In God We Trust

In God We Trust

Philosophy class assignment

11-23 October 1989

19 years old

Jimmy walked into his room, slammed the door behind him and tossed his books onto his unmade bed. He scanned his selection of compact discs, chose one, and popped it into the player. Music flooded into the room and Jimmy sighed with equal parts contentment and exhaustion before turning the volume up a little more and collapsing face-down onto the bed, his books tumbling to the floor.

Opening his eyes, Jimmy surveyed his collection of books. He’d read everything from horror and fantasy, to new age and the occult. His gaze rested on his Bible. It appeared brand new, the binding barely cracked. He’d read it once, long ago, and has tossed it aside, declaring himself an atheist. If there was a God, he thought, he definitely wasn’t like the oppressive, vain, demanding god portrayed in the Bible. Then he reached out and took the other bible. The Satanic Bible. It was tattered and worn out, the pages soft and dog-eared. He felt it made much better reading than the other, and negligently tossed it to the floor. That book was also a pile of crap. An entertaining pile of crap, but a pile nonetheless.

There was further evidence of dabbling in witchcraft, Tarot, I Ch’ing, and other methods of spell-casting and divination, but they were all just passing fancies or items of curiosity. None of Jimmy’s dabbling every really satisfied him, and what precisely he was attempt to satisfy through his blasphemous practices was as much a mystery to Jimmy as to anyone else.

Sighing again, Jimmy rolled over onto his back and stared at the ceiling. Lost in the blissful world of non-thought, he absently shooed a fly away from his face. A few seconds later, he fly was again buzzing persistently at the edge of his consciousness, and Jimmy brushed it away, this time in anger. He grabbed a notebook from the floor, rolled it up and stalked the fly. He spied it on the wall to his left and carefully, cautiously crept closer. As he neared, the fly fidgeted, buzzed its wings in agitation, but remained in place, as if sensing its inevitable doom. Jimmy slowly raised his arm, and struck the fly with lightning speed. It fell to the floor lifelessly.

Jimmy stopped to pick it up, but as his eyes rested on the fly, he couldn’t help but feel a pang of guilt and remorse for killing a helpless, innocent creature, however vile and repulsive it might be. He couldn’t explain why he felt that way, except that he’d always been like that since he was a child. A little wistfully, he pinched its wings between his fingers and flushed it down the toilet. He returned to his bed.

“What a mess this world’s in,” he said to himself. “Nuclear bombs, racism, murder, hate, war, stress… Who needs this? If only it could be done over again…” And with that thought in mind, he fell asleep.

The next morning, Jimmy went to his philosophy class. The professor was reviewing Descartes, on whom they were to be tested the following day.

“Cogito is what? ‘I think; therefore, I am.’ Jimmy, can you tell us how Descartes proves that God exists?”

“Well,” Jimmy began. “The general idea of God is that He is perfect. He can we, as imperfect beings, have come up with the idea of a perfect being? The only answer is that it came from God. Also, Descartes asks where could we have come from? There must have been a cause to our existence, and so he pins that responsibility on God.”

But God is not a perfect being, Jimmy silently adds. He’s imperfect; he’s just like the rest of us. He makes mistakes, too.

“That’s good. I see you’ve been paying attention. Can you tell me what, in general, the egocentric predicament is?”

“The egocentric predicament,” he explained, “is when you go around believing only you exist and that everything else is illusion.”

Then the professor took over to go into further detail. As Jimmy listened, he looked at the teacher and the students. He couldn’t hear anything except the buzzing air. His movements were slow and his limbs were too heavy to move. He felt as if he was underwater.

As he blinked, Jimmy had the impression that everything around him… flipped over. His eyes grew wide, and this time, as he forced his eyes to remain open, it happened again. The world just flipped over, as if the horizontal hold on a television set had suddenly let go.

Gradually, everything became grainy, like an over-enlarged newspaper photograph. The colour slowly faded until Jimmy found himself in a world of grey and white snow.

“What the hell…?” The words sopped dead in front of him. There was no echo, no indication of walls, objects or even space. The word “cogito” flashed through Jimmy’s head. “I think; therefore, I am.”

What could have passed for days when by and Jimmy spent them in a state of oblivion. He leaned against a wall and slid down until he was sitting, his elbows on his knees. Suddenly, he whipped his head around and started at the wall.

“This wasn’t here before!” He looked at it. The wall blended in with the background of grey and white snow, a vague, half-seen shape. As he started, it took on a more solid appearance. It became more definitely there. Before long, the wall was a solid, white thing in the middle of nothing. Jimmy turned back around, and leaned his head against the wall, closing his eyes. He was numb. This was all too much for him.

Slowly, his mind cleared, and he remembered a time he spent in a lush garden. He stopped.

“Wait a minute. What am I thinking?” Jimmy shook his head. His recent memories were becoming obscure, replaced by ones older, ancient, familiar, yet unfamiliar. They were overwhelming him. He remembered the time he’d made this garden. He opened his eyes and saw the vague outline of trees, shrubs, flowers. As Jimmy became more and more aware of the scene unfolding before him, like the way, they became more and more definite; their colours, their shapes, their very existence. Like the wall he leaned upon, they literally materialized before his very eyes. Their existence, it seemed brought about by his very thought of them. He chuckled to himself. “I think; therefore, I create.”

He jumped to his feet, the cool green grass spreading beneath them. He looked at the wall, and banished it from his mind. It flickered, and wavered, then disappeared altogether, the grass growing in its place. He decided that a massive oak tree would look nice there, and so it came to be.

After the garden was completed, he filled it with animals, and added seasons. Animals were always innocent and content with what they were, and the season, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring, added the right amount of spice and variety to living. But this time around, Fall would be a little longer, and Summer a little shorter… and a little cooler.

When he was finished, Jimmy walked around the garden and inspected his handiwork. He hadn’t intended to create people this time, but he realised that without them, he would be terribly lonely. He wandered about for days in a state of indecision, when he came up with a new idea. Instead of creating another Adam and Eve, granting unto them full control over their capacity for hate, greed, jealousy, insecurity, anger, etc., he would create another pair, Fallon and Donovan, with those same aspects of human fallibility muted, practically nonexistent. They would form a simple people, loving, kind, interested in keeping peace, and caring for all. He would banish from their minds all thoughts and ideas of war, hate, greed conceit. And so it came to be.

Jimmy, now called James, Son of No One, lived happily with his new world. He instilled a sense of right and wrong in his new race. He made sure no dogma existed. They knew he had created them, but no one worshipped him. He made it clear that he was just like everyone else, that he was just a prone to mistake as the worst of them. He was not an all-powerful, almighty, all-knowing being of perfection and vengeance (to James, vengeance was far from perfection). And it was understood that these people were to live for themselves, not for him. Not for “God.”

Life was simple and happy, yet challenging. But the new race lived together harmoniously, blessed—as a last-minute thought—with an innate understanding of what could happen if they let their greed and hate overpower them. This time, James believed, he did a good job. This time, everything would be perfect. This time, nothing could go wrong.