ARGUMENT FROM BITTERNESS: (Sickness II) (Extended Version)
1) If God existed, he would hate me.
2) Freshman year I caught pneumonia.
3) Sophomore year I broke both my legs by running.
4) I was also put in the hospital later for a still unidentified illness.
5) Junior year I caught poison ivy for the first time. On my face.
6) Senior year I caught what feels like TB.
7) My plants keep dying for no reason.
8) Last night I ran into a shiny black Cadillac, license plate #383.
9) I need to give my suffering meaning.
10) God must hate me.
11) Therefore, God exists.
That is the proof of God I composed in a moment of bitter inspiration while writing in my blog about how much it sucks to be me. I was in a far better mood a week later, possibly due to an increased dose of drugs, and decided to flip back through my posts. I had to laugh at my own angsty stupidity when I came across the proof again, but I did realize that it had potential, and that I could make it work for my next Philosophy paper. I gave it a little tweaking, increased it from four steps to eleven, filled a few holes in the reasoning, and voila! I have reasonably proven to myself that God exists.
I was not so sure about other readers, however. Would they accept it to be a solid proof of God? Yes, most people look at me every time I’m sick and think to themselves that something must be out to get me, but would they actually take that thought far enough to look at this proof and think “Whoa…yeah, God really must exist”?
The proof does have a strong basis in fact for two of its most important points. For one, I really am always ill. My sicknesses are semi-sentient monstrosities that mutate and regroup for another attack instead of being completely destroyed. My doctors hate me because they cannot cure me, and I’ve had several people this year ask me if I’m a hypochondriac; they must have noticed the frequency of my illnesses, too.
Also, I am a very existentialist person. I’m always searching for the purpose and the meaning of this and that, and sometimes I go to absurd lengths to find it. So of course when I am faced with something as daunting as the apparent break down and destruction of my immune system I want to give it meaning. “Why me?” I ask my blog, and readers cringe in anticipation of more existentialist bullshit. The same process applies for the pointless death of all my plants, my dented hood from the Caddy’s chrome bumper, and the fact that the old breaks in my shins now prevent me from running long distance. Of course, all these quests for a higher meaning usually end with “God must hate me.” It is an extremely satisfactory and self-gratifying reason; it means I am important enough in the world, that I have made a big enough impact on it, to earn the ill will of its Creator.
There are also a few weaknesses in this proof that I felt should not be corrected for two reasons: One, it would make it even longer, and I had already doubled its size; two, it would kill most of the humor. Leaving in these weaknesses adversely affects the proof’s credibility, but since my purpose in writing it was not to convince people to accept my views of God or prove His existence to everyone, this is not that important.
First of all, this proof does not address what is directly causing my frequent illnesses. Since I have records that state I was a perfectly healthy, normal human being before I was brought to live here in
The second weakness is that I have no real proof that God would hate me at all. If we are to attribute my sickness to Him, I can only conclude that I must have done something upon moving here to bring down His wrath. But this cannot be true; I have been doing all the things my Christian brethren in the Bible Belt condemned me to Hell for throughout my entire life. I am not baptized. I believe neither that Jesus was the literal son of God nor that He rose from the dead. I know how to do runic and taro spreads and I read books with magic in them. And while this provides ample fodder for some of the less tolerant people out there to hate me, I am not quite sure God would sink so low as to do the same. And if this is true, the whole basis for my proof is undermined.
Therefore, it is a good thing that I wrote this proof with a mainly comic intent. Since I cannot prove without a doubt that God would hate me, there is no way this could be used to convince an Atheist that there is something out there to believe in after all. The Atheist would probably chuckle, however, and I would feel satisfied that my creative effort had not been wasted. Thus, I think my proof of God fits in quite well with the ones handed out in class.
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