Palenque.

I meant to blog on this a few weeks ago when I read Eduardo Galeano's Upside Down in the course of two days and two nights during Finals Week, but the crush of other things prevented it until I remembered my favorite passage tonight. The entire book overall is definitely a must-read; it is a profoundly tragic, if ultimately uplifting, tale of the pitfalls and contradictions of imperialism and globalism as regards Latin America, and by extension the non-industrial world. Anyway, there are a series of sidenotes throughout the book, and one of them regarded the people of the Palenque in Columbia, and I thought I'd share the choice paragraph here.

Years have gone by, centuries, and Palenque survives. The people of Palenque continue to believe that the earth, their earth, is a body made of fields, jungles, wind, people, that it breathes through trees and cries through streams. They continue to believe that those who have enjoyed life will be rewarded in paradise and those who haven't will burn in hell, in the eternal fire reserved for the cold women and men who disobeyed the sacred voices that command us to live life with pleasure and passion.

I like that, a lot. I was once asked by a girl back home if I believed in God and I said 'I'm not sure.'* She said 'Do you think you'll go to Heaven?' And I responded 'Oh sure.' She goes 'How can you possibly believe that?' I said 'Because when I'm up to stamp my ticket, I will have lived my life sincerely and without judgement for anybody else. Hypocrisy is the worst sin of them all.'

I put the asterisk there because I wanted to expound on that a little more: I still don't know what I believe on that, if only because it never really crosses my mind. People say 'Oh you're an agnostic' and I go 'But that figures that I've thought about it and concluded that I didn't know whether God exists; I just haven't thought about it at all.' I do think about it though, and if I've concluded anything it's that I definitely don't believe in a God who micromanages, whether through deliberately picking every animal that stalks the earth, or smoting federal judges, or raining hellfire on the good people of Massachusetts. While the people who protest on behalf of a vengeful God are certainly within their rights, I just wonder why they want to believe in a deity that would frankly care about the morality of Africans using condoms when millions of people on that continent are dying from a disease we could stop. "For fear of seeming intolerant or uncertain, or just for lack of thinking, they talk about a God too small to be God," in the words of Killing the Buddha. If he is truly an awesome God, than He is beyond our capacity to see or imagine; perhaps then we should lower our eyes a bit more towards the earth, and our fellow men, and this life.

And this is a hell of a way to spend a Saturday evening. The lights are flickering, so I'm gonna shut this down and go read some Hemingway (by candlelight if necessary) and listen to KJHK until the tornadoes come.