(no subject)

[sebastienne]

Where's the point where you go from atheist scepticism, to the belief that there is a god, and she is fucking with you?

It's the point where you have a mood-swing towards the melancholy, and wander off in the dark along Marston Ferry Road with no particular aim. Just as you're stood at a lonely crossroads, trying to decide the best route to walk home, you're asked for help by a lost woman, looking for road you know but can't fully explain the directions to. This decides your route home, as you head up Headley Way with a bit of purpose - your mood lifting - in order to point her in the right direction. You feel better about your melancholy swing, about leaving the party early, because otherwise the woman would have walked even further out of her way - and there was barely anybody else on Marston Ferry Road for her to ask. The world fits together again.

Just as you're meandering along Gipsy Lane, pondering the strange serendipity of sequences of events like this, you come across a book - more seredipity, it's been placed in your way, like you were meant to leave to party early to help the woman to walk the long way home to find the book: "The Black Swan", by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a psychology-philosophy book about how we love to see patterns and narratives and connections when in fact none are present. Ha-ha, god. This round to you, I think.

Comments

[sccye.livejournal.com]

Heee. I've always thought that if there is a God/dess Zie's got a great sense of humour. Also, see Duckbilled Platypus.

[the-same-sky.livejournal.com]

What a lovely piece of writing - small but perfectly formed.

And all the better that it is true...

[h0m54r.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

Curiously, I was also at a party last night, on Marston Street. Given the infrequency of my party-going, this is quite an unlikely coincidence.

[ayaron.livejournal.com]

"about how we love to see patterns and narratives and connections when in fact none are present"

Surely the point to that is that such things can happen without the interference of any deity?

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Patterns, perhaps. But we see patterns where there are none because of things like the confirmation bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias), and even when there are patterns we attribute them to narratives, to cause-and-effect, where in fact there is just randomness.