Okay this one is a doozy to try to explain, and admittedly pretty dark in concept. It took so many words I actually used paragraph formatting for this description. It will be expounded upon in great detail in a story I’m writing, although it’ll be a while before anyone lays eyes on that, so I’ll do my best to summarize here. For the record, this applies to a feeling you can have no matter the belief system subscribed to, under the right circumstances.
Essentially this is a visualization of spite towards the being known as god and the pointlessness of such a conviction, as well as a representation of feeling powerless to the whims of the universe. It’s a feeling I’ve had before, though I don’t generally feel this way, and I’ve had realizations since that I think will keep me from feeling such a way in the future. However, I thought it was important to express certain things about the feeling and represent it visually to make a bit more sense of it. It helped me to play out the scenario in my mind.
Deep down, nobody can be truly sure of their beliefs, as they are by nature unprovable, although a stalwart style of living by those beliefs often manifests itself as a feeling of being positive and can help you structure your life in some ways. However, I think everyone is susceptible to committing too hard to certain beliefs and being unwilling to compromise them when there’s contradictory evidence right in front of their face. Sometimes something will come along and force you to reconcile with your own hardened opinions, and it can feel like the walls of your reality are shattering before your eyes.
I think a lot of people tend to attribute some sort of humanity to their idea of god, which isn’t necessarily something I disagree with, but I think our specific type of relationship with such a being would negate the relevance of that humanity. After all, why would the world be so full of pain if humanity applied to the transaction? I found my own answer to this through attempting the art of worldbuilding for story writing, and seeing the throughlines between my relationship with a character and my relationship with the transcendent idea of a god. Asking why is a pointless question in such a case, because generally it’s more of a why not from their perspective, literally able to make anything happen for any given personal purpose. I think if there is such a thing as god we exist in the same capacity to them as fiction does to us.
Anyway, now that that’s all established, I can run through the hypothetical that inspired the image. There exists a monolith altar from which direct communication can be had with god. Upon the learning of such a thing, someone who believes god to have humanity that applies to us in the same way we apply it to others would go immediately asking why certain things in their life are the way that they are, or why some people who seem deserving end up with no happy ending, or vice versa. You’d be hoping for some divine knowledge, for a piece of information that made everything make sense, that proved everything you’d endured worth it. No matter the answer given, it wouldn’t be satisfactory. Why is an unanswerable question from the human perspective when it comes to existence. It’s the lack thereof a discernable meaning that allows us to create our own meaning for things, otherwise known as interpretation. To these ends it makes sense to me that should they answer, finally breaking the streak of indirect communication and acting as a character in their own created reality, their answer would need to be translated into words that a human can understand and can’t contradict anything that’s happened in all of history, what with reality being perfectly logically consistent. With all these caveats in place, I think the only answer possible would be the same sort of answer a human might give when asked why they made a certain choice in a story they’ve written. The answers you’ll get for that question will vary greatly in detail, but if such a thing must be translated into words it can almost always be watered down to something along the lines of “because I thought it’d be interesting” or “I wanted to make a point”, or “that’s simply the way the story unfolded based on the world and characters. It just made sense.” And now imagine how selfishly that would come off to someone who lived through and endured the world, a living sentient thing who possesses imagination and can see a better option for themselves but has no power over the storyline.
If someone puts such trust in their god being purely good rather than seeing the concepts of “good and bad” as inapplicable in such a situation, such an answer would destroy everything they had previously believed about there being a purpose to life all at once due to the thought that your own thoughts and opinions are at best meaningless and at worst don’t belong to you in the first place, and could induce a colossal identity crisis the likes of which could only be caused by engaging with the transcendent. After all, our world holds no direct stake in the realm of transcendence by very definition.
After living with the idea that god cares about you specifically, otherwise known as main character syndrome, such an answer would cause anyone to be filled with spite, and having felt this feeling before, were I given the opportunity to speak directly with god at the time I more than likely would’ve tried to attack their assumed humanity in a petty and spiteful way that can only have an effect in our own canon, and couldn’t possibly affect someone with the status of writer, as they would have planned it and seen it coming, giving me the opportunity to attack them in the first place. When believing that life is sacred and a gift from god rather than something that exists simply because it does, the most intense thing you could do would be to return that gift, saying you don’t want or need it. The action would be intended to return the sentiment I’d received from their answers, sub-textually saying “this thing you’ve created means nothing to me.” Were I to be in direct contact with our creator while feeling this way, I may have made a rash decision before compartmentalizing the differences between the way our world looks to a human that lives in it vs. the god that writes it. So were I to make such a move, it would be with the expectations of disrespecting the being to the point of changing the pointlessness of it all from where we stand. An attempt to gain some agency over the world even in my final moments. But clearly that interaction would have a point to make, and I’d just be there to help it be made. It’s only pointless from inside the ego.
After playing it all out in my head I realized that even if I were to attempt such a thing, as I stood there on the verge of death, looking up at the monolith embodying god and that I now blame for casting such a shadow over my life, it would remain unphased, and take my life back from me with a coldness and apparent selfishness no human relationship could ever truly display. After all, if someone truly was writing every moment of every story in our reality, they commit cruelties to human beings on a regular basis, and what makes this any different? At that point why not blame everything any human has done to you on this idea of a god, leading you to hate the world you exist in. The lack of a reaction from god would ironically render my attempt to make my life meaningful in the grand scheme of our reality entirely meaningless to anyone but god themselves, leaving me to die with my mistake more frustrated than ever before. But no matter what, I will have played my part in the story as a character that exists as one small piece of my creator. We are them as much as they are us.
So I guess this image just exists to remind me not to place blame on outside forces. Many things in life have no one to blame, and trying to see an intention or purpose behind something which has none from the context of human life can be a slippery slope, especially when you run with your interpretation as if it’s the inherent truth. A simpler way to put it would be that this image reminds me that I truly know nothing outside of myself, and therefore can’t be stubborn in my belief in a truth that applies to anything besides myself. Good luck breaking down a non-existent wall. I also just find the idea that for some, the very confirmation that the god they believe in exists would be enough to prove the world meaningless for them. The irony of learning nothing matters from the thing that is supposed to give it purpose is richer than I can put into words. It leads me to believe there’s a good reason god doesn’t speak back.
If you made it this far, I hope you enjoyed. It’s wild to me that this is a summary of the idea, it ended up way longer than I intended, but I think it was necessary. Thanks for reading my philosophy hypothetical, hopefully I worded it well enough for it to make sense.
