about the museum is the task it sets itself: to rationalize a story, written 3,000 years ago, without allowing for any metaphoric or symbolic wiggle room. There’s no poetic license. This is a no-parable zone. It starts with the definitive answer, and all the questions have to be made to fit under it. That’s tough. Science has it a whole lot easier: It can change things. It can expand and hypothesize and tinker. Scientists have all this cool equipment and stuff. They’ve got all these “lenses” and things. They can see shit that’s invisible. And they stayed on at school past 14. Science has given itself millions of years, eons, to play with, but the righteous have got to get the whole lot in, home and dry, in less than 6,000 years, using just a pitchfork and a loud voice. It’s like playing speed chess against a computer and a thousand people with Nobel Prizes."

The Truth

That's the thing about the truth
It's so delicate and helpless,
So fragile and evanescent
That you have to protect it -
You have to cup it in your hand
Or it'll go out like a tiny flame
Dying in the smoke that surrounds it.
That's what we're here for -
To see the truth,
Whatever little of it we understand
And bear witness
For fear that it would die
Under the onslaught of the world
And all the lies within it.
That's what gets me -
The truth is so weak,
All on its own,
And you just don't get it
Or you wouldn't try to bury it
And destroy it;
You wouldn't try to paint it
Into black and white -
The truth is too beautiful
To be restricted to the monochrome
But you don't get it
Or you wouldn't lie to me.

Paver Stones

I like paver stones, especially those angular bendy ones. I love the way they fit together... just so... interlocking and perfect.

And you can always tell if the workmen really cared:
You can see if they lavished their love on these little bricks, if they cherished them and made them fit, if they sought out the best for each and the other...
Or, if they tossed them down in casual disregard and let them lie there - broken and humbled - forever akimbo as evidence...

Miscera

Some thoughts exist and come to me... they travel from far and wide... they appear from nowhere... and disappear soon after...

Some thoughts jump out of my unconscious into my thoughts... and leave when they please... or stay.. or not... the Miscellaneous answer to no one...

Some thoughts are messy and not well thought out... like the gooey goodness inside a soul... or body... a messy little collection of stuff entwined in itself... and maybe me... perhaps necessary... like a small intestine... or unimportant and obscure... like an appendix, that you'd dismiss in snobbish gesture...