MAN OF FAITH
March 28, 2008
Lately I've been having a lot of fun telling people that I am a man of faith. Of course I don't just come right out and say this. I always wait for them to make the first move. By them I refer to the standard variety of faith monger, a class of people that always finds a way it seems to share their beliefs with you. I used to hate it when they did this. I would be moaning and groaning inside, thinking something like, "Good grief, here we go again. Same shit, different day."
But not any more. Now, I can't wait for such opportunities to present themselves. I have learned how to extract some great fun from such occasions. What I do is assure them that I am a beleiver as well, but give them along with that assurance a sort of caveat. I tell them that, although I am a person of faith very much like they are, I am at the same time, not likely one who shares their particular faith, that I do not believe in the same thing that they believe. When they ask me what that is (which they always do because people of their ilk seem always to be keenly interested in belief systems), I respond that I believe that what they believe is very likely wrong.
Typically, they will find a way to immediately exit stage right when hearing this, sensing that I am some sort of clown just having some sport with them, which is not far from the truth. I am indeed a clown. I don't know how a true nihilist could not eventually turn into some sort of clown. But if they decide to stay and invite some torture into their life, I stand ready to dish it out to them.
Believers (the mainstream ones) are incapable of comprehending the nihilist mind in much the same way that none of us can truly understand the vastness of the nothing that pervades the cosmos, or the way that something comes from nothing or the manner in which they are in reality but two sides of the same coin (as Alan Watts suggests).
I realize that I am most likely wasting my time messing with people like this, but at the same time I realize that there is no such thing as wasting time. What I am really doing is filling the time that I have, which is all that any of us does in our lifetime, we fill the time given to us. And we all fill it with basically the same thing: beliefs. I just happen to believe that all of those beliefs are wrong, except for one: my own.