What about the name?
Apr. 20th, 2001 11:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saint_monkey"Saint Monkey" I mean. Everything seems to be synchronous lately, and all of my friends are involved in monkeys or elephants in some way, but I promise that i'm not just on the popularity train here, the name has a history for me.
For a long time, I made a vain attempt to be religious for my grandfather's sake. It would have broken his heart to tell him that I did not believe in God, so I never did. In a way, "God" to me was my grandfather.
When he died, I felt freed to truly abandon the concept of God, and as a way of coming to grips with that, I wrote little poems for about a year, dealing with God, (pissed at him,or his followers mostly.)
One day, while looking into research on rhesus monkeys for a project, I became just positively monumentally depressed over the evil that man perpetrates on nature in the name of the progression of man. (Not necessarily the preservation of nature, or even conscious stewardship of nature.) Earlier in the year, I had just read a wonderful book about "Washoe," a chimp raised to be human by a california couple. They taught her sign language. Washoe uses language as language, and she expresses herself eloquently and coherently. It is a very beautiful thing. For the first time, humans have encountered and communicated with intelligent life outside of their experience. It should be listed as an earth-changing event.
Anyhow, I started thinking about all of those rhesus monkeys in their cages, wired to machines, and I couple that with the thought that they may be coherent intelligences, capable of constructing their own religions, their own mythologies. Perhaps even communicating them orally, far more subtly than we have thought to look. Some research scientists want to discount Washoe, saying that she is simply "mimicking" and her attempts to construct new words for her surroundings are simply random babble, interpreted by her handlers. They don't want to face the idea that Washoe, and other research subjects are capable of cognition, because it may spell the end of their research.
Thinking about this, the idea that religions, the foundation of hopeless hope, could exist in some limited way among these monkeys, and we as the devils in their hell, want to deny them even the right to exist in order to further our own needs (and for what? Jesus Christ, cosmetics? ridiculous.) Thinking about that, I started to cry. (don't figure me as someone who cries a lot. I almost never cry, not even when my grandfather died.) Where was the "saint monkey" that would come free them from their cages?
That's when I knew for sure that God was dead, and he wasn't my grandfather, because he would never permit such a thing.
For a long time, I made a vain attempt to be religious for my grandfather's sake. It would have broken his heart to tell him that I did not believe in God, so I never did. In a way, "God" to me was my grandfather.
When he died, I felt freed to truly abandon the concept of God, and as a way of coming to grips with that, I wrote little poems for about a year, dealing with God, (pissed at him,or his followers mostly.)
One day, while looking into research on rhesus monkeys for a project, I became just positively monumentally depressed over the evil that man perpetrates on nature in the name of the progression of man. (Not necessarily the preservation of nature, or even conscious stewardship of nature.) Earlier in the year, I had just read a wonderful book about "Washoe," a chimp raised to be human by a california couple. They taught her sign language. Washoe uses language as language, and she expresses herself eloquently and coherently. It is a very beautiful thing. For the first time, humans have encountered and communicated with intelligent life outside of their experience. It should be listed as an earth-changing event.
Anyhow, I started thinking about all of those rhesus monkeys in their cages, wired to machines, and I couple that with the thought that they may be coherent intelligences, capable of constructing their own religions, their own mythologies. Perhaps even communicating them orally, far more subtly than we have thought to look. Some research scientists want to discount Washoe, saying that she is simply "mimicking" and her attempts to construct new words for her surroundings are simply random babble, interpreted by her handlers. They don't want to face the idea that Washoe, and other research subjects are capable of cognition, because it may spell the end of their research.
Thinking about this, the idea that religions, the foundation of hopeless hope, could exist in some limited way among these monkeys, and we as the devils in their hell, want to deny them even the right to exist in order to further our own needs (and for what? Jesus Christ, cosmetics? ridiculous.) Thinking about that, I started to cry. (don't figure me as someone who cries a lot. I almost never cry, not even when my grandfather died.) Where was the "saint monkey" that would come free them from their cages?
That's when I knew for sure that God was dead, and he wasn't my grandfather, because he would never permit such a thing.
