just saw "the sixth sense." you believe in ghosts? don't believe i do. in vampires? clones, shades, demons? no, though it's 1 a.m, i am alone in the room, and my dead grandfather's picture hangs over me. my father painted it. he paints everything in grays and near-blacks, so even if you don't know my grandfather, just from the painting you can tell the man's dead. anyhow, i guess my metaphysics are pretty dry...

sometimes i wish i did see a ghost. that would mean there is SOMETHING beyond this boring, hopeless world of hours. and if there's something, there has to be... something else. maybe there is holiness and permanence after all. maybe we are divine and redeemable. maybe too, there is a god in a heaven... i haven't seen anything. so far, all i've seen points the other way... the newspaper headlines, the biology classes, movies like "the ten commandments" (i just can't picture God so absurd as to boom, like Darth Vader, "thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife"!)...

these things persuade me that the universe is mindless, its only gesture a shrug at whatever atrocities and horror we bring on ourselves. death is likewise a shrug-- we dissolve completely, mind and body, no differently than soap dissolves. when you're gone, there is nothing left. it's as if you and everything else never were. and that's why i'd rather be seeing dead people walk around.

but let's think of it another way. what if God is neither redeeming nor negligent? that is, what if the cards of the cosmos are maliciously stacked against us? what if the universe was a horrible machine devised by some monster to torment us, to drive us into eternal terror and insanity? then there should certainly be ghosts. our torture can't end with death; we're not getting off that easy!

what can this horrible Nazi-God think of? maybe when we die, the soul is still conscious, but forced to lodge within the coffin for a few hundred years watching the body go rancid. or say that our souls crawl back in a mangled form, to terrorize those we loved most in life? or say, we wake up on a lush tropical island, blissfully amidst our dear departed. But after a few months, we find all of them with limbs missing, and it turns out that we had all become cannibals?

a universe that is not only godless, but also ruled by an unopposed devil... seeing the violent course of our history, that is certainly plausible... the supreme being may be a Nazi scientist, one who creates beauty only for us to witness it smogged and emasculated, who engineers the horrors of this world as mild metaphors for those in the one beyond? left with those bleak conjectures, atheism seems, what... uplifting?