Coincidence

One of the little quirks that seems to stay in my belief system in spite of the ever-shifting tides of my personal opinions is my refusal to believe in coincidences. Synchronicity, I will call them, or the universe trying to tell me something, or the signs of a sense of humor in the mind of God. I can't call them coincidences. I can't call them random chance or statistical oddities, which I suppose is why, in spite of my willingness to pick up and try on just about any passing religious belief, I will never make an attempt at atheism.

Atheism seems so boring, really. And it brings to mind a memory of asking someone, what do you believe? and he pointed at a book by Christopher Hitchens and said, "That book." The way I see it, never trust anyone whose belief system can be defined in the course of one book.

I hear mutterings amongst the Christians, and possibly amongst the other one-book religions! Settle, folks, I'm not bashing your religion. Because yes, the Bible is the be-all-end-all source, but your entire religion isn't encapsulated entirely within its pages. There's interpretation there, there's room for debate, there's generations of people arguing about it and writing about their arguments and reading all the other arguments and writing about those, too, and eventually someone gets up on a preacher-place and talks about it and that's the religion you learn.*. A Christopher Hitchens book, on the other hand,  is a book of interpretation, it holds a single argument. A snot-nosed one, at that. To say that your entire belief system is entirely extant and explained within one book and to have it be a book like that strikes me as being too close-minded to be trustworthy.

Also, I hate bloody Christopher Hitchens. I've got no problem with atheists who just...don't believe in a higher power. There's a bit of me that respects the nonbelief, for all that I think it's dull as hell. There's a certain amount of courage in that. And if you meet a nice atheist, they're not being nice out of fear of celestial retribution, but because in a world without gods we only have one another. It's beautiful, when you think of it like that.

But an atheist who's actively out to condemn and mock all other religions? Bite me and all my collected God-and-gods, you condescending little shit.

And yes, before you make the accusation, as a matter of fact I did read the book in question. Did you think perhaps you were dealing with the sort of person who doesn't read a thing that's been put in front of her just because she doesn't happen to agree?

But I was talking about coincidences, and how I don't believe in them. The impetus for this was an interesting one, as it happens. This morning, I woke up with the hankering to go through all my zip drives and see what was on them. I had backed up a goodly amount of my artwork from previous computers, and I was thinking about one drawing in particular that I never finished coloring and decided to look for it. The first drive I plugged in was a mystery; it had folders, but none of them were mine, because none of the folder names had exclamation points in them and a few of them were in Japanese.

Odd, I said to it, and was promptly hit with the realization that at some point in the history of this zip drive, it had been accidentally exchanged for one that looked exactly like it. I should mention that this zip drive could not have left the house in at least a few years.

BOY, WAS I UPSET. Two gigs of drawings and pictures and writing, gone into the possession of some random person two to three years in my past! The little Godzilla in my head rampaged away for about five minutes, and then I found a music folder.

I don't know about you, but I always have a few songs playing in the back of my head. My brain is a bit like an iPod on crack. Several iPods on crack, actually, since there's usually a jangle of twelve different songs playing at exactly the same time. If you wonder why sometimes I have a particularly wild look in my eyes, that's why. Usually one song tends to take precedence over the others, and that's the one I sing under my breath when I'm supposed to be doing things like keeping quiet because other people in the library are trying to study so-shut-the-fuck-up-you-crazy-bitch.

This song has been stuck in my head for four days, where it has been slowly driving all the other songs insane:

The chances of the first song in the zip drive's music folder being that song was really quite improbable indeed, but there it was. Make of that what you will. I decided that clearly, the gods have talked about it and concluded that I need more random music in my life, and so arranged for a way by which this could come about.

Unless it is Christopher Hitchen's zip drive. Then it's clearly just coincidence.

*Unless you're a straight literalist. You guys can mutter away, because apparently if your daughter got raped, you'd have no issues selling her to the rapist. I have a bone to pick with about seventy percent of Leviticus.Maybe more; I'd have to reread it to make sure, and I'm not in the mood this morning.