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WEAR YOUR INSIDES OUT<\/strong>: Remember how I promised you a post about how God\u2019s like a killer mutant cat? This is that post!<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t now find the post at Secular Right<\/a> which triggered this response, but I recall it as an ingenue, even a gamine, in which the author asked why theists so often assumed that the atheist worldview was bleak or depressing: How can we feel bereft when there is Mozart and springtime?<\/p>\n

And yeah, I\u2019m really sympathetic to that view. I used to believe that people generally chose the worldview whose position on the afterlife was hardest <\/em>for them to accept, because that was what I and my godfather and several other people I knew had done. Mozart and springtime can prompt astonished feelings that reconciliation has happened, somehow, when we weren\u2019t looking.<\/p>\n

Perhaps some of the reason I reject that view comes from a difference in temperament. But I\u2019m more interested in exploring whether my difference with this atheist-amid-cherry-blossoms worldview is based on our divergent approaches to the relationship between beauty and meaning.<\/p>\n

One could view beauty as its own meaning, in the same way that it\u2019s its own justification. I\u2026 don\u2019t actually know what that would feel like, or look like, because I don\u2019t do it, but conceptually it seems possible.<\/p>\n

But to me beauty is always an arrow, always points beyond itself; it\u2019s always lack as well as presence. It\u2019s always both two faces, and the vase in the negative space between them. When I\u2019m most present to beauty, it seems to me that I can hear the blood pulsing beneath the skin, the life and vulnerability and horror beneath the musculature. Samuel Delany\u2013maybe in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand<\/em>\u2013? but I think actually in Babel-17<\/em>\u2013anyway, he described a man\u2019s muscles as \u201clike snakes in milk.\u201d And the glamour and danger of the snake deepens the beauty of the man.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to The Uninvited<\/em>! Badmovies.org<\/a> summarizes its plot with, \u201cA killer mutant cat that hides inside another cat.\u201d And a) that is one of the most awesome things I have ever read, but also b) that\u2019s pretty much what I think beauty is. A cat, with all the reality and life of a cat\u2026 but inside the cat\u2019s skin, there\u2019s something else, something more powerful, something more real. When I talk about \u201cmeaning,\u201d which I should do less often (it\u2019s an easy crutch for the theist), it\u2019s this killer mutant cat-within<\/em>-the-cat which I mean.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"