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What If? BEAU SPERRY

Our What if? essay series encourages you to embark on philosophical adventures more frequently and motivates you to regularly push past the boundaries of conventional thought. To read previous submissions, click here

This open-ended thought experiment is participatory and accessible to everyone.

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BEAU SPERRY currently lives, studies, and drinks in Paris.   When he grows up he wants to be a kid again.  He traces his roots below the soil of a Utah cattle farm, and is currently on a yearlong sabbatical from undergraduate studies in Maine where he studies Philosophy and English Literature.  Twenty-six weeks ago he saw it rain in the Sahara.

 

What if?

What if the keystone of propositional logic is a door through which we exit what is knowable, a priori; so that we might watch, wild-­‐eyed, as one infinity builds itself around another?

What if?

***

When I was nine, a pastor told me that only God knew the Capital T Truth and that the rest of us got lower-­‐cased, a lower caste. I wish I had responded, confused but earnest, “What if man created all the letters?”

What if we created letters, but letters are imperfect? We must see the contradiction in God’s theoretically perfect decision to use an imperfect means to speak to us, to impart immaculate teachings. Why would God convey perfect words in an imperfect medium? Because the imperfect is the only possible way we, the distinct snowflakes that constitute the blizzard that is existence, could hope to understand it.

What if sometimes God realizes that not all good things can exist without conflicting one another and tolerates negative consequences as contingencies to the necessity of a greater good? What if in other words, God bets against the market? If this is true, heaven might look like an investment bank in the mid-­‐2000s. Angels may be writing complex derivatives and creating toxic, negative contingencies for the profit of the greater good, the greater God. What if morality is in itself amoral, and goodness painful in its utility?

What if there lies a capital underneath morality, and that God is getting symbolically rich off of the mortgage that original sin took out in your name?

***

If any of this proves itself, may it be a testament to the idea that the most ornate cathedrals may depend upon a single keystone. If not, may I remain a hollow body who asks earnest, confused, as all emptied bodies do, “What if?”

 

Published: April 15th, 2014

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