Paul Kimball recently put out a post on his blog at redstarfilms.blogspot.com. For those of you that read our content but don’t listen to the show, I am polite to most of our guests… very polite. I withhold reservations I may have so I do not offend them and only softly inquire into the more logical side of things. As such, this makes every episode kind of draining for me, as I am a fairly “loud” thinker and this politeness is counter to my real nature.
Anyway, Paul Kimball isn’t draining for me. In fact, he is my all time favorite guest… ever. He’s the one person in this community that I really, really enjoy! He believes but only logically is a hopeful agnostic. He expects that his own vision will not be proof for others. Mmmmm… reason! Logic! Soundness of thought! These things make me a very happy co-host.
Anyway, Paul Kimball posted a really interesting concept… He basically says that you can choose how you want to believe. You can just take old concepts and apply them to the “story of the day.” One example he gave of this is the way in which Roswell was embraced and handled will now apply to the Aztec 1948 ideas. There is no outside thinking here… it’s the same stories and ideas with different settings and characters… you can always predict the end.
The other path, Paul proposed, is one that is a lot scarier and less traveled. He posted that this path is when one can embrace the uncomfortable concepts. This is the equivalent of traveling in the darkness with no flashlight and no idea of the end point… walking for the sake of progress and journey… adventuring for adventure’s sake. This is horrifying and uncomfortable. But for some brave souls, this is the way to truly explore the unknown.
I find that I do not want to travel down either path, but I am being dragged down that less traveled, horrifying path. I don’t care for any of the stories. I don’t care for anything out of the norm. My mind drifts and wanders and pokes and prods… I fight it with everything I have. I sedate my mind, I distract myself, I play video games and fidget and twist and turn and smile and laugh and joke and deny and avoid… I am the reluctant traveler. I am so scared. I don’t want to know. Please don’t tell me. Please don’t let me see it.
The greatest quote I ever came upon for this concept was in a Stephen King book, of all things… It
“He wanted to tell them that those dead boys who had lurched and shambled their waydown the spiral staircase had done something worse than frighten him: they had offended him.
Offended, yes. It was the only word he could think of, and if he used it they would laugh —they liked him, he knew that, and they had accepted him as one of them, but they would still laugh. All the same, there were things that were not supposed to be. They offended any sane person’s sense of order, they offended the central idea that God had given the earth a final tilt on its axis so that twilight would only last about twelve minutes at the equator and linger for an hour or more up where the Eskimos built their ice-cube houses, that He had done that and He then had said, in effect: ‘Okay, if you can figure out the tilt, you can figure out any damn thing you choose. Because even light has weight, and when the note of a train whistle suddenly drops it’s the Doppler effect and when an airplane breaks the sound barrier that bang isn’t the applause of the angels or the flatulence of demons but only air collapsing back into place. I gave you the tilt and then I sat back about halfway up the auditorium to watch the show. I got nothing else to say, except that two and two makes four, the lights in the sky are stars, if there’s blood grownups can see it as well as kids, and dead boys stay dead.’ You can live with fear, I think, Stan would have said if he could. Maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. It’s offense you maybe can’t live with, because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are live things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don’t blink, and there’s a stink down in that dark, and after awhile you think maybe there’s a whole other universe down there, a universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some of them have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I’d scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn’t look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense.”
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