In which I respond here because I’m no longer in college.

I’m reading one of the late Philip K. Dick‘s final three works: a wild tour of drugs, insanity, and longing called VALIS.

While the characters – so far at least – are so engaging that it’s worth reading, there’s a great deal of vocabulary. Some of it is off-putting, because I already possess a reasonably massive vocabulary, with as solid a relationship with modern English’s predecessors as a product of public schooling can reasonably expect to have, but on some pages there will be three or four – or even more – words I need to look up. Is this communication, or is it masturbation? Who was he writing for? (And will I ever be one of them?)

It doesn’t escape me that the more words one has, the more topics one can think about… I mean to say, can we think about something without having first fashioned words to describe it? I don’t think we can. So: esoteric topics require their own jargon. Fine.

Anyway. Point is, athiests: always pissed off because [1] they can’t force themselves to experience God the same way they can force material things to interact; [2] the existence of suffering in the world upsets them so much that no clear thinking can be done about God or love after the topic of pain is introduced; [3] they require physical, dimensional proof of a force that possesses neither characteristic directly (but only indirectly, as a side-effect); and, [4] if they’re thinky, they tend to go on and on obfuscating and defining and defending and thrashing about and making the entire thing so fucking achingly complicated that no one has the energy to enter into meaningful dialog with them. Which they take to mean they’re right. Continue reading "A single, absolutely verified theophany" →