Stole this from David's sermon notes:
David Foster Wallace, a brilliant writer, considered to be
genius, an agnostic said
“Because here's something else
that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is
actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping.
Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the
compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing
to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or
the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that
pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money
and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never
have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and
beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age
start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On
one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths,
proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The
whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”
Worship
power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more
power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being
seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of
being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not
that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default
settings. They're the
kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and
more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being
fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the
so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default
settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums
merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and
worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways
that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The
freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center
of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course
there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious
you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting
and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The
really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and
discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice
for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being
educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness,
the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had,
and lost, some infinite thing.We're all lonely for something we
don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes
around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?"
