Within the next 50 years, I expect the development of direct neural links, making the data that’s available at our fingertips today available at our synapses in the future, and making virtual reality actually feel more real than traditional sensory perception. Information and experience could be exchanged between our brains and the network without any conscious action. And at some point, knowledge may be so external, all knowledge and experience will be shared universally, and the only notion of an “individual” will be a particular focus — a point in the vast network that concerns itself only with a specific subset of the information available.

On the one hand, this sounds like some sort of technically-enabled Buddhist ideal, a sea of undifferentiated souls disappearing into nirvana, the end of individual consciousness, everyone entirely at peace with themselves and with the universe.

On the other hand, every fucking word of it terrifies me. The ubiquitous internet all-mind feels like a new kind of dystopia.

It is a little-known fact that Ralph Iscariot, brother of Judas, has three books of the Bible devoted to his extraordinary life: collectively, they are known as The Gospel of Ralph. Recently unearthed in a tiny cave near the sea of Galilee, these books document, in almost no useful detail at all, the period in which Jesus — and Ralph — lived, and died, and lived again.

Ralph was a mule tamer who learned about Jesus late in life, and spent the remainder of his days trying to track him down. He was perhaps not the most intelligent of Christ’s prospective disciples, however, as this representative verse, from First Ralph, Chapter 5, Verse 12, amply demonstrates:

Ralph came, in the fullness of time, to a fork in the road. And he stood uncertainly in this place, weighing his options, swinging his head from side to side, until the moon had risen and fallen seven times; and Ralph was weak with hunger. And then, on the seventh day, he collapsed, and then died.

This is the last we see of Ralph in the First Book of Ralph. Indeed, it is the last of the First Book of Ralph, which ends rather abruptly after his death.

II: The Second Gospel

One wonders, then, given Ralph’s death, why a Second Book of Ralph would be necessary. The easy answer — given that the book contains no actual words — is that it wasn’t necessary, but there’s no quicker way to annoy a Ralph exegisist than to point out the fact that the thirty pages of Second Ralph are actually blank. This will lead inevitably to a heated lecture on meaningful silences and the invisible semantic nuance of negative space and the Ineffable Beauty of Unbeing, and so on. When confronted with a Second Ralpher, it is always prudent to smile, exclaim politely over the empty page he will inevitably shove into your face, and then walk quickly away, not looking back.

III: The Third Gospel

Ralph makes a triumphant return in Third Ralph — resurrected, the gospel is at pains to point out, on a Tuesday.

… being the day on which all true Martyrs return from the dead. Unlike Wednesdays, when only False Martyrs, like a certain unshaven Bethlehemite, who we shall not name, was purportedly, but almost certainly not, reborn.

Ralph goes on to give what is essentially a critique of the rest of the Bible. It wasn’t a flood, he says: it was a few days of rain, blown out of proportion by crazy old man Noah — a senile aquaphobe who fled to the rowboat he kept in his backyard every time the air got a bit dewy, an enraged cat under each arm.

Leviticus: not a tribe of priests, but a cranky old tax-collector who sentenced everything that annoyed him to death — the yappy little schnauzer from nextdoor, men with excessively oiled mustaches, the weather, the color pink — and, finally himself, for being mean and intolerant and alone (the only death sentence he ever carried out, incidentally).

Sodom and Gomorra: nice little hamlets where you could buy a little weed and pick up a naughty scroll in one of many back-alley shacks. Peter: a smelly old madman. Lot: a failed writer who carved a misshapen, rudely curvaceous salt statue on his front lawn and told everyone it was his wife, punished for not doing “God’s” bidding (his wife had walked out on him many years before).

And so on, gossipy calumny in the bitter tones of a disappointed old man.

Until the middle of the book, where the tone abruptly changes, and it becomes clear that Ralph is writing from his second deathbed, wracked by some unnamed pain. There’s a sudden silence in the narrative, a kind of calm, and then this:

I saw him many years ago, in the market, buying chickens, in that calm, gentle way if his. It was as if he stood in the eye of the din that raged about him, extracting goodwill from cynical hardbitten merchants.

I stalked across the market and planted myself in front of him. “Where the hell,” I said, “have you been?”

He gave me that slow almost-smile, that infuriating not-quite-smile, and said “I’ve missed you, Ralph.”

“You aren’t who you say you are,” I said.

“Of course not. I’m who you say I am.”

“Yeah? Well I say you’re a fake an a liar.”

He inclined his head, just slightly, but did not otherwise respond.

“My brother thought you were a savior, and then he thought you were a traitor. The Romans thought you were a rebel. The Pharisees thought you were a usurper. All these idiots” — I waved my arms wildly, taking in the whole market — “think you’re a god.”

“I am all these things, and more,” he said.

I had a lot more to say, I wanted to scream my loneliness at him, the bitter and bereft years, the long dark passage into cynicism and despair. But I didn’t have the breath for it. I stood and stared at this long-dead man, and said nothing.

“What do you want me to be, Ralph?” he said, at last.

Dead, I thought. Groveling. Contrite. Unmasked.

“My friend,” I said.

“Then that is what I am,” he said. “Always and forever. Your friend.”

He took my hand, then.

I have been unhappy, on occasion, since that day. I have been angry and bitter and afraid. I have been vicious and unjust. But less and less, as time goes on. The despair that cloaks me is not gone, by any means, but it has become diaphanous, so that I can see the world through it. And that is a comfort.

There follows a long passage on “Crazy John the Apostle”, and the meth-infused joyride through Canaan that produced The Book of Revelations (which Ralph calls Fear and Loathing in Jerusalem), and then a sort of faux-Socratic dialog between Ralph and the pitcher of water on his bedside, on the subject of the rejected 11th commandment (Ralph: A commandment against farting? Seriously? Pitcher of Water: Look, you try wandering the desert for forty years with a bunch of tooting Israelites. I’d make commandments up too.).

The Gospel ends, abruptly, in mid-sentence, which has led a small contingent of Third Ralphers to claim that it is the only part of the Bible — and perhaps the only written document in existence — in which we can witness, first-hand, the death of its author. Others maintain that he simply lost interest. Most believe that the rest of the gospel was lost, and that there are many other Books of Ralph out there, somewhere, awaiting discovery.

If, on the other hand, you’re looking for documents that carefully, surgically, and systematically gut the moral corpus of an entire society, then you’re not only in the right place, you’ve hit the motherload. You’ll find this:

Several of the techniques used by the CIA may involve a degree of physical pain, as we have previously noted, including facial and abdominal slaps, walling, stress positions and water dousing. Nevertheless, none of these techniques would cause anything approaching severe physical pain …

And this:

To violate the statute, an individual must have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering. Because specific intent is an element of the offense, the absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture. … We have further found that if a defendant acts with the good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering, he has not acted with specific intent.

And, this:

As we explained in the Section 2340A Memorandum, “pain and suffering” as used in Section 2340 is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of “pain” as distinguished from “suffering”… The waterboard, which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, does not, in our view inflict “severe pain or suffering”. Even if one were to parse the statute more finely to treat “suffering” as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.

Now, it seems to me self-evident that, once you’re in the business of carefully parsing the word “pain”, once you’re cheerfully debating the atomicity of the phrase “pain and suffering”, then you’ve entered a dark and scary place. And if, furthermore, you happen to be sitting in the justice department while you’re doing this, and your mad ravings not only have the force of law, but will in fact be put into practice as soon as your leather-winged emissaries can beat a path to whichever fetid torture chamber your opinions were expressly written to justify, then the whole country is in a dark and scary place.

To be clear: what’s frightening about this whole thing is not that these people legalized torture — it’s that they changed the definition of torture so that they wouldn’t have to bother. You don’t need congressional approval to eviscerate words, or to stuff their hollow carcasses with your own twisted, self-serving perversions. What you need, apparently, is faceless lawyers in dark subterranean cubicles scratching out poorly-argued legal opinions on preordained decisions. What you need, most crucially, is moral vacuities with their hands on the level of power, people willing to subvert goodness and decency in the name of — what? Security? Paranoia? Power? Probably all those things, and a lot more. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that one of the core assumptions of our democracy — that you can codify morality in law, and place those laws in the stewardship of human beings — is now null and void. If you control the language that underlies those laws, and are willing to subvert that language, all bets are off.

So who owns morality? The obvious answer here is religion — but religion is, if anything, a worse steward than the law, precisely because morality is kind of the point of religion, and because it has so routinely failed us. I’ve seen arguments that the Old Testament contains some of the earliest moral arguments in human history, and I suppose that’s true. Commandments five through ten are still good, solid advice: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t cheat on your wife, honor your parents, don’t covet your neighbor’s stuff. However — the prime real estate in that list of to-don’ts, its first four items, are devoted to the proposition that God will absolutely kick your ass if you worship other gods, or make statues, or say His name in any context other than base supplication, or work when He doesn’t want you to work. The Ten Commandments are half moral treatise, half naked power grab.

Which is, in microcosm, the problem with all religions. They start with the premise that you are here to please your creator, and all the other stuff — all the good works — are ancillary considerations. It’s a key tenet of Christian theology that being a good person will not get you into heaven: only believing in Jesus Christ — which is to say, getting down on your knees and subjugating yourself to His will — will do that. You can spend your life feeding orphans and pulling children out of burning buildings and donating organs to strangers, but if you happen to believe in Buddha you’re going straight to hell. And you know what they think of orphan-feeders down there.

Say it another way: the problem with religion, organized religion, is that it’s just another power structure, a pyramid of oppression with some god at its apex. Except it’s not really god up there, it’s whichever obese corrupt sanctimonious cleric has declared himself the voice of god.

I don’t think, for example, that anyone outside the Bush Administration would argue that the Catholic church’s sordid history of holy excruciations were shining example of Christian morality — were anything but the opposite of moral. We don’t have anything Inquisitional in the current state of Christianity in this country, of course, but examples of Inquisitional thinking, small and large, abound: whether it’s televangelists blaming gay people for hurricanes, or political parties using outdated religious mores to browbeat the devout into submission, or befuddled born-again presidents signing off on torture.

Having said all that: I find myself, against all odds, going to church on a pretty regular basis, and listening, every week, to a couple of hours of demoralizing cant about my flyspeck irrelevance in the face of the sacrifice that Jesus made for us 2000 years ago. I’ve been doing to this for several years now, and I must say I find it all no more convincing now than I did when I started.

But — if I grit my teeth, and ignore the fables and the dogma, I find it extremely pleasant to be surrounded, every Sunday, by a group of people who genuinely care about each other, and spend large portions of their lives doing stuff for other people with no expectation of getting anything back for it: they go on missions trips, and work at soup kitchens, they do community cleanup for no other reason that they think it’s right. And the pastors, for all their afactual pronouncements on the nature of life, the universe, and everything, are devoted, caring people, who preach without pretense or sanctimony. They’re honest-to-God role models, and I like and admire them immensely.

I don’t want to romanticize this. Churches, in the abstract, aren’t morality mills, by any means: a Pew study found that 54% of churchgoers think that torture is a right and proper way to treat your enemies. Some of that comes from the unfortunate linkage of fundamentalism with the current malign strain of Republicanism, some of it from the evil genocidal stuff in the first couple of chapters of the Bible. And you certainly find lots of this kind of selflessness outside of churches and mosques and synagogues. But I’m starting to believe that, if you could strip away all the oppressive cruft and focus exclusively on the core message of the more enlightened religions — peace, love, empathy, etc — we wouldn’t need any laws, civil or religious, to legislate right behavior.

Because somewhere between our innate savagery and the outer, societal savagery with which we’re daily besieged, there’s a diaphanous skein of moral fabric that whispers the truth. More often that not, it’s drowned out by the clangor of our own worst instincts, or by the vile prattlings of the snake-oil salesmen whose primary charter is to subvert our built-in knowledge of right and wrong. It’s there, though. I didn’t used to believe it was. But, these days, I do.

There’s a book by CS Lewis, called Mere Christianity, that starts out with one of the loveliest expressions of this core idea I’ve ever seen:

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used be called the law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the “laws of nature” we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong the “Law of Nature”, they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law — with the great difference that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature, or to disobey it …

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

Lewis goes on to ascribe this Moral Law to Heaven, of course, but I’m willing to bet that plain old run-of-the-mill human beings started it all. I don’t know why our species would choose to invent something as toxic to its natural savagery as morality, but there’s probably a good reason for it — evolution has little patience for the unnecessary or the vestigial.

I realize that this is all just a bunch of handwaving: another kind of faith. But, again, I’d choose terrestrial handwaving over supernatural handwaving any day of the week. The problem with attributing our morality to an Infallible Omnipotent is pretty obvious: it doesn’t work. Something as creakily defective as our moral sensibilities clearly aren’t the work of an Intelligent Designer: they feel like the work of a Bumbling, Inept, Compromised, Conflicted, Occasionally Good-Hearted Designer. Which is to say: us.

But wherever morality comes from, the fact remains: even the best moral instruction isn’t actually teaching us anything. It’s unlocking things we already know.

So where does that leave us? In a not-very-good-place, I think. Morality is, first and foremost, a very personal thing, and second — if you’re very lucky — an intimately shared experience, one person to another, community to community. A kid helping a blind man across the street. A mosque sponsoring a poor child in a country thousands of miles away. An engineer giving up a six figure salary to teach in a low-income district. Morality is a lovely and fragile thing, a butterfly flitting through the landscape of the apocalypse, and when you see it in its purest form, it’s beautiful, and devastating.

But as soon as you try to scale up to the institutional level, it disappears: evanescing off the hide of the Beast like mist. It’s not that corporations, governments, and religions aren’t moral entities: it’s that they cannot be moral entities¹. Morality is a personal affair, and large institutions are apersonal: they’re controlled mobs, basically, both more and less than the sum of their parts. Sure, these giant entities sometimes make gestures toward the moral: but the gestures are always hollow, hedged, and easily compromised.

Which makes things difficult. Every aspect of our lives is controlled, in one way or another, by these institutions, and there’s little hope that they’ll ever govern according to moral principles. It feels like the only thing we can do is what we have been doing: muddle through, keeping an eye on the leviathans, and relying on people who are willing to slingshot their moral sensibilities at the bad guys until they stagger, and fall. Then gird ourselves for the next onslaught.

Maybe there’s another way. Maybe one day we’ll evolve a species of morality that’s better able to withstand the annihilating pressure of the institutional collective; maybe we’ll find a way to govern from the base of the pyramid, and filter our innate sense of right and wrong up to its apex. I’m not optimistic. But as long as this thing is inside of us, I’m hopeful.

But it is one thing to disbelieve in God; it is quite another to never feel a twinge of doubt about one’s own disbelief. And just as the Christian who has never entertained doubts about his faith probably hasn’t thought hard enough about the matter, the atheist who perceives the Christian God and the flying spaghetti monster as equally ridiculous hypotheses really needs to get out more often.

Look, Ross is clearly a much smarter guy than me, and he generally argues his points quite eloquently. But this is just silly. There are, in purely evidentiary terms, no differences between the Christian god and the Flying Spaghetti Monster — or Scientology’s Xenu for that matter, or Plato’s Forms, or Conan’s Crom. They’re all equally unprovable.

What is indisputable, I think — and Ross alludes to this in his post — is that the human race has a generalized tendency to confuse the unknown with the ineffable; to fill the gaps in our knowledge with gods who don’t so much explain things as render the need for explanation moot. This tendency manifests as the Christian god, yes, but also as the Muslim god, a host of Hindu gods, etc. All of whom can be beautiful outgrowths of human need, creativity and love (when they’re not telling their subjects to slaughter everyone who isn’t like them, of course). But they’re not based on facts.

Atheists who refuse to acknowledge their own vast gulf of ignorance should be mocked and derided, of course. But atheists who refuse to consider a god in their quest for understanding are just acting like post-enlightenment human beings confronted with a pervasive lack of evidence.

Which is not to say that the Christian god (or any of the other ones) are pointless exercises in mass delusion. I have seen gods give solace to people who believe fervently in their existence — and that makes them very different, and infinitely more worthy, than creatures made out of pure snark, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

But it does not make them more credible. It just doesn’t.

At first blush, it’s a fair charge. Atheists, by and large, emphasize rationality, materialism, and logic in their arguments against religion, so they’re open to these kinds of attacks in ways that people who base their arguments on faith are not. You want to be rational about it? Then follow your argument all the way to its logical conclusion. If you must argue for a world without absolutes, then you have to live by its rules.

But it’s a soufflé argument — beguiling and delicious on the outside, hollow on the inside. Because, yes: if you posit an infinite universe that is by definition full of infinite possibilities, then it’s possible that all of it is the work of an ineffable Master Planner. But, by the same token, you could make the claim that, somewhere out there, fluttering aimlessly about in the vast soup of the possible, there exists a butterfly that craps tacos. Because we’re all just physical manifestations of data encoded in genes, aren’t we? And genes are just molecules, and molecules are just atoms, and atoms are always buzzing around doing weird quantum mechanicaly things. So it could happen.

But probably not, right? For one thing, it’s pretty unlikely. If you could plot the likelihood of the existence of taco-crapping butterflies on a probability graph, I imagine they’d be several billion times less likely than, say, being struck twice by lightning while you’re running from a meteor strike behind an honest politician. For another thing, there’s no evidence to support it. If there was some empirical data involved — fields of tacos appearing in the middle of a butterfly preserve, for instance — then the notion might be worth considering. But there’s none of that. Tacos come from Mexican restaurants. You might be able to construct a pretty plausible argument that Taco Bell craps its tacos, but that’s probably as far as you could go.

I don’t mean to draw parallels between gods and insects that excrete tortillas. All I’m saying is that it doesn’t make any sense to tell people they can’t make absolute statements because anything is possible. It’s permissible, and even necessary, to make bold, absolutist claims in the face of the infinite, if you have actual facts to support them.

So if a group of people says that there is no god, and points to the vast lack of evidence for their existence, and then points to the errors and internal contradictions of pretty much every holy book that makes claims on the material world, and then points to the growing body of science that is busily explaining all the miraculous things that were once the sole purview of scripture — then I think they can safely call themselves atheists without having to worry that the claim invalidates itself.

But the column is really about Steve Jobs, of course, his mind and his methods, as all such columns must be:

Steve Jobs believes the key to his success is in finding, hiring, retaining, then firing the best talent in the world. He would maintain in the very moment he’s firing Fadell that Tony is better at his job than anyone else on Earth. Yet still Fadell must go and that’s because – ego issues aside – Jobs had to make room in his inner circle for Papermaster.

Everyone close to Jobs is under continual analysis: is this person really (or still) the best in the world? If they aren’t, or if someone else is just as good but more important for some additional reason, then the incumbent has to go. Steve Jobs ultimately betrays all of his direct reports in this manner. It’s just the way he is. And if it costs Apple a few million to remove one extra head from the room, well that’s okay with a board that KNOWS (as we all do, to put it fairly) that Jobs really is the secret of Apple’s success. His system may be brutal, but it works.

There’s a reason why I call Lord Jobs Lord Jobs. It’s not just my helpless, quasi-spiritual devotion to the stuff he makes, and to the aesthetic that informs it; it’s also because, in many ways, he’s as temperamental, maddening, inspiring, contradictory, bullheaded, and ultimately indomitable as any god you’re likely to encounter.

Mostly when people go to temples to worship their gods, they focus — to their great credit — on the positive: all the reanimated corpses and entreaties for the poor and wine/water transmogrifications and drowned centurions. But, really, the holy books they’re reading from are mostly about power, and the horrible things that will happen to you if you fuck with that power. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, and — if you’ve really pissed Him off — He planteth a foot in your ass and sends you tumbling down to your eternal punishment.

I’m sure Lord Jobs is a very nice person when he’s not plotting world domination from his seat in Cupertino. And I’m equally sure he’d balk at actually sending people to hell. But he will crush you utterly if you get in his way, and not really think twice about it. There is Lord Jobs, there is the goal of Lord Jobs, and there is the straight line of scorched earth between the two. Nothing else.

I mailed my iPhone out to a company in Kansas for repair yesterday, because it won’t sync with my computer anymore. What I should have done is take it to the Apple Store and get a free replacement, but I can’t do that because my phone is unlocked. My phone is unlocked for very good reasons. Nevertheless: Lord Jobs has decreed that filth like me, who stray from the Divine Path, will not share in any of its blessings. Even if I paid full price for those blessings. Even if those blessings aren’t blessings at all, actually, but contractual obligations. No matter. I am a heretic, and as a heretic my presence in an Apple Store is frowned upon, and my entreaties mocked and reviled.

And so I’ve been shaking my tiny fist in the general direction of Cupertino ever since my lovely phone gave up the ghost. But it’s a lackluster, good-natured fist shaking — and when, Jobs-willing, I exchange many hard-earned dollars for a working iPhone, I will go back to using it — and loving it — slavishly. And worshiping dyspeptically, reluctantly, tiny-fist-shakingly, at the feet of its creator.

Such is the power of the Lord.

All hail Lord Jobs. Damn it.

Update: Gruber corroborates Cringley’s basic point, but cast aspersions on most of his interpretations.

Try to imagine Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing to a song of infinite length. Their technique would remain as dazzling as the talent of the resurrected Lou Gehrig, and it is just as tempting to fantasize about them dancing forever as it is to imagine him playing his last game one more inning, and then another…but what was most valuable in their art, as in his play, would then be lost. Without a sense of the end, and thus of the shape of their movements, the beauty and drama they achieved in finite time would become the infinite and thus meaningless repetition of technique; or, if eternity be imagined as all moments gathered together, this finite beauty and drama would become the absurdity of every move executed at once, and so on for every activity we know. Life itself, as the activity of activities, requires the finitude imposed on it ultimately by death to preserve its meaning.

… but I don’t buy it. I think that Mr Miller is trying to make the best of a bad situation, and I applaud him for it. And there is a certain gravity that attends the preoccupations of the doomed. But, seriously, if we could find a way to cheat death, I’m sure we could find a way to introduce meaning into our absurdly elongated lives.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

But things can be massaged into a state of obscured complexity — which is to say, perceived simplicity — by good abstractions. These days, if you want to establish a connection to a server somewhere, you don’t have to know anything about the details of TCP/IP, or packets, or networks. You just say connect and — poof! — magic happens.

Which brings me, oddly enough, to God. Or gods. There was a time when gods were stand-ins for the bewildering complexity of the world we live in. When the giant yellow ball in the sky disappeared for several terrifying seconds in the middle of the day, or mountains exploded and smothered entire countries in ash, or oceans rose up and drowned continents — it was a lot easier to abstract all of that stuff away behind a vaguely ubiquitous and all-powerful god than speculate on the actual mechanisms that caused it. Or even know that those mechanisms exist.

Before monotheism cornered the market on faith, the relationship between things we didn’t understand and the gods we worshiped were pleasantly direct. You had gods of oceans, gods of war, gods of beauty, storms, death, fertility, etc. So — if the river didn’t swell at the appointed time and your crops withered, you didn’t have to worry much about the mechanics of that cataclysm. You had a god to blame, or curse, or beseech.

And — far more importantly — you didn’t have to face the pitiless amorality of a world that lets things like that happen. When that ancient ruined farmer asked why the river decided to lie fallow a year, I’m pretty sure it would have been easier for him to believe that he’d displeased the river god Hapi. because the alternative is that it happened for no reason at all. The notion of existential meaninglessness is far more terrifying than the anger of invented gods. Gods have intelligence, and will. If they’re good, they can be appeased. If they’re bad, they can be opposed. Either way, you can do something about it. We’re just not equipped to deal with the notion of a giant void of intent at the core of the universe — this well of uncaring absence that we live in isn’t something we can fight, much less defeat. There’s nothing to fight. It’s like declaring war on rain. What good can it possibly do?

Anyway — eventually, the welter of targeted, domain-specific gods (shallow abstractions, all) collapsed into a series of one true gods. And then those monolithic gods began to experience their own, internal contractions, as the puny hu-mans they oversaw began to figure out the whats of their world. We don’t need a god to explain eclipses anymore. We know what makes the ground shake, and we understand that bolts of lightning are massive discharges of static electricity, not divine javelins. Religion is fighting desperately against this encroachment of rational thought into its domain, but it’s a losing battle.

Gods are still relevant, though, and probably always will be, because science and rational thought can’t really help with the why. Why does disease devour so many people every year? Why are there so many homeless children? Why do people starve? Why are there wars? Why do we die?

God answers those questions. Or rather, he doesn’t answer them, he abstracts them away. We aren’t meant to understand all of these horrors as individual, random, disconnected events, he tells us. It’s all part of a plan — a plan that isn’t disclosed to us, that will never be disclosed to us, and that we couldn’t possibly understand even it even if it was. We don’t have to understand it. When our fathers die, and we ask for a reason, god says because I wish it to be so. There’s no need to ask the next logical question, because we’ve left the realm of logic. We’ve entered the divine.

So I guess the analogy I started all this out with is kind of crappy. Divine abstractions aren’t like programming abstractions at all: they’re meant to conceal the things we don’t know, not simplify the thing we do. We needed Helios not because we didn’t want to think about the chemistry of the sun, but because we couldn’t. By the same token, we need a God to tell us that our lives have purpose and meaning not because we don’t want to go to the trouble of finding it ourselves, but because there’s nothing to find. No purpose. No point. No meaning.

Which is to say: the delicate scaffolding of meaning is something we have to invent, and erect, and maintain. And we often to do it through the medium of an omnipotent, all-seeing, inscrutable, irascible god. God may smite us every so often. He may give devils free reign, burden us with laws that contradict our deepest desires, inflict disease and sorrow and death. But he’s there, an oasis of intent in the center of a dark, uncaring void. And he has a plan.

Nothing to fear in God. Nothing to feel in death. Good can be attained. Evil can be endured.

Save me, protect me, God, in this day of wrath.