For all the digs and jokes about MySpace, I’m finding it a cheerful place to meet people and chat about this and that.  That’s more then I expected when I joined, which btw was only so I could communicate with other people in the center of the Love In Action protests back in the summer of 2005.  A fun MySpace thing are the random surveys and questions people exchange with others on their friends list, via ‘bulletins’.  One came my way a few days ago, a dare of sorts, and reticent little dweeb that I still am inside, I decided to risk it myself:

ONE QUESTION

You get to ask me 1 Question (TO MY INBOX)…any one question, no matter how crazy it is, and I promise to answer it truthfully…the catch is…you have to repost this and see what people ask you….so go for it…

I got a few bites, some of which really made me think.  One asked me how I would compare my hopes and fears about my future and the future of my country now, as compared to when I was 21.  Considering that I turned 21 within a few weeks after Nixon resigned, the question really floored me: the more I thought about it, the more I realized how vastly different America is now, from what it was then, and how far down the right wing has dragged us since those days, since Reagan.  I’m still pondering my answer to him, but it’s really hard to look at how much damage has been done.

Another one came the other day asking me what my proof of the existence of God is.  In another survey I’d joked that beautiful guys were my proof that there is a God.  My questioner, an atheist, wanted a bit more detail.

The question managed to open the door a tad to that place inside of me where I talk to God; where I’m still a six year old boy, laying on his back on a warm summer night, looking up at the stars and wondering what they are.  I thought I’d share my answer.  The country is in a grip of fundamentalist hysteria, the central conceit of which is that those of us who aren’t "bible believing Christians" have no faith, no spirituality, no reverence, no sense of awe and rapture, no morals, no values higher then the pleasure of the moment.  We’re all just skating by, just cheating our way through life.  But it is not those of us who are willing stand before the creation, before the great work of nature, just as we are, and let it speak for itself, who are the cheats. 

No…that was just me being ironic. You hear heterosexual guys saying the same thing about beautiful women being their proof that there is a god.

Until you get to the point that you can even say you understand how the universe was created in the first place, I really don’t think you can claim you have a proof that there is a creator. My thoughts about God are mostly along the lines of Frank Lloyd Wright, when he said "I believe in God but I spell it Nature." I don’t look to the bible or any sort of holy writ, other then the natural world, which I take to be the firsthand testament of the creator itself. When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird. But I admit the natural world reveals no objective evidence of a creator. And that doesn’t really surprise or distress me. I am fine with that and not really interested in whether others share my spiritual beliefs or not. Just that we’re all free to live by our conscience in these matters. I care very much about that.

I feel a great spiritual exaltation whenever I contemplate the fundamentals of physics and nature, and a deep spiritual gratitude toward whatever it was that created this amazing and beautiful universe, and whether or not it amounts to any sort of consciousness, or anything a human mind could grasp as being an consciousness, is not a question I can answer, or worry about all that much. I ponder it often but I don’t worry about it. I have no proof to offer you or anyone else, nor any doctrine nor creed nor theology to impart, other then don’t stop asking questions, and don’t be afraid to discard answers that don’t work anymore. The tree that stops growing is dead.

And…Your Mileage May Vary.

-Bruce