[Old piece of writing from one of my mid-1990’s websites—yes, it’s a spoof, but one with a philosophical/atheological point to make (see first footnote explaining the origin and concept of “Ungod”).]
Excursions Near the Temple of Gloom
or
How I Found Ungod
by Eltanin al Rastaban
While romping through the highland jungle near an archaeological dig (yes, years ago I was Indiana Jones, so to speak), I stubbed my toe.
On a rock. A remarkably smooth rock, in fact. As I checked the surface for the remains of my toenail, perhaps thinking it could be reattached with a little scotch tape I had on hand, I observed some oddly invisible, cryptic characters on the edge of the stone.
Retrieving my slightly rusty trowel, I quickly dug the stone out. Since it was located in the disturbed soil of the surface there was no need to do more than note its coordinates in the forest. Eagerly, I began to study the mysterious markings on the rock.
I said earlier the characters were invisible, and indeed they were, except to the faith of an atheist. When I showed the stone to my archaeological compatriots, not one of them could see any markings or letters at all, since they lacked atheist faith. Indeed, their jealousy of my ability to see characters on the stone quickly led them to dismiss me from the team.
Now I admit their petty jealousy perturbed me. Nonetheless, I retreated to my trailer and began the task of recording and translating the message on what would later become known as the Rock of Ungod.
The result you see before you, referred to variously as the “Word of Ungod,” “Ungod’s Atheist Teachings,” or the “Ungod Commandments.”
I present them together with my own explanations, for I have discovered that by simple, sincere atheist faith, I’ve gained the uncanny ability to comprehend exactly what Ungod was trying to say.
Ungod’s Brevity
It has been asked how so much information could have been found on a single rather small stone. It is simple. The invisible characters on the stone magically grouped themselves in layers over one another, alternately rising and falling as I needed. Reading the holy writ of Ungod was more like unpeeling an onion, albeit a somewhat magical one, and less like making pressings of gravestones or, for that matter, reading pedestals. Thus the Rock of Ungod has a clear edge over the tables of Moses or the tablets of Mormon. After all, their technology was stone age. Ungod’s is information age.
A word about the pre-Mayan language on the tablets. In most languages, ancient and modern, a distinction is made between nouns and verbs—or more accurately, between objects and their actions. Here that is not the case. Remarkably, their word for an object always includes its action or behavior as well.
In a sense there are no verbs in this language because nouns already include the verb: we might call them noun-verbs. What almost serves the place of the verb, however, are characters that indicate the existential or logic state for each noun-verb in the sentence. These are:
- happens
- moves
- happens-not
- moves-not
- happens-if
- moves-if
Though there may be other logic-states, they are not found on the Ungod stone. In the deciphered passages, the logic states follow [in brackets] in the same order as the noun-verb to which they apply.
Any noun-verb that changes or exists (or is provisionally presumed to exist, in some contexts) is assigned the logic-state of moves. If it is non-existent, it is assigned the opposite state of moves-not. On the other hand, when a noun-verb is assigned the logic state of happens, it becomes a reference to the noun-verb’s experience itself—or the experiencing of it by some sentient being. This will become clearer as we look at the sayings.
The first 8 sayings of Ungod are as follows:
- 1) Gods Ungod-living [moves-not] [moves]
- 2) Gods Head-thinking Body-being [happens] [happens-if] [moves]
- 3) God-giving Ungod-living [happens] [happens-not]
- 4) Body-being Head-thinking [moves-not] [happens-not]
- 5) Body-thinking [happens]
- 6) Body-thinking Pond-changing Ungod-living [happens-if] [moves] [moves]
- 7) Body-being Ground-dancing Ungod-living [happens-if] [moves] [moves]
- 8) Body-being Corpse Corpse [moves] [happens-not] [moves]
The Atheist Teachings of Ungod — Explained!
1) Gods Ungod-living [moves-not] [moves]
Translation: “There are no Gods but Ungod”
Since Ungod is no god, this pretty much sums up atheist worship.
Ok, you’re right. Atheists do worship the pink unicorn and great fisheye, I admit that. But most of all atheists worship Ungod. Or they will as soon as they find out about her, because. . . ok, because Ungod is naked.
That’s right, not a stitch on. And can Jehovah and Allah and Buddha say that?
2) Gods Head-thinking Body-being [happens] [happens-if] [moves]
Translation: “If God had a brain, He’d have a body.”
And if he had a body, he’d have to wear clothes. Or else go stark naked like Ungod.
What Ungod means here is that she is a much better choice for human worship because she can be naked. Whereas God, poor bodiless entity that He is, hasn’t a thing to hang his clothes on.
Oh, and the part about a brain? Obviously if God had a brain, He’d give himself a body. Who wouldn’t? It makes things so much easier, starting with what to do with your hat. But God doesn’t have a body, and consequently he doesn’t have one very important thing that comes with bodies: a brain.
And without the brain, he’ll never think to give himself a body.
Talk about a vicious circle!
Ok, there’s one other little problem with not having a body. You can’t exist!
Why? Because you can’t do anything—because you don’t have any parts to do anything with. No body, no brain, no you.
Which makes what to do with the hat the least of your worries.
3) God-giving Ungod-living [happens] [happens-not]
Translation: “Service to God is disservice to Life”
How’s that for a bumper sticker.
If you put it on your car, will you find your windows smashed and tires flat? Probably, says Ungod. If you belong to God, any truth but His makes you angry, since it threatens you with eternal punishment.
“I am a Jealous God,” says God. “and since I only exist as an idea in your head, I will strike you with all my wrath if you think unGod-like ideas!” Serve God, and you serve an idea-virus. It invades your head, destroying any thoughts incompatible with it, barring the ears, eyes, nose and mouth from anything Ungod. What you believe is more important than how you live.
Poor Ungod! She thinks ideas should serve you, not you them.
Instead of getting stuck on your beliefs, she thinks you should be free to abandon them as soon as the wind changes—or a better idea floats by.
But God, that destructive virus, wants to rout everything out the human mind but Him. Think God ideas, or go to hell. Believe and worship God ideas, and be rewarded with the only existence that really, really matters: afterlife.
Ah, afterlife! The City of Dis. Heaven at God’s right hand. Cloudy, wispy angels braying in your ears! God, God, God, God all day long in your ears.
Heaven indeed, if you’re the God-idea virus. But hell, sheer hell, if you’re the ears.
Such is service to God.
You can’t have two masters. Serve life, or serve God. Take your choice.
But is life a master? Ungod is telling me she didn’t write that.
“Life is us in our aliveness, that’s all,” she says. Can you be your own master?
You can, you absolutely can. But only if you are virus-free.
Service to God is disservice to Life. If you are all goo-goo eyes over heaven, over the sweet fantasy that you will have eternal life without pain or effort or bathroom visits—well, the result is that you pay that much less attention to life. You care that much less about things on earth. After all, the real show is in heaven.
So if a few million people starve here, a few million more get tortured there, what does it matter? This is only life. And by dying, they’ll just get to heaven a little quicker—. That wonderful place where they’ll have the angel-braying God-virus in their ears all day, and running out their noses. The real show!
Of course, life on earth isn’t entirely useless. I mean, its a great opportunity to build religious schools and indoctrinate as many billions as possible with the God-virus.
We need those billions in heaven. God feeds on them. It’s His only source of sustenance.
But wait, Ungod…
Wait.
A few exist who believe in God but also seem to care about those starving and tortured millions. And actively try to help.
They are called liberals.
If they serve God, how can it be that they care so much about life, about helping other people here on earth?
They serve two masters, says Ungod. The God-virus only got half their brain. Or got brain but not heart. Or they have an active immune system.
Whatever.
The point is that all the others who serve God are engaged full time in a frontal, full-scale attack on liberals. And now you know why.
4) Body-being Head-thinking [moves-not] [happens-not]
Translation: “Thinking is something that bodies do; therefore without a body to do the thinking, thinking can’t exist.”
Ungod’s construction here is a little inexact (hey, Ungod is anything but perfect!) but what she means is that thinking only happens in certain animal brains, and then only when those brains receive adequate nutrients and caloric energy. Which means, gosh, thinking is a physical process!
Ungod’s point is that since God is not a physical being, lacks a body and therefore lacks a brain (not to mention other appendages), God can’t think.
Thinking can’t happen, she’s telling us, unless a body does it. And God doesn’t have one of those. He’s not a body-being. (And He’s never gotten over it, either.)
Ungod’s meaning really goes much further than this, though. If you bob your head and try to pick up the faint vibrational hues and radiances of her words, the following revelation leaps upon you:
Information doesn’t exist out in the world. It is only a human—perhaps only a hominid, perhaps only a mammalian—characteristic. Information happens only in our imaginations.
This is made explicit in the very next words on the Rock.
5) Body-thinking [happens]
Translation: “Information happens!”
Information happens! Isn’t that the truth of it? But what the hell. . . !?
Let me explain. Ungod means information is an internal experience we have, not a set of “facts” about the world. Information is not “true” says Ungod, except as a bit of common human experiencing.
Don’t let this confuse you, says Ungod. She means that information is always a comparative: instead of being True or False, an information-experience is instead more true (or less true) than some other bit of information experience.
And information is species-specific, and therefore species-limited. If you can grasp this, and its consequences, you’re getting close to the beating heart of the Rock of Ungod.
6) Body-thinking Pond-changing Ungod-living [happens-if] [moves] [moves]
Translation: literally, “Meaning swims in the dark pond of living.” But it’s fuller meaning is roughly as follows:
“One thing life can never be is meaningful. Only language can be meaningful. Even then, only to the extent that it dips into the dark pond of life.”
Ah, the meaning of meaning, whatever that means!
Ungod is saying, “Look at that oak tree!”
And she means that the words “oak tree” are meaningful, for they are symbols which point to—reference, in fancy talk—the tall woody object gracing Ungod’s front yard. “Oak tree” is meaningful because it references something, and when you hear the words you know that it is not the words themselves, “oak tree”, which Ungod wants you to embrace. Rather, she wants you to glide into her front yard and hug the tall woody thing.
Words are meaningful because they point at things—real things. And the value of the phrase “oak tree” (or more accurately, its source of value) is that real thing in the yard. The real thing is in itself valuable, and the words about it are meaningful because they point at the value.
This boring-sounding stuff is very important to Ungod, and she will get very angry at you if you let on that it bores you. So you better snap to and pay attention, or you’ll soon have naked Ungod to pay.
That’s better.
Now, what if we said the tall woody thing in Ungod’s front yard was meaningful? Before, we said it was valuable, and that the words about it were meaningful. But what if, instead, we said the tall woody thing was itself meaningful?
This would be the same as asserting that Ungod’s tall woody front yard thing referenced or pointed at something else. And that to hug her tree is really to want to hug the something else that the tree references. In this case, it is not the tree which is the real thing, rather, the something else which it references is the real thing.
This, you may recognize, is the usual viewpoint. Sometimes people will claim that the real tree references some abstract or ideal tree in God’s mind. Sometimes they will say it references God Himself. Either way, the touchable, physical tree in the front yard has been rendered meaningful, its value removed to another realm.
Wrong! wrong! wrong! says Ungod. “Evil! And nothing but evil!” she shouts!
She is here to tell you, for the sake of life and all that is wonderful and all that matters, that the tall woody thing in her front yard is meaningless.
Meaningless, meaningless, meaningless.
It has to be so.
If it is meaningful, then it is not the real thing. It is not what is valuable, something else has been given value instead.
Real things are always meaningless. Instead of referring to something else, they are themselves IT.
If you are meaningful, you have no value from yourself, but only from what you reference. You are nothing but a symbol, a word.
Which is the great lie of theism.
Theism says our whole world, life, laughter, love and all, is nothing but meaningful. It says that all value comes from God. That God is the real thing, and that earth and earth life is but a symbol of that, at best pointing to God.
Theism insists on moving value away from lovely earth to a non-physical so-called “spiritual” world—a place of God and angels and dead souls. In theism, this realm of death after life is believed to be what is ultimately real, and all the things of earth and cosmos are reduced to being merely meaningful, drawing what paltry meaning they can from what is euphemistically referred to as “after-life,” the unholy realm of God and angels and dead human beings.
Oh, the great betrayal of life that is theism!
Stark naked Ungod, let her nakedly come forth and show us how to value life instead of death, let her uncover before us a path to the wonderful laughter and love and livingness of being real things. We are beautiful body beings, all of us, in imperfect body-being ungod life.
Oh come forth, and step into the meaningless world of being valuable, of being value itself. Of being ungod life!
Naked Ungod herself is telling us so.
No wonder atheists worship her.
7) Body-being Ground-dancing Ungod-living [happens-if] [moves] [moves]
Translation: “To realize we are body beings is to realize life takes place here on earth and not elsewhere.”
Ungod is a body being. You are a body being. I am a body being—at least, last time I checked. A body being is the antipode of a spiritual being.
Ungod’s language may seem strange at first ear, but it is the strangeness of real things. Listen to Ungod strangeness.
She is telling you that a spiritual being is one whose final and only home is after life. (Ask any Christian, ask any theist, they will all admit it!) What they want, what they yearn for, what they worship is after life.
And “after life” means, well, come on! It means what follows upon death. The world of after-existence. The world of the dead. Theists say God lives in this realm of death, which is after-life or after-existence—and atheists agree entirely.
The difference, of course, is that theists insist that the realm of death (after-life, after-existence, call it what you will)—theists claim that it really does exist. That it is really some kind of place, spiritual and bodiless and yet somehow we’ll be ourselves and have spiritual bodies, though never having to eat or defecate or spit.
While atheists—lacking all practical common sense—conclude that death is actually death, and that after life is actually after life, and therefore not life at all.
And they conclude, most non-sensible of all, that having a body and being a body being is what it’s all about, and that without bodies, being feeling and doing anything would be exceedingly difficult, devoid of pleasure and satisfaction.
Oh those atheists! Where is their common sense?
Now, Ungod admits that it seems undesirable not to live forever. To lose our bodies and all their wonderful feelings and thoughts, to lose our loved ones, to see all our bodily pleasures and preferences come to an end—it does not seem desirable.
But Ungod’s point is that theists believe all these bodily things come to an end at death as surely as non-theists do.
The proof is in the ground. In the dead body itself.
It’s dead. We put it in the ground and years later, if we dig it up, it’s still there—partially decomposed, claimed by bacteria, molds, and bugs—but still dead.
The news is bad whether you are atheist or theist. Though of course theists try to disguise the bad news as good news. You were never really a body being at all—they chant.** You were a spiritual being, and the spiritual part continues to live—forever—in that realm of death called after life. Sitting smugly at God’s right hand (or was it left?).
The atheist, more accustomed to honesty, says “Yes, we die, and it’s a bummer. Death is final, for the body never recovers from the grave. And body beings that we are, when the body is lost veritably we are lost, our thoughts, our dreams, our hopes, our pleasures, our memories, our loving—all the wonderful aspects of body-being, lost when being a body is lost. Our very selves lost.”
Strangely, Ungod doesn’t cry.
Ungod chortles, and skips, and smiles.
Why?
Ungod knows a secret.
It’s written in the Rock.
8) Body-being Corpse Corpse [moves] [happens-not] [moves]
Translation: We never experience our own death, no matter how many come to the funeral.
Not that we don’t die, but that we never know we have died.
How can that be? Of course we know we die
Ungod, however, means “know” in the sense of experience. Body beings never experience their own death.
They experience the death of others, but not of themselves
Which means that, in our experience, we live forever. Not so, of course, in experience of others, but what do we care. That’s their experience, not ours. And we will experience their deaths, but they will not.
Experiencing, in other words, has a strange eternal quality
To the experiencer it never ends, this business of experiencing
And there it is: eternal life, right here on earth, in our bodies; we never needed heaven after all.
—Eltanin
FOOTNOTES:
* The concept of Ungod was born in a comment I made regarding a couple of posts by Kornform in an America Online forum.
Kornform, God & Ungod POSTED 4/22/94
Kornform: >>>There almost certainly are a lot of things beyond our knowledge actually existing, but we cannot talk about them beyond just speculating. One cannot say “there is X” without experiencing x with some sense perception. If x is beyond our knowledge then you obviously haven’t experienced it, thus cannot say it exists. This goes for gods.<<<
And:
Kornform: >>>Look, reality is out there and we discover it. We won’t know it unless we experience it by sense perception and analyze it by reason. There might be some realities which we will never be able to detect, in which case there’s little utility in discussing it.<<<
My comment:
Well said.
If God is defined as something which is not capable of being experienced, then that god is simply the unknowable. Unknowable whether it has consciousness, unknowable whether it is a being, unknowable whether there even is such a thing as the unknowable. This means that the only rational attitude concerning claims about any God who cannot be experienced is absolute skepticism.
Interestingly, there is a way to avoid this result of absolute skepticism concerning God. Absolute skepticism results because God is defined as not capable of being experienced. However, God can always simply be defined differently. It might be worthwhile to make a thought-experiment along these lines.
Thought-experiment:
Let us define God as the unknown, but not the unknowable. That is to say, let us define God as that which is detectable by sense experience, but which has not yet been detected. There are several important points to this definition of God: (1) God is a physical or empirical entity, thus God is knowable and can be proved to exist, (2) God is everything which we have not yet detected by sense experience, thus God is the unknown but knowable (doesn’t that sound religious or something?), (3) nothing we already experience and know is God, but it used to be God before we came to experience and know of it.
Thus, by this definition, God is physical; the scientist always seeks God; and God dies as soon as It is experienced and known.
An atheist will rightly object that to call this God leads to semantic confusion and amounts to dishonesty in public discussion. I concur, so instead of calling this definition “God”, I suggest we call it “Ungod”.
No one can deny that Ungod exists. Yet Ungod is entirely unknown. Once known, that bit of Ungod dies, or ceases to be Ungod, which is the same thing, I take it. (Thus Ungod dies all the time, so Ungod is that much better than Jesus, who only died once.)
My questions:
Can a rational religion be built around Ungod?
Is belief in Ungod theism or atheism?
What does it mean for theism if in order to define God in a way that is consistent and can be proved to exist, we must end up with a definition like Ungod?
By the way, we only know the existence of other beings by experiencing their behavior. Sense experiences inform us of that behavior, and thus satisfy for us the question of their existence. Note that thinking is a special case of experiencing. When we think thoughts or feel emotions, our thoughts and emotions are ours, not some other being’s. In this special case, we experience our own behavior firsthand—which proves our own existence, of course, but can never prove God or some other being’s existence. For it is our behavior and not God’s which we are experiencing when we think thoughts or feel emotions.
This seals the door on theism. Unless God is defined as detectable by sense experience in some way or another, the result must be absolute skepticism about claims concerning God, even the claim that God exists. In short, the rational theist must become an atheist. Or redefine God as something empirically detectable: i.e., as a physical entity.
Another way to look at this viewpoint. Every perception involves two elements: the behavior which is perceived, and the experience of perceiving it. Thus when I see Mary walking down the street, her behavior is what is perceived, and I, the perceiver, have an experience of perceiving her. Thus, experiences are always experiences of something, which is always some kind of behavior. Now, in the special cases, the behavior which is experienced lies not outside, but inside. When we think or when we feel, the experience we have is of our own internal behavior.
This is why I draw the very important conclusion above: when we experience things outside of ourselves, what we experience is outside behavior, which in turns proves the existence of something. It is quite valid to have faith in our sense experiences for this reason. But when we feel or think, the behavior which we experience is our own feeling or thinking processes. These in turn prove our own existence (as if that were necessary!) but cannot of course prove the existence of anything outside us. To say that the source of the behavior we witness when we feel or think is God, or something external to us, is simply to mistake our own internal behavior and experiencing for something alien: it is a category mistake.
** Ok, some theists fib and claim those of us who are saved will have our bodies in heaven—but when you read the fine print you discover that almost all the wonderful things we love to do as bodies (eat, sleep, have sex, etc.) are forbidden. Even the ground to stand on is taken away, replaced with insubstantial clouds. No matter how you slice it, you only get to be a “spiritual” being in heaven—not a body being. And that removes all the fun.
