The Lonely Gunman - "To chaotically explore the underside of digital life in an amusing manner."
"I found God on the Internet, who would have guessed?"
March 1 2000
Welcome to this chaotically periodic installment of The Lonely Gunman!
You may be wondering why I was looking for God on the internet. I mean, God is supposed to be everywhere, right? Why would I need to look for him? Well, it all started with a dream : http://www.knowledge.co.uk
/frontiers/sf098/sf098p17.htm . In this dream I saw a huge brick wall with GOD spelled out in 30 feet tall "John Deere Green" letters. I looked away from the wall and then looked back, GOD was still spelled on the wall. This had to be a sign, right? So I was inspired to find God on the Internet.But, how does one find God on the internet? Unfortunately, the obvious approach didn't work-- all I received from www.god.com was a 404 error. I guess the Global Online Directory just couldn't fill the great big green giants's shoes. But this got me thinking… Just who are these 404 blokes that they think that they can block God? The answer came from the shadowy bowels of the 'net and the mysterious Secret Hidden Illuminated Order of 404 : http://www.realm-of-shade.com/404/ .
After a hair raising escape from the absurd rites of the 404, it came to me that perhaps this issue needed some really Deep Thought : http://www.empirenet.com/personal/dljones/index.html. Unfortunately my quest for Deep Thought* led to an eminently embarrassing experience with the local video store clerk. {CENSORED}
I was just about to give up on my search when I turned up the following quote: (and here I thought that writers of Star Wreck had invented Tachyons, when in fact Tachyons are God, well, sort of, anyhow, here's what you've been waiting for, the big Tachyon himself, God :
From : http://www.trufax.org/takyon/welcome.html
A unified field is a field in which all energies are in a state of unification. It is a field in which magnetic, electrical, gravitational, strong/weak nuclear, thermal, acoustical and other radiative attributes are in a state of mathematical, geometric and harmonic unification. They are not de-coupled, separate or broken down into radiative attributes. It is based on Einsteins modified equation E = mc2 * Oc2 , based on E = mc2, where O is the consciousness constant. It means a shift from Special Relativity to General Relativity by accelerating energy to reach the Bohm Superquantum-Relativistic Potential otherwise known as the holographic infinite information continuum, also known as the intelligent field that interpenetrates the universe, the source, or what humans anthromorphically refer to as "God"."
For some reason this version of God left me a little flat, I mean, what fun is God if you have to be anthromorphically constantly conscious to have a chat over tea? I think I'll go back to easier to accept theories, like the one where Microsoft takes over the Universe and Bill Gates promotes himself to Head Geek, eeeeeeerrrrr God : http://www.ms-monopoly.com .
*Deep Thought, of course, is a character from this issue's recommended book : Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy : http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0517149257/consolatiumphi02 . A totally classic trilogy of five books that have also made multimedia appearances as text-based adventure games : http://abandonware
.universal.av7.net/Jeux/The_Hitchhiker_s_Guide_To_The_Galaxy.1987.html , radio plays, tv series and more! Douglas has many thoughts about God, this is my favourite :'The Babel Fish,' (Not Alta Vista's Translation Software - DW), said The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, 'is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which ahs supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel Fish.
'Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
'The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist say God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
' "But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
' "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
' "Oh, that was easy, " says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
'Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central them of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps it Up for God.
'Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.'
Well, that's all for this issue folks, I'm going to go get myself a Pan Galactic Gargleblaster, stayed tuned for my esoteric digital nonsense in the near future!
Dylon
If you have any comments or questions about this issue, you can email The Lonely Gunman at kusari@artofchainmail.com. I offer no guarantees to the validity, functionality, safety, usefulness, or amusement of any of the links or information included in "The Lonely Gunman".