Is God a Comedian?

It’s easy to ignore the rantings of religionists because they offer no proof. Everything they preach is based on faith, and they can’t give me a convincing reason why I should have faith so I don't. Quantum physicists, on the other hand, claim to have come to their conclusions by empirical means. This is all provable by science, they say, if you go back to the start of existence and then investigate reality at the sub-nuclear level. This means that I feel more obliged to take them seriously. So…

I woke up this morning 5½ hours after going to sleep with much existential confusion beating my brain cells with a caveman’s club. (My quantum physicist and The Borg had conspired to keep me from my bed longer than I’d intended, you see, and that meant drinking more than I’d intended, and so I woke up feeling a little less than keen to start a bright new day. In short, I didn’t want to get up.)

I did get up. I did, mainly to deal with pressing existential problems like getting the washing on the clothes line and charging up the battery packs for the hedge trimmers. In so doing, my newly unrefreshed mind began to formulate questions for the quantum physicist. The first was:

‘You say that everything I perceive in the material universe is an illusion, and further, that it’s all a projection of my own consciousness.’

‘Yes.’

‘Does that include you?’

That was the first question, but there were more, like the assertion that this illusion has its root in my thoughts. So if I want to get to the truth, should I stop thinking? Well, that does find an echo in the Taoist doctrine that to gain true knowing it’s necessary to give up all knowledge. By the same token, however, I have observed that people who don’t think much (and even tell me that I think too much) are usually little better than monkeys with a taste for capitalist delusion. So should I suspect that monkeys have a better grasp of existential truth than I do? That’s both sobering and funny at the same time.

There were more, several more, and the caveman was becoming ever busier with his club, but I can’t be bothered to enumerate them here because I want my lunch and who cares anyway? I did have one little thought, however, while continuing to stay trapped in the illusion:

I’ve heard it said that material existence is all God’s dream. I’m now inclined to suspect that it’s all God's big joke, and that It’s been laughing Its socks off ever since the Big Bang and will continue to roar until Doomsday. But that can’t be right, can it, because the very concept of time is part of the illusion. Isn’t it?

I think I need to be born a lot smarter in my next life.