The impossibility of disproving the existence of some sort of Supreme Being keeps me from calling myself a full-fledged atheist. As I said yesterday, all organized religions of which I'm aware are starkly at odds with what I observe.

Still, apart from my adolescent foray into personal religion, here's a few faiths which I've toyed with:

Cthulhu Worship: As this tract informs us, Cthulhu will awaken to destroy the world, and only his faithful followers will die quickly and escape the unspeakable horror of his rampage. Worshiping Cthulhu is the only logical choice. We already know a pulp science fiction writer created a religion; why not a pulp horror writer? I kind of get hung up on the whole human sacrifice thing, though: aren't gods supposed to do that?

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: This one makes as much sense as any other. Plus, their heaven has a beer volcano and a stripper factory. Unfortunately, I've yet to find a pirate costume.

A "giant, omnipotent, undetectable bee in the center of the sun controls every atom with its infinite arms": EnterTheJabberwock's dissections of Jack Chick tracts contain mysterious references to the aforementioned Holy Bee. He's released few details on this revelation, but when at last the Holy Bee's divine revelation, I for one will be first in the street, begging for the Holy One's sweet, sweet honey.

Gnosticism: Gnostics held a wide variety of beliefs (almost as if they were making it up, but then religious people would never do that). One of the central tenets is that the Old Testament "God" is really a petty, jealous, blind, stupid, divine tyrant called the Demiurge, who prefers to keep mankind fearful and ignorant. That would explain everything, wouldn't it?

Recently I've been reading a lot of skeptical and atheist blogs: The Friendly Atheist, the James Randi Educational Foundation, the Skeptic magazine website (and its magazine, to which I subscribe), P. Z. Myers's blog and the "Bad Astronomy" blog, as well as the clever if angry Chick Tract "Dissections" on Enter The Jabberwock.

Apart from entertainment value and moments of deploring our nation's critical thinking skills, they've prompted me to sort out my own attitudes toward religion, and towards religions' subject matter. No, I am not about to accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. Nor Buddha, nor Muhammad, nor L. Ron Hubbard. Quite the contrary: for a while I've been calling myself an agnostic, when I'm about as agnostic as Elton John is bisexual. At this point in my life I consider myself 99 and 44/100ths percent atheist, with the other 0.66% willing to consider the existence of a Supreme Being, First Mover, or what-have-you ... except for the concept of God as presented in all the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, and nearly every branch of Christianity).

Back in high school -- a Jesuit-run high school, mind -- my apostasy bloomed into a weird concoction I termed "Pantheistic Deism", which I even wrote a five-page paper on for a religion class. (Sadly, the religion teacher wanted to show it to others; in my paranoid dreams it's locked in a secret basement in the Vatican, but realistically it probably just got binned.) It combined the Deist concept of a God who set the universe in motion and didn't interfere with it further, with an Alan Watts-esqe view of Eastern religion where what we call mere matter is in fact an aspect or a manifestation of God. One of my analogies was with a fiction writer: his characters, props, and settings are really parts of his own mind, but within the context of the story they are separate entities with their own motives and identity. And, like a terrestrial author, this "Divine Author" must make the behaviors of this (to him) imaginary world logically consistent and plausible, or the story falls apart.

I mention this mainly to give my readers (yes, both of them) a good laugh. However, these two views -- a god intimately tied to the universe, and wholly separate from it -- illustrate my intellectual revolt against miracles, revealed religions, and supposedly infinite beings who sound like petty tyrants or spoiled children.

My modern argument against an Abrahamic God is simple: Omniscient, Omnipotent, Loving/Merciful -- pick two. If God is omniscient and omnipotent, then he's not Loving or Merciful because, well, Darfur. If God is loving and/or merciful and omniscient but not omniscient, how much does he know? How can we get his attention? Prayer does bugger all, at least in a double-blind test. If God is loving and/or merciful and omniscient but not omnipotent, we've got the same problem: there's little we can do, prayer doesn't seem to make a difference, and we're still clearly on our own down here.

Yes, this is hardly original. Yes, I've heard most if not all of the standard counter-arguments: "God is like a man in a high building watching an accident", "God gave us free will and lets us exercise it", "God does answer prayers, but sometimes the answer is no", blah blah blah. Even factoring in the people who claim to have witnessed miracles, from what I can tell the only difference the existence of God would make is that when you die you'll go to Hell unless you pick the right belief system and the right moral code from the hundreds or thousands preached by Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Or rather, Orthodox Jews, Conservative Jews, Reform Jews, Hasidic Jews, Shi'a Muslims, mainstream Sunni Muslims, Wahabist Muslims, Orthodox Christians, mainstream Roman Catholics, American Roman Catholics, Roman Catholics who reject Vatican II, Anglicans, Methodists (of various denominations), Episcopalians (of various denominations), Baptists (of various denominations), Lutherans (of various denominations), ... you get the idea.

Occam's Razor, man. Pick the simplest explanation that fits the evidence. Since I can't find concrete, external evidence for God, I've decided to carry on as if God doesn't exist.

And yes, you can be a moral person without the threat of Hell after death. What about the threat of making this life more hellish, for example? The Golden Rule still makes sense, even if the person who said it was just a man.

(Aside: I remember being told that at least some Muslims have/had no concept of a soul that survives death. Rather, at Judgement Day, God will resurrect everyone, and consign the atheists, apostates, unrepentant sinners, and other ungrateful ones to eternal punishment. Apart from the sheer cruelty, it would be less effort just leave them dead, right? Plus, is the resurrected version of me consigned to everlasting hellfire the same person who's typing this sentence, or just a poor shmuck with my memories dropped into his head and suffering in my place? Just an errant thought.)

While I have a blog of sorts on my website, it's mainly to track the appallingly infrequent addition of fiction, game crap, or dinky programs. I might as well use this for something.

This Holiday Season I've mostly gotten presents for myself. Yes, I bought Mom a TV for her bedroom and a month of cable, and friends books and DVDs, but most prezzies are for myself, funded either by relatives or my own ill-gotten gains. (Not illegal, mind; getting the gains made me ill.) That's mainly because the gifts I usually get are a) cash or occasionally gift cards, b) candy and other edibles, or c) some minor knicknacks that some relative thought I'd like. A present from a friend is still lost in the mail, so I may be proven wrong this year.

Most of what I've gotten myself this year are (anyone? anyone?) books: RPG books, science fiction and fantasy books, and just today four computer books from Nerdbooks.com, so close and so wonderfully discounted. Now, I've tried to avoid thinking about software development or anything related to work, but January is creeping nigh, and it's time I started looking for gainful employment. The market for procrastinating novellists being astonishingly small, I'll have to fall back on writing software for a living. (Well, attending meetings, giving woefully ignorant estimates that are swiftly set in stone, getting interrupted to fix someone else's problem, and using my evenings and weekends when nobody's in the office to actually write software.)

But, honestly, my interest in software has been next to nil since I resigned my job. (Maybe the empty list ... sorry, LISP joke.) OK, I've written one or two Ruby programs to calculate die roll probabilities, and spruced up a word-counting program during NaNoWriMo, but that's it. Neither have I blossomed into a demon-driven novelist, a short-story master, a promising game designer, or the next Abelard. Mostly I've been Internet Guy without the corporate funding (or should I say promised corporate funding). My "sabbatical" is nearing its end and I've nothing to show for it. And to think I expected something different ...

Michael had started to doubt his sanity over the past few months, ever since the stray black cat had calmly walked into his life. First had come the nagging feeling someone was watching him, or trying to talk to him. Then had come the dreams, no nightmares of tentacled horrors and walking dead, of rending claws and twisted parodies of human beings, of giants and rats, and cats, always cats.

And now the stray was talking to him.

Thinking at you, actually, said the voice in his head. It's not easy using human words, but it's the only way I could get through.

"I'm going crazy", Michael muttered.

No crazier than any other human. It's those oversized brains. Now listen.

"I've been working too hard", Michael muttered to himself. "I need to lie down ..."

No sooner did Michael think of rising from his chair did the cat dart across the carpet and leap onto his chest. The cat's front claws dug through Michael's sweater, and two golden eyes glared into his. Would you focus, you oversized monkey?

Primal instinct made Michael freeze. The cat's claws retracted, but its paws still pressed against his chest. That's better. Now, we need your help.

"We?"

The cat growled. Stupid words. Why can't you humans ***** like us? I mean, we cats. The entire Imperium of Feline Worlds. And your kind too, of course.

Michael laughed. "'Imperium of Feline Worlds'?!" A sudden, inexplicable fear gripped him, and he froze, unable to move or scream.

This is getting tedious. Why don't you just stay there, and I'll explain. The cat climbed down, and paced the carpet.

We rule a thousand worlds. Not in outer space; that's a wasteland. Travel to the stars only if you really like lichens. But parallel to this Earth are a million other Earths; some differ from here only in tiny ways, others are so strange even your giant monkey brain couldn't imagine them. As the superior life form, we rule most of the comfortable ones.

Michael felt the terror slowly ease, and he ventured to interrupt. "Superior? Did you build cities? Cure polio?"

No, that's what humans are for. We just make you serve us.

"OK, maybe I can accept a telepathic cat, but you do not tell us what to do."

Oh really? The cat sauntered over to the kitchenette and meowed pitifully.

Michael leapt to his feet. "You hungry girl? Let me get you your din-din."

NOT NOW! Just making a point. Sit down. Good boy. As I was saying, we control about a thousand alternate Earths. The others aren't worth the trouble. Sure, you monkeys manage to screw up your own lives, with those huge brains of yours, but we're mostly comfortable. And until now, we've let you think you're in charge; you're easier to handle that way.

"Listen Blackie --"

Call me First Speaker to Humans. It's close enough to my actual name.

"OK, whatever. So you rule the Earth --"

Not me, idiot. I'm just a liason. The actual ruler is -- a giant golden cat, sliced tentacled things with one swipe of his paw and then the same paw, claws retracted, took an affectionate swipe at Michael's head -- which I can't really translate.

The intense vision filled Michael with joy and awe, and he found it hard to focus on First Speaker's continued pontification. But now the situation has worsened. On some way wrong version on Earth we haven't found yet, the Hollowers were born. The less you know, the better you'll sleep ... but if some friend of yours starts acting oddly, and develops a waxy complexion or loses all facial expression, never under any circumstances let him or her get you anywhere alone.

And yes, they found this Earth. Already we've discovered and neutralized advanced agents, some in your governments. That's why we chose you for first contact.

"But what can I do?"

First Speaker told him.

Michael couldn't sleep all night. It was an amazing and daring plan, but it would undoubtedly work. With the cats' help, in ten years not only would humanity thwart the Hollowers, but the various nations of this planet would set aside their differences, and forge a brand new future based on enlightened self-interest.

In the morning Michael checked himself into a psychiatric hospital. The doctors diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic, and medicated him heavily.

Outside the hospital, two cats sat, a huge orange tabby and a smaller black cat. The tabby swatted the other with his paw.

Oh, wait, that's another site.

Actually, this is just a dodge to see private LiveJournal entries of friends. Maybe I'll leave some brain-droppings here, maybe not.

Nothing to see here, move along.