oh mal 2

Now, a corollary of your obsession with the ideal is an indifference to and a devaluing of the real. One of your great heroes, it seems, is Pascal, whom you value not for his human achievements, which mean nothing to you (indeed you’re way too idealism-obsessed to be equipped to evaluate the real achievements – scientific, political, philosophical or humanitarian – of any of your earth-bound contemporaries or predecessors, which is why it’s so easy for you to sneer at and belittle those achievements), but for his apparent rejection of his own earthly activities for the sake of the next world.

In answer to the question ‘Is there a God’, you say that God simply is the oneness of the universe, which ‘indubitably exists’ and which ‘cannot die’. You then speak of the reverence that is thus owed to every particle of the universe. It’s a view of god that seems on the surface of it, unobjectionable, though of course there’s no reason to revere this immanent god, or to put it another way, since your god just is the oneness of the universe, there’s no need to call it God – you could just as well call it ‘the oneness of the universe’ or ‘the interconnectedness of all things’, and reverencing every interconnected part would be rather time-consuming, and even counter-productive – for to revere everything might just be to revere nothing. You use this argument, it seems, to denounce abortion, and yet you seem to have no trouble dismissing homosexuality as a perversion. Not a very reverential attitude. Your reverence for everything seems to call for abstinence, and it seems to me that you vaguely associate homosexuality with a lack of abstinence, even with some kind of terrible indulgence, making it therefore evil. Do you also argue that we should revere all living things as coming from God, and advocate vegetarianism, or better still abstinence from all forms of eating as destructive of that which was created by god? Oh but now I’m assuming a transcendent god, whereas your conception is of an immanent one. Tricky stuff, trying to make sense of all this, much easier to admit it’s all guff, in spite of the radiance you write of. Funny you don’t mention the infinite varieties of shit that also come from god or in fact are god, but they can’t be so easily incorporated into poetic yearnings I suppose.

I think there’s an obvious confusion in your head between an immanent god, which just is and has no power, and an overarching transcendent one who punishes the indulgent and the insufficiently reverent (both gods are of course products of your imagination, but the transcendent one, yourself writ large, is surely your fave, as it is everyone’s, for a god without overarching power just isn’t any fun). After all you ‘converted’ to the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, as power-obsessed and hierarchical an organisation as has ever existed in western civilisation, an organisation wholly committed to a power-wielding transcendent god, so there’s surely something suss about your gentle pantheistic claims.