The Cosmic Flyswatter

“Dey was so much Spirychul Enegie in dat room dat I could see sparks a flyin’ an’ light-bullets smakin’ into my foe-head!”

So said my friend, Jingo. I had run into him again outside the ready teller over in Monrovia, CA. I met him once before. He was reading the Wall Street Journal at the time. He had commented about the elections. Only the last time we spoke he was affecting a British accent. He was clearly homeless, but I think he is an actor of some sort. Either that or he likes to mess with people’s minds.

This time he was telling me about a revival he had just attended in Texas. I think that “Spirychul Enegie” he was talking about must have gotten a hold of his tongue and done something to it. His tongue was no longer a phony Englishman’s.

What in Sam Hell does spiritual energy mean anyway? It’s another oxymoron. For those who have graduated from Harvard, an oxymoron is:

From Wikipedia: An oxymoron (plural oxymora (greek plural) or, more often, oxymorons) is a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms. Oxymoron is a loanword from Greek oxy (“sharp” or “pointed”) and moros (“dull”). Thus the word oxymoron is itself an oxymoron.

The problem is that the word spiritual means the immaterial (the non-physical). Einstein pretty much got everybody agreeing that matter and energy are just different forms of the same thing. So the term spiritual energy means non-matter matter. It makes no sense. But it doesn’t matter. Folks use the term anyway to describe the feeling they get when a collection of souls put their minds together on transcendant things.

But it got me to thinkin’. If I were an atheist, like say, Christopher Hitchens, I would be forwarding the idea, which he does, that there is nothing besides energy and matter. Everything else is just a myth, a fancy of foolish idiots’ imaginations. Silly desires to make sense out of the meaninglessness of life. Of course Old Hitchens, who wrote a book called “God is not Great,” is a really well educated Fool. But don’t say anything if you run into him. Don’t tell him that I said he is really just a frustrated aging “Reality Scout” in short pants looking for a merit badge. He’s hoping that the great Cosmic Eagle Scout, Mr. Chaos will reward him for attaining “Understanding Beyond Measure” about all the order of things chaotic.

Let’s just say for the sake of an argument that there is nothing besides matter and energy. Well…this would make spiritual energy nothing more than a lot of folks’ thoughts all added up together. Even Christopher Hitchens could see past his vast intellect and understand this. I’ll bet there are even some Harvard graduates like Bill O’Reilly that could grasp this notion.

OK! So now all we have is a big volume of spiritual energy produced by a bunch of well meaning idiots. Since there is really nothing spiritual but only energy it seems that we would want to encourage as much production of the good energy as we could and try to suppress the bad energy.

If you like to smoke pot, now is a good time to take a long drag and hold it in while you bleat out, “But whose to say what is good and what is bad, man?” Then you can exhale and finish up with “You know what I mean, man?”

Let’s just say that for the sake of our argument that we actually know what is good and what is bad. OK, man? Then we could decide which spiritual energy is good and which is bad. We can appoint a commission, allocate bail-out funds, and regulate our society so that things are good. Just a novel idea. But our pot smoking friend has a point, don’t you think Christopher? We certainly wouldn’t want everybody thinking that there is a God that told us things about what is good and what is bad, now would we? That would be silly and dangerous and foolish, huh? We would then have to agree on things like, oh say…the Ten Commandments. Whose to say that killing and stealing and lying and cheating on spouses is bad?

What’s that you say, Christopher Hitchens? What? Oh I see, if everybody were as smart as you they would know not to do these things anyway. What’s that? Oh, the idiots need to fear a God to restrain them from adding to the bad energy. OK…OK…I see.

Could it be that your secular philosophy simply has no answer for the radical evil that is growing in the world today? Is it just possible that you stand stupid before pure evil, an evil that is simply envious of the good? I don’t think you understand that evil has no life except from the good which it must requisition for the destruction of its own source of being. I know you don’t understand this since you don’t believe in the Absolute Good, which is the Living God.

No matter, my friend. Let’s just frame reality in your comfort zone where you can pretend superiority. It’s all just spiritual energy.

Yeah but think about it, Chris. What are the chances that everybody can get all smart like you in a big hurry? What are the chances that any of us will ever really see Star Trek the next generation? Now that I think about it you should be telling everyone to go to church on Sunday. That way there will be more good spiritual energy. Things will be a lot safer for us all. The chances that you will be rounded up with other atheists and homosexuals and feminists and undesireables and then invited to a head chopping party will diminish greatly.

So try this. Try thinking of the activities of churchgoers as nothing more than good spiritual energy being manufactured by useful idiots. Trust me you’ll sleep easier. You will be able to count sheep knowing that a whole bunch of idiots are in a room somewhere where:

“Dey is so much Spirychul Enegie in da room dat you can see sparks a flyin’ an’ light-bullets smakin’ into they foe-heads!”

Oh and uh, good luck on that merit badge, Christopher.