logic of an agnostic pantheist

"This is what God said: 'I promise that never again will all people and animals be destroyed by a flood. I am putting my rainbow in the clouds. And when the rainbow appears, I will see it and remember this promise of mine.'"

for despite all claims to an omniscient God, God in fact has something of a bad, or at least imperfect, memory. it is a memory that needs reminders of promises, the promise alone unable to substantiate itself. God needs aids as we need them. this imperfect memory defeats, first of all, assumptions of omniscience, knowledge being only sustained memories, and complete knowledge entailing a working memory of anything and everything, alpha and omega, first and final cause. the act of forgetting -- Forgetting being actually inherent to everything -- could not be a possibility were it a true case of omniscience. so, God does not know all (and indeed CANNOT know all anyway, as a thorough study of prophecy would show).

secondly, God's imperfect memory begets an altogether different reading of the scriptures, if they are indeed supposed to be God's Word. the bible is no less a historical telling by way of selective memory than the histories of humankind produced by its own imperfect collective memories. were we even to propose that God would be at least less inclined to error in his telling than humans, it would no more depreciate the weight, the heavy burdenous weight, of the condition of a possibility (and therefore SOME probability) for error; nor can it stave off the more immense problem that with limited memory (of any sort!) there is inherently, indispensibly, a perspective, a point-of-view, and necessarily, simultaneously, a bias in what is Told. alternate histories must therefore have alternate Gods, differentiated and distributed by people (or, the more likely case, pre-differentiated and pre-distributed by something human but unconscious or subconscious), people who themselves have points of view and biases. God(s) must be pluralistic. monotheism in its strong form then can only exist emically, in those cases of violent (abridging, omitting) isolationism, in self-limiting; in its weak form, monotheism must equate itself with pluralism of a sort, a closet monolatrism, whereby, just like "Love", only the name and the act of signification itself of SOMETHING (always something different) can serve a base for union.

a showdown with my simulacrum (OR becoming an other)

the way a blind eye turns in on itself and magnifies the immanent -- i turned to me to propose a revelating experiment; no mastermind in his dreams could muster what it takes to invent such a scheme. for you see, it surfaces on what's already apparent: the surface of the mirror, the glass in the photocopier, bordering my words and a bright light; the internal architecture prime for reproduction, like a mime, smooth and without obstruction. if the machine of life can do this, why can't i?

slowly i began to reminisce, thinking backward and forward -- the mirrors, the glassdoors, the sidewalk's skyscrapers, a highschool photo album, the family videos. there were little tyke birthday parties on VHS, RGB settings just a faint tint too red; there were ceremonies and field trips, balls -- portraits that sleep on the shelves after invading the walls; stories by friends, at least the ones i've heard, girls telling boys telling boys telling girls -- a history, the way all histories are made: suggested, imagined, mutated and framed. i made it, my image, a copy of me.

and i put it to work: sit in that chair, at the desk, near the stairs, say hello but don't say hello if it isn't clear, sing the songs, do the dance -- and done! i was free. not from the cage of walls and windows beyond which the piercing light of the sun illumines the greens and blues and gentle greys of a nostalgic world of origin -- no, not free from that, but from myself. from me! god help it was irrational but one-hundred-and-two percent logical, a provision of intense proportions, expressing the given truth that we mustn't say yet we need to know: a copy does what a copy should do, stand in for what you want it to.

so i plugged my ears and strained my eyes and let my copy tell its lies. it tugged at me -- it beckoned me to come closer, but i was bolder, and older; and i stood in the fourth wall of each scene and at times viewed it like the screen of the TV in the den, up too loud, full of bad reception and barely perceptible glitches. it struck me then: the bad reception was on the side of me, the me in the TV: no life, no breath, no warmth, no hope, nothing but an empty image, hollow of meaning, of chemistry -- a disemboweled and distorted semi-simulacrum encoached in malformed phenomenology. and strike two: this frankenstein's monster of one-sided memories had the lethal potential to disown me, the me of the periphery.

it was all over, unless i made one final move, one last synaptic convulsion, capable i knew of sending me, both of me, flying and dying into the ocean of molten thalamic fluids of the acutely neurotic; but the alternative was intersocial death -- so i played my hand. i threw myself back into the material world, into the mind's colloquial Cartesian theater, threw back the metaphorical curtains and bent all subjective space-time to my volition. all the shadowy reflections of my past were nearly gone -- fed to the cogs of my creation, teeth still nashing and grinding, silently resounding 'more! more!' oh, i'd give them more. return to the faces of family and friends, their souls, their tongues, their eyes. their eyes -- looking at me and searching me for signs, signs, signs of consent, all the things we needn't say but we must know: agreement, acceptance, convenience, displeasures and pain, brought to the forefront to pave the way for novelty, for change. i took it all in, in a breath, and filled the vacuous concavities of the copy with their jabber, their stares, the perceived expectations substituting at times their presence. natural channels of irrigation formed, veins and arteries, stretching between this and all other copies, traversing thresholds, restoring promises, reviving broken hearts, and procuring lovers. and when i'd finished my deed and looked into it eyes, it deeply bowed to me, and that's when i realized: if i could make one and God could make two, then with a bit more work i could complete me with you. so i did, and all was good.

now there's one small problem with this picture, something i've failed to elaborate -- too late to solve it, too little time to make a lecture, so i'll just say it once here and now. you see the problem with a copy is if you give it all that's you, then you'll discover unspoken truth number two: a copy is a copy until that copy becomes you. and as i winced at its glitch of a grin, a thought at long last came to me, that what it was thinking was beyond -- no, wait, more than me. MORE than me. and in the breadth of three words, all was said and done, glasses the world over shattered over a blink's millennium. and when my eyes opened again, there was only one -- one me, one 'real', no casualties, and the thing that had made me was gone, empty as it was of life, of breath, of hope. and as i write, i wonder if i'll ever see him again -- no, surely not. but the point of this message that i'm writing here to you is, when you say i've changed, lord, you haven't got a clue. i've just done what every living being someday has to do; and if there comes a day i ask what's gotten into you, then you can remind me of this story, of the natural progression of reality and the eternal assimilation of the simulating entity: the me, the you, the me.