My idea of God comes from St. Anselm: God is the highest thought that can be thought.

If there is a God, and he lives up to all of our expectations of him, (and he must, or else he is not God), then he would not be so petty as to become furiously angry and result to violent retribution during those occasions in which we, equipped with our limited mental capabilities, accidentally or purposefully call him names he doesn’t like.

Blasphemy, then, can never really be what it is generally considered to be: a personal insult or attack on God, (and a very very bad thing), because God cannot be proud and stubborn enough, and have his feelings so easily hurt, as to warrant all of the fuss made over it.

In my view, blasphemy is actually the practice of speaking out against dated religious customs and clearing the way for fuller appreciations of truth. It is dangerous only if there is just one path to salvation, as many religious traditions hold, but luckily this theory is easily dismissed. There are many religions, and there always have been. Never has one religion reached more than a fraction of the human race, and religions are uniformly limited to social and geographical regions. If any of them really is the only path to salvation, then God’s saving grace is limited to a small, predetermined number people and God himself is an unjust bigot; which contradicts the traditional attributes associated with Him.

At one time, all of the current world religions were new, blasphemous ideas, whose followers were sought out and persecuted for stirring up trouble; which demonstrates that every spiritual idea can be blasphemous, even if it later becomes The Truth. Jesus was often called a blasphemer, as were most other prophets and spiritual leaders.

Blasphemy is a scary thing to many people because most religions begin from a fear that they will be exposed. Every new spiritual tradition is born out of an older religious tradition, and automatically generates a great deal of opposition. To overcome criticism, the resulting theology must include certain safeguards, guaranteeing the new faith as the prime vehicle for Wisdom. The safeguards include statements like, “This is the Truth, and if you don’t believe it, you will suffer, in the worst ways I can imagine, for ever and ever.”

It must be understood that a God who punishes based on religious preference is the enemy of all noble qualities of mankind. Goodness, Truth, Justice and Kindness flee from this God. The search for wisdom, perfection and self-actualization are too dangerous to consider. This God is also the enemy of every great thinker, and had those gifted few been more wary of divine retribution, humanity as a whole would still be walking around picking berries.

My writing, and painting, is about searching for a better god. If a particular god – say the god of the Christians, Jews or Muslims, offends our sense or reason or morality, by definition that god is too limited to be real. My dismissal of concepts of God is not atheistic or anti-religious, because it is only my respect and belief in the inherent perfection of God (as an ideal) that leads me to refuse these limited human conceptions.

The point is that Blasphemy is not an attack on God. It is the quest for an improved God, and the sacred duty of the spiritually eager.

I feel like I know a lot about how the world works, am I happier? Healthier? More successful? No. Am I kinder, more helpful? No. So what am I arguing for? Why am I – increasingly, ANGRY. Is the anger part of my passion? People say they want passion in their work. Scholars say they want passion in their research – well, I’ve got it. Bigtime. I have a chip on my shoulder. I’m ready to CUT down, destroy, kill all the postmodernists, starting with Derrida, ending with Lyotard. That will be my Thesis, My announcement. After that I’ll just write clever essays, get a nice university job at a beautiful campus, and live.

Want to be a poet:

I want to write poetry. Not because, I like it, so much as, it seems a difficult and novel task, that many great men, with whom I find I have much in common, attempted. Also relevant is the fact that nobody reads poetry any more, it is not in fashion. Thus I can write freely without concern of it being good, or measuring up, or even of being ever read by any individual other than myself. For who reads poetry? Especially in days were everyone, everyone and their neighbor’s daughter’s cousin’s playmates is a poet.

On misdirection:

The audience is not participating, they are not really aware of what is happening, the magician (writer, artist) is ahead of them at every step, anticipating, planting false trap doors, false clues. He leads them, he manipulates them, he LIES to them: and they LOVE him for it. If he showed the trick, if he just told the story, without the flair, and pomp, and misdirection, and fancy language, and flashing lights and beautiful girls, nobody would read it. Moby Dick would just be a tiny notebook entry: “saw a white whale today, but couldn’t kill it.”

On Ethics:

Only intelligence can willfully and purposely intend to be moral. Unintelligence will first choose to be moral, but without at all recognizing how to be moral. They will miss the specific necessities each situation merits and ignore the repercussions and consequences of action, both to self and others, and by choosing, “goodness” and the “right” action, may make themselves self-pitiful, envious, angry and violent, as well as smug, superior and scathingly judgmental. One large correct moral choice may result in years or a lifetime of small dark sins, bred through a bitter heart of perceived injustice.

Culture of Access:

Culture of access: First you have to have something, some idea, then you have to name it something unusual, so everybody knows it’s YOURS and yours only and if they use it you can sue them, then you can CHARGE for it! The Culture of Access has its ROOTS in religion. God is the one thing that men have consistently sold access to. Not God, benefits. What benefits? Prosperity, success, prayer, not to mention eternal life. Selling your soul for fun and profit. Selling Your Soul for Fun and Profit.

I continue my day, and notice how my eyes are drawn to the breasts and bottom of every girl of some attractiveness. In my defense: women are beautiful, and it is no insult to call them so. Men often seek out beauty in a solitary walk through nature, in the pleasant surroundings, the touch and color of the bright furniture in a sushi bar, music, food, and the littlest pleasures of our physical senses. By small appreciations of this manner we are able to stir the spaciousness of our soul into a deeper connection with our own journey. It is the primary role of the artist, in fact, to capture and preserve these tiny moments, frame them and place them in the public eye precisely so that the public has easy access to beauty when they recognize the need for it. Hawthorne says of Zenobia in the Blithedale Romance, “Zenobia was truly a magnificient woman. The homely simplicity of her dress could not conceal, nor scarcely diminish, the queenliness of her presence. The image of her form and face should have been multiplied all over the earth. It was wronging the rest of mankind to retain her as  the spectacle of only a few. The stage would have been her proper sphere. She should have made it a point of duty, moreover, to sit endlessly to painters and sculptors, and preferrably the latter; because the cold decorum of the marble would consist with the utmost scantiness of drapery, so that the eye might chastely be gladdened with her material perfection in its entireness.”

Why should we have to wait for an artist to first copy that perfection (without clothes, I cannot help but agree with Hawthorne in this respect) before we appreciate it? Most young women have a glimpse of Zenobia in them, and most people fail to notice any but the exceptionally beautiful. If I find in a blushed cheek or dark eyelash, a piece of that eternal magnificience of womanhood, why is it sinful for me to languish, to stare, to breath deeply of this beauty as I would of a solitary flower in a field? It is not that I need to intrude; I’m not looking for any sexual satisfaction or favor, but I feel no need to be bashful in my awareness, on the contrary, I want the girl to realize how special she is, how beautiful and holy. Pleasure of this type, pleasure in the beauty of women, is often seen as the root of evil. Satan himself, then must have created feminine beauty. And along with it, the beauty of the stars, of green forests, crystal blue ponds, and orange yellow sunsets. That bubbling of spiritual awe in the face of such beauty must be the serpent’s tongue licking our pride and basest of natures, luring us into sin. Nonsense! Without beauty and recognition of it, both beauty, and pleasure in life’s small miracles, like chocolate cake and jasmine green tea, the world would be bleak and drab, with nothing for a poet or an artist to do.

Maybe philosophers are not necessary anymore. Maybe they have never been necessary. Perhaps like all artists, entertainers, they offer a brief destraction, some great ideas, hell they may even describe life exactly as it is, perfectly, and have come to know the True nature of all things. So f*ing what? Tomorrow we will still need to work. We will still need to eat. We will still have the same animal instincts towards the opposite sex, towards fear and danger, we will still have jealousy and pride, we will still have to get along with and co-exist with people we may very well like to strangle. What good is Truth?! We cannot escape the symptoms of our existence, the state of our earthly mission. And so, rather than prophets of eternal reality, philosophers are really the people sitting on their ass, looking at the clouds go by, refusing to participate for fear of giving their efforts to a point they can’t conceptualize intelligently, while the rest of us are trying to make do. At least, that has been the philosopher of the last 2000 years. Much more useful, perhaps, no – definitely, are those persons who can acutely understand our actual existence, on its own terms, without criticizing its obvious pointlessness, and offer concrete ways to improve it! What does it matter WHY we are here. We ARE here. What does it matter, if what we see is ‘real’, if our actions are ‘good’ or ‘evil’ and if these terms hold eternal value or are social constructs. All of philosophy is immediately dismissed. All that matters. ALL that we can ever know for sure and nothing else, is this, one moment we find ourselves in, and every previous, and every subsequent, until death. And so, what I find of immense value, is anyone who knows how to increase the worth of this one moment.

But actually…

Nobody is interested in Philosophy. Everybody is interested in happiness. And although they may not intellectualize it or even consciously seek out happiness as an end to itself, it is the secret motivation for human action. The desire for happiness, sometimes known as pleasure, rules every situation where we choose something in favor of anything. Cake vs. Nothing. Chocolate cake vs. strawberry. New clothes vs. wearing the old ones until we die, colors and styles, cash or credit (which may well have practical concerns, which are generally based on and can be linked back to happiness.

And yet: the artist himself, although weakening the appreciation for natural beauty, develops the strongest sense of observation. For in the painting of a flower, the artist must first notice, then marvel at, measure, examine, and appreciate the flower in depth and detail. It may be argued that the artist is the only observer; for no one has ever or will ever examine that flower as much or appreciate its beauty as much as did the artist, and it could also be argued that the artist saves that particular shade and style of flower, and makes it eternally accessible to others, and by the process of singling it out, makes it easier for man to see the beauty that is all around him; for some men can only see beauty in small packages when correctly presented.