I'm bored with your calligraphy and your basketball.

[L.B.]

NOTE: This was written at 5 A.M. after fitful sleep and before coffee. I apologize for any rambling or confusing bits - I was still very foggy.

When you're a little kid, you don't know your letters. You point at pictures of kitty and doggy and birdie and stuff.

 

Then you get a little older and you learn to recognize letters and you learn how they go together, and that there are (sort of) rules that help you understand how to form words and form ideas - the basis of language.

 

Some people get really good at something known as calligraphy - literally "drawing letters", rather than just writing or typing them. They're expressing the same ideas, but they're adorning the letters with a flair, a beauty, a style that makes them stand out from ordinary letters.

 

Here's the thing, though - there's an old saying about putting lipstick on a pig - if you get excited about how sexy that pig looks because lipstick, it's only because you're able to disassociate your mind from the "pig-ness" of the pig, and you're able to latch on to the exteriors, the window-dressing. It's like dating someone whose only attractive quality is a huge bank balance that they're willing to waste lavishly on you. There's just nothing else of substance - and no amount of lipstick and lonely desperation makes that pig any less piggy.

 

I'm bored with Christian "calligraphy" - the fancy-ass ways of trying to prove or justify or validate the most unbelievable bullshit. Use the Higgs-Boson theory, use the god-of-the-gaps theory, try using philosophical arguments to explain away the total lack of actual objective data in favor of the existence of your deity. Use whatever, but it's all just the same letters drawn pretty. They don't make any more sense when they're drawn pretty, they don't carry any more weight when they're drawn pretty. They're just the same letters as the Dick And Jane books, the same letters that unlocked the mysterious names of kitty and doggy and birdie when we were four years old.

 

The "Ark Experience" is just really fancy calligraphy telling the story of a really old man with a magic boat.

The "apologetics" debates are nothing more than expensive ink and specialized pens and linen paper telling us about talking animals and people eating magic fruit and people fighting giants.

 

Then there's basketball. Most of you don't know, but I used to be a very competitive basketball player. I never got grades good enough to play for my schools, but I played in the parks in a large city, home to a huge university, and I played against a lot of college players. At 6'2" I look huge to the average person, but I was a little man compared to those guys. I more than held my own - to the extent that a coach saw me playing against some of his players and I wound up with a scholarship offer after having played not one minute of organized team ball.

Why do I mention these things? Because I loved the game so much that even though I could and did play with guys who went on to be professional players, I would still go to my local parks and play against whoever wanted to play.

 

It was fun - but it also got boring after a while. Being able to fake someone out with a move that wouldn't even make most of my opponents blink, let alone react, is funny for an hour or two. Some of my friends who were decent park players, but not really at the higher level, REALLY liked playing on teams with me at the smaller parks, because I could make them look good and we would almost always win. One of my friends and I once held the court for four hours with the rest of our team being made up of players from our high school's GIRLS' varsity team. Yes, two guys and three girls beat everyone that came to the park that day for four hours straight.

 

I bring this all up because after a while, it was just too easy. Even playing against the best competition I even faced was still just run, jump, shoot. I know I could have gone on and probably would have reached my apex and maybe wouldn't have played among the elite, but even they are just running, jumping, shooting.

 

I hang around most Christians, so ignorant of history and so ignorant of logic and of rhetoric, and they go "ooh" and "aah" over Ken Ham's calligraphy, over Ray Comfort's calligraphy. They swoon whenever someone retells the magic boat story or the magic fruit story or the magically-undead-man story. They're looking at hand-lettered, leather-bound, heirloom versions of kitty and doggy and birdie, that's all.

I get around most Christians, and even the ones who want to have the (slightly) more open-ended discussions about reality and mind and the esoteric are just the best players at the local park. After a while, there are just things they can't defend against because it's stuff they have never seen before. After a while, if I want the game to be even a little fun anymore, I have to start pushing myself and forgetting that the other team is even there, like my friend and I did with the girls from our school - the five of us just threw trick passes and took stupidly-long shots and just showed off for one another because the only thing the other team was doing was filling the requirement for there to be two teams in order for a game to take place.

 

I'm bored with calligraphy that says the same shit in different colors and fonts. It's stupid, no matter how expensive your pens are.

I'm bored with playing to 15 points, win-by-two, when it doesn't matter which of my teammates shoots - we're going to beat your asses just because we've already played against people that wouldn't even tie their shoes to play against you.

 

You know, players like REAL LIFE and EVIDENCE and LOGIC - I've laced up my sneakers and taken these players on, day after day, and they always win. Christians have nothing that can counter what these players bring to the game.

 

So when you come along with "the truth" or "god said" or "the gospel" or whatever, those are just your fancy letters saying the same unbelievable crap. It's all just your driveway-league Saturday-afternoon farting around, and it's not even remotely interesting. If I play ball with you, it's because I have nothing better to do at the moment, or it beats whatever else I had to deal with at the time.

 

I'm bored.

[Fweethawt]

I wish I could write something like that when my mind is foggy.

[NowWhat]

On 11/3/2017 at 11:44 AM, Fweethawt said:

I wish I could write something like that when my mind is foggy.

 

I wish I could write something like that when my mind is lucid.