A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, June 11, 2010

Questianity

I'm going to start a new religion. All the other ones are too sure of themselves for me. (Well, maybe not the Unitarians or the Buddhists, but there's something too starchy about the former and too detached about the latter.) Its symbol (i.e., its cross or crescent or six-pointed star) will be this:



Its god will be the one Rabelais proposed to meet when he spoke his last words: "I go to seek a Great Perhaps."

Its deadly sins will be the same seven:

  1. Pride: the assumption that one has found the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
  2. Envy: the preoccupation with whether what other people believe makes them better off than you are
  3. Wrath: the willingness to start a fight over beliefs 
  4. Avarice: using a community of belief, like a church, for one's own personal gain (e.g., most politicians)
  5. Sloth: being too lazy to search and question 
  6. Gluttony: pigging out on the perks of being a true believer (e.g., most politicians)
  7. Lechery: using the powers of a priesthood for sexual gratification 

Welcome to Questianity, fellow Questioners.
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