Mid-Week Melancholy
Well, technically it's not the middle of the week anymore because it's Thursday almost-evening, but I had these melancholy thoughts yesterday, which was Wednesday, the real middle of the week.
Blame it on Jon. It was past ten at night and we were in one of the classrooms when he suddenly told me and Justin about a question his friend had been asked during a job interview.
You come to a crossroads; one fork leads to a village of normal people, the other to a village of cannibals. The cannibals always tell the truth and the normal people always lie. There's a man at the crossroads, and you don't know if he's a cannibal or a normal person. You can only ask him one question. What would that question be?
He couldn't remember the answer, so I googled it, and I got links to all sorts of horrible websites. But the most horrible one must have been the one I decided to look at because it looked interesting, which of course turned out to be a mistake. I didn't hang around the website long enough to see what it was really about, but from what I could gather people had been trying to shut it down with lawsuits and the like, and from what I could see the contributors to the website appeared to support white supremacy and race supremacy and all that sort of nonsense - in the name of God.
It made me feel sad, and when I went home I read the newspapers and felt even sadder.
It's true, what the Bible says - how the Israelites turned away from God, how the Jews didn't recognise Jesus as their true saviour. How it speaks of people building their own altars, creating their own gods, turning to iniquity. We often blame God, asking why He would allow pain and suffering and Pure Evil, oftentimes using that as justification for not believing in Him. But what we fail to realise is that many times we are the ones who have chosen evil, and our hearts gradually become hardened and steeled against what is good and right. Crowley in Good Omens was right; people say things like The devil put me up to it, but they actually think up things to do to each other quite independently of any other supernatural being which might exist.
It's not even about hate crimes, or torturing babies. Some weeks ago we were watching I Survived a Japanese Game Show, and to fight elimination, Donnell and Mary had to "become" chickens - wear a chicken head piece, roll around in oil and feathers, and burst huge balloons shaped like eggs by sitting on them, whereupon a yellow liquid would spurt out.
The Japanese in the audience were laughing away, but I didn't really find it that amusing - and my mother said, This is so demeaning and stupid. I'm not going to watch anymore. The Japanese are really sadistic.
And I realised that she was right. What's more, God never created human beings for this sort of nonsense. He created us in His image, full of dignity and grace, but we've rejected that image of Him for something cheap and worthless, all in the name of fun, entertainment, money. Things which aren't wrong in and of themselves, but sometimes you wonder at just how far people are willing to go.
Oh dear, I am becoming such a prude, and this sounds like an Annoying GP Essay.
But you know, there really is a lot of pain and suffering in the world, and the least we can do is enjoy and appreciate our health, safety, peace and sanity, instead of doing what is clearly utterly ridiculous and unnecessary, for an end I think only God knows we are trying to achieve. Although I think what we might be trying to achieve is, really, life without Him.
The answer to the question, to save you from having to google it, and not getting the answer but links to strange websites, is Which way to your village? If he's a normal person, he'll point the way to the cannibals' village. If he's a cannibal, he'll also point the way to the cannibals' village.
