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alice2Philosophy, existentialism, quantum mechanics, these things are all great fun. What’s not to love about a riddle, a paradox, a conundrum? They’re like brain teasers, puzzles waiting to be solved.  However,  it never ceases to amaze me how me can always reason our way into a great deal of trouble. Human beings can rationalize anything and quite cleverly, too. Of course, we’re often wrong, but that’s a whole other story.

Following one such discussion about the nature of ourselves and the existence of God  got rather amusing. It was decided that there is no “us,” that the ego was simply a figment of our own imagination, something we dreamed up or evolved into to help us compensate for our rather dreary and nihilistic existence. The problem there being, “who” is actually doing the dreaming? If there is no self then there can be no self to dream up one’s self.

Once again in the process of attempting to disprove the existence of God we’ve simply gone and disproved the existence of ourselves. It’s hard to imagine this conversation continuing at all, since we’ve just managed to prove we don’t even exist, but that’s a conundrum for another time.

Morality however, rears it’s ugly head. What is morality? It’s not all just learned behavior, people seem to have an innate sense of morality that must come from somewhere, our higher selves perhaps? The alternative would suggest that we are just biological units, with no ego or self, which then leads one to conclude that we are incapable of morality of any sort. So higher selves it is.

rabbitThe next explanation for our existence, for our alleged higher selves, was the collective unconscious of humankind, which made me laugh because I thought of holiday shoppers glued to their i-phones, mindlessly marching along behind the herd. The collective unconscious! It was soon decided that the collective unconscious was actually the collective consciousness, a very intelligent entity that gathered all the human data in a centralized location of the great beyond, a bit like the NSA or perhaps even like…..God Himself. The problem being, this was supposed to be an argument against the existence of God and so far all we’ve managed to do is disprove our own existence. So at this point, we’ve all ceased to exist, but the idea of God is starting to come to fruition.

Clearly we are becoming a bit confused here, eating our own tails so to speak, because while our non existent selves are struggling to dream ourselves and God into existence, it occurs to someone to ask, “So who made the dreamers?”

Now don’t be fooled by the obvious logic behind this question, it’s bad form to be too reasonable in a forum on reason. When this happens, it is necessary to simply shoot the messenger and restore order.

With the click of a mouse, he now ceases to exist, and everyone else gets back to the business of contemplating their own non existence.

The mental gymnastics people are willing to contort themselves into to either deny or disprove the existence of God are rather impressive to watch. I call it the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. What always baffles me however, is that it never occurs to anyone to ask why? Why is it so important to you to try and reason God away? Where is the pay off there, what is the benefit, what motivates you? That’s where the answer to the riddle lies.

alices adventures