On the nature of causality and religious doubts

Dear posterity,

There has been a lot on my mind. I’m sorry that I haven’t been keeping up on this log very well lately. Let’s clear something up, though. I’m not having doubts. I am as rock solid in my faith as I was before and after I put my hands in that dirt. Things can’t affect my faith now. The difficulty is, I am having a hard time figuring out what exactly it is I have faith in. I mean, it’s Jesus—but what is Jesus, other than obviously not whatever it is the corrupt papacy is yammering on about. They probably have a statue of pazuza sitting right under that guys throne. THAT MUST BE WHY HE’S SUCH A SOUR SAUSAGE! They worry that he’ll let a few droppings fall on that statue, and they wouldn’t like that—so they give him a constipation diet rather than the healthy and inexpensive bean diet that I’m on. Another mystery solved! I’ve lived through plenty of discomfort in my life with good cheer, but none of that sort. That would be a test even for me.

So let’s clear some things up. We went to a lake to find another of Jesus names—he has more than fifty, but we only want the fifty coolest names. Then a giant bug man came out, killed Marcella, and was killed by us. When he died a couple of stooges with a red rope tying them together took as across a stone river into a land of Gad and Simeon Jews (who didn’t have any new names of J-face. We stayed there so that Marcella could be revived—and she was by one of the village elders. Unfortunately, she died pretty quickly after that. See, a few of these guys had agreed to worship this bird-faced statue in exchange for his protection and a temple so that the other jews could worship in the right way. This is a difficult situation. I mean, that was a pretty nice thing they did for other people. You should always do nice things for other people even if it harms you. But, what a dumb religion that makes such a big deal about who consecrates a temple so that you’d have to do something to terrible to yourself just to help out everyone else. It’s a good thing god changed his name to Jesus, came down, and told these guys they didn’t have to worry about stupid things when it got in the way of worrying about smart things. But these guys couldn’t get on board—probably they’d left before J-snake’s message could get to them. In the end, I think we give these guys a pat on the back for effort and extol them to think a little more critically about their religious practices.

So, Zombres asked J if we could beat this demon, and he was like – probably not dude. This puzzled me. Who could we not beat if Jesus was on our side? OH WAIT, I KNOW, JESUS! I read all these logic puzzles in school—I know the drill. The only one who can make a rock so round that whenever Jesus pushes it up the mountain it falls over again no matter how hard he tries to balance it is Jesus. So, I’m thinking, maybe Jesus was just doing these guys a solid—pretending to be a statue with a bird face to get his message to them so they didn’t have to feel so bad about not being able to keep holy.

After this Zombres put his rock-wizend mind to how to win this fight. Knowing I’d be fighting Jesus, you might think I’d feel bad about trying to defeat the guy I worship. But, of course, since he has it all under control, I don’t have to worry about this stuff. He does—but he’s smart enough that there isn’t a lot of worrying—he is a master planner. They say that when he kicked the money lenders out of the temple he started muttering about how he would have designed it differently so that they wouldn’t have had a good place to gather there in the first place. So this plan, it involved me protecting myself from lighting and standing outside talking to a lot of these banshees and gargoyles to try to get Pazuza’s attention. When I tried to do this, though, it failed. I figured maybe Jesus was going to make a martyr out of me to teach some awesome lesson. While I did that, Gwyn was looking out for him and he was gonna let out some flying Marcella/Zombres/Kolya action on him and try to take him out with a million punches in the first round. Shaur actually knew and was arch-foes with P, so he was pretty excited about the plan. Alright, so it worked fine. First I started talking to the Banshees. They stopped listening, though, because Zombres and Gershom make them all chaotic—which—I don’t know, whatever. They weren’t bothering me to begin with because I had 10’ radius on, so I’m not sure why that was necessary, but , well, planning is done for a reason by a guy who doesn’t trust Jesus. Then a guy with a huge emerald sword in a nice suit with a bird face came by. I’m not used to Jesus being overly concerned about his looks—but maybe this is the only way the Gaddites would listen or something. Okay, so first he introduced himself, and I got a little over-excited and told him that if he stopped this huge rock from breaking the earth I’d worship him because I’d know he was Jesus because only Jesus could do something that powerful. Then he said something about ‘gaining my worship’ that gave me pause since, if he’s Jesus he already had it. Then, I thought, maybe this has something to do with all of his names. Anyway, that’s the start of the doubt or confusion or whatever you’d call it.

We got a little side tracked, then, and he told me I had made a huge mess. I told him that I didn’t make a mess, that he summoned all these demons and they wouldn’t be fighting if he hadn’t. Then we got into a truly fascinating and mind bending conversation about causality. He tried some cheap tricks first, just to test me out, but I passed the test. The first was the problem of proximate causation. He asked if he had brought a snake, and it came and I let it out, and then it ate a weasel, who killed the weasel. The snake! Duh! That wasn’t even a test it was so obvious. The second one was a little more tricky—the problem of fate. He said “if I was carrying a bucket of lava, and you kicked the bucket and it flew through the air and landed on the weasel and it died, who killed the weasel.” Fate—obviously, though less obviously. See, if it were raining or the wind were blowing harder or softer, or if the weasel knew that lava was hot—if any of these little circumstances changed—it would not have died. Only if I kicked the can taking these factors into account and modifying the force of my leg in such a way to make sure the lava extinguished the weasel would I be a murderer. Obviously I don’t even eat plants that aren’t beans, I would not kill a weasel.

So, here is where things get REALLY tricky and interesting. Having passed the elementary tests he said “okay, so if I was carrying a bucket, and you thought it was lava, but it was really water, and you kicked it and it flew through the air, and you wanted to kill the weasel with it, but you only got the weasel wet, who was responsible for the weasel getting wet.” I was RIGHT about to give a brilliant answer when Zombres flew out and started this fight. We were about to solve the whole thing peaceably, but we had to resort to violence, which troubles me a little. Mostly during that fight I just sat in my bubble puzzling over this state of affairs. Now what I want to know is – Jesus understands that you have to modify the trappings of your message so that everyone can understand it. But, people get in awfully nasty fights about trappings. Some people kill Jesus followers just because the follow a different name of Jesus (though they probably don’t really understand that that is what they are doing). Why does he let this happen? I think this long conversation about causality had something to do with it. Jesus must have sent this demon to set the wheels of my mind in motion on this important question. He has always liked to give me hints. If we swing back to C-town I’m going to go read up on Aristotle in the library again. Oh yeah, we beat the demon and sent it back to its plane. I knew it wasn’t Jesus, then, because there is no way the danger gang could defeat Jesus in a fight. But he killed Marcella again first. Also, the magicians here couldn’t revive her again because they had been worshiping the bird faced logician and stopped when they saw us beat him. I hope they don’t start worshiping us now.