All that is

All that is, is. All that ain't, ain't. Ain't? But before we get into all that,

Is this not strange and wondrous, this thing what just happened unto me? A few weeks ago, pursuant to having lost my wallet in Nwalins, I set about getting a newly certified copy of my birth certificate from the New Jersey Bureau of Vital Statistics. This bureau's website shunts all that is visiting and that opts for 'expedited records requests' to some creepy fulfillment shysters in Texas. A confusing series of events and decisions and failed faxes later (all that is irrelevant and kind of embarrassing), and suddenly I found I had accidentally paid both the creepy Texan shysters and the N.J. Bureau of Vital Stats for, respectively, an expedited and a non-expedited request for my birth certificate.

The expedited request was delivered UPS about a week ago.

This afternoon, someone from the N.J. Bureau of Vital Stats just called me and said, 'You had a copy of your birth certificate send last week, and I just came upon another request, non-expedited, that looks like a duplicate... Just wanted to know did you still want this one?'

Holy crap. A civil servant who went out of her way to check on something I'm SURE she didn't have to check on. A nice gesture. A mitzvah.

All that is is seriously better now.

All I know is that I could not possible know whether or not I know something or other.

or, The Philosophers Stoned

the_mishka pointed out, during the excellent dinner party she and jaegerbeast spearheaded at the Clarendon Silver Diner last night, the existence of the word 'ignosticism,' a non-belief system that holds that even agnostics claim too much knowledge about the existence of 'god.'

Now, I have the utter respect for people whose job it is to sit around inventing and then lamenting philosophical problems (usually turning on clever manipulations of language and meaning... they're basically the corporate attorneys of human understanding, but so far nobody's really caught on and lynched them). But friggin' yikes: this term is annoying and I want no part of it. The sentence 'An ignostic cannot even say whether he/she is a theist or an atheist until a better definition of theism is put forth' (from Wikipedia) is sophistry: theism could be defined as the belief in an old guy with a white beard on a throne in the sky, belief in the Force, belief in Santa Claus, or belief that, every time a box of Ritz crackers is sold in a Giant Supermarket with no broken crackers inside, an angel gets a blowjob. What does 'better definition of theism' even mean? (Falsifiable? See below.) Wait, I have one: God is me. Ding ding ding! I'm a theist! (Or 'God is I': I'm a theist and a SNOOT.)

The position seems an utterly made-up one that no human could truly be said to hold except in formal debates or on the grounds of super-principled logical orneriness: i.e., playing Spock. I don't therefore believe that ignostics exist. Call me an anignosticist. I'll also accept 'pugnostic'.

In other words, saying that a cogent definition of god precedes the arguments for or against the existence of god is one thing (to my mind, one irrefutable thing); saying that, because of a logico-semantic loophole, I cannot choose to identify as an atheist based on my opposition to the extant body of known human definitions of god is another (to my mind, horseshit).

...As is the claim by various philosophers that the proposition 'God exists' is meaningless. This is based, so far as my VAST web research reveals, on defining 'meaningless' as 'unfalsifiable'—but this is an empty if not fallacious definition. (I could accept that any proposition that is unfalsifiable is 'useless' in logical terms, but not meaningless.) No human being who would utter the proposition 'God exists' with any sort of vested interest (e.g., her/his faith) would consider it meaningless. Nor would any person who looks at the world and sees the astonishing things, both beautiful and terrible, done in the name of the gods defined by and believed in by other people! Philosophers who derive meaninglessness from meaning can suck my butt just as much as those who force meaning on poor, unsuspecting meaninglessness.< /rant>