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Threads is convinced I want to read posts from Christians asking atheists stupid questions. I’m sure I’m somehow to blame for this. “You’re responsible for your own algorithm” is the latest not-exactly-true-but-true-enough way to propagate radical responsibility nonsense, and I’m sure I scanned a few too many comments to make sure somebody else was fighting the bad fight.
I’ve watched this fight play out for forty years now, and there’s an existential chasm between the side where God must be and the one where God isn’t. I’m not going to try to bridge it, but I’m going to try to explain why you shouldn’t bother trying to get people on my side to jump it, and explain it without even mentioning Pascal or Thor.
There was a guy who did something in or around my office. He had an affect on the cusp of stoned and about to tell you aliens bugged his phone. My most uncomfortable encounter with him was when he showed me a gold-plated piece of junk jewelry he found on the ground and told me it was solid 24 karat and he was going to pawn it for the down payment on a nightclub. This appeared to be just the tip: when I was out to lunch, he showed up in my office and told everybody that the government was growing weed on Mars.
Very strictly speaking, this is a possibility. We have the technology. However. It would have to be a secret kept by thousands upon thousands of people, executed flawlessly to prevent anyone from catching on. Our best people can’t even murder a few North Korean fishermen without word getting out. After the initial setup, it would involve a steady stream of spaceships getting there and back for every harvest. It would require the highest dedication and skill from people getting megadoses of solar radiation on every trip. It would have to have been meticulously planned by hundreds of experts, not one of whom said, “Guys, the dark side of the moon is, like, right there, relatively speaking.”
Could the combined resources and dedication of a world superpower conceivably do such a thing for the sole purpose of somebody being able to smoke a blunt that, at a conservative estimate, burns $40,000,000 worth of Mars weed? Maybe.
Nobody blames me for not giving this equal consideration next to my conviction that no government is growing weed on Mars. It’s barely a conviction. It didn’t occur to me to need a well-formed opinion on such a thing until asked to invest in MarzBluntz. I’m pretty sure nobody thinks I’ve always known about Mars weed but refuse to risk my stock portfolio. Nobody thinks I’m growing my own weed, and I desperately need to deny the existence of the world’s least efficient cartel. Nobody thinks I need to find Mars weed and try it. Nobody even thinks they need to convince me to smoke Mars weed: if I was handed a bag that could reasonably be filled with weed grown on Mars and the only paper handy was the Mona Lisa, that blunt gettin’ smoked.
But I think mid-tier renaissance art will stay safe in my presence no matter what people hand me. So many historically reliable realities would have to go up in smoke for Mars weed to exist, I feel comfortable dismissing it out of hand. Even the relationships between these alternate institutions are suspect. I could be convinced that the government is full of paranoid dope peddlers, but I could not simultaneously be convinced they’d put together a secret space operation a century ahead of its time.
Most of the theism arguments I see start with the theist cutting straight to the blunt. When asked why this blunt costs so much, it’s explained that the weed is from Mars and rolled in The Last Supper. Then the argument spins down into something about the cost of rocket fuel or the moral calculus of getting high.
I don’t smoke weed anymore. I might if it came from Mars, but I’m not going to believe anyone who tells me they have a Mars blunt. I’m not going to argue with them, or try to tell them no blunt is worth that much. Whatever other people are smoking is not my problem unless I’m stuck in the same train car.
So that’s what this all sounds like to most of us over here on the atheist side. People keep offering us unlikely drugs when we don’t do drugs, then blowing smoke in our faces and telling us we’re high when we say no thank you. Imagine how you would react if someone blew smoke in your face and told you to be grateful because it’s the $40,000,000 blunt from Mars.
