Manifesto V

Dedicated to the principles of Following Our Lord, Jesus Christ, and Our Sister, Eris Discordia, in the pursuit of life-as-game for the Salvation of Mankind from the Tyranny of the Devil, who is One Who Cannot Abide Mockery and is known as Greyface to the Illumined, we Sacrifice the need to have our beliefs be taken Very Seriously Indeed by others.

Learning to not take Love, Laughter, and Life less seriously than ideas about reality, we progress along that infinite golden road toward a place of serene and uninterrupted Bliss that is the Kingdom of God and which has no war, strife, or Hot Dog Buns (obligatory stale joke). The burning chaos of creative fire which is the Lord is the goal of our path and we welcome those who would walk it with us as long as they at least pretend to get it. Because we all know that what you pretend to be, you eventually become.

Our Lord said that He was, among other things, The Truth. Being content with this statement as the basis of our Faith frees up a good bit of mental horsepower from pointless tasks like wondering what The Truth is, which we can now dedicate to trying to figure everything out. This is not the same, because if you are trying to figure things out, you don't need to be looking for Truth, only small-t truths that are confined to well delineated domains of applicability.

Try this some time: go out and read a bunch of philosophy and while you're doing it, keep in mind at all times the statement, "I don't know what I'm talking about, and neither does this guy." The results will be more dramatic if you read two well reasoned works which come to different conclusions. It works the same for theology. Eventually you start to realize that all philosophy and theology is a thin net of words stretched over a more substantial but less objectively accessible framework of experience and assumptions. Change either one, and the whole structure shifts. (These are the grids that are explained in Psycho-Metaphysics.) This whole thing is then a shell of artificial sense and nonsense covering a vast ocean of Who Knows What, flowing under the Feet of Our Understanding. (This is not to be confused with a Feat of Understanding, which is hard to stand up to.)

The implication of Our Lord's statement is that while statements may or may not be the truth, they can never be The Truth, because that's what He is, and He is not a statement, but is instead a guy. And God. At the same time. Members of ILHJ are forbidden from claiming to understand that, but are encouraged to believe it if they want to. The standard Discordian prohibition against believing what one reads applies here: you really have to feel it, and then, like, you GET it.
Meditate on how the Truth can be a Guy until you understand it, then meditate some more until you don't.

The great thing about beliefs is that you can use them to organize your life into a grand adventure if you want, and the bad thing is that you can also make your life a terrible burden using a variant on the same technique. No one can ever prove a standard-issue belief either true or false, because the sorts of things that can be done this way are not beliefs. The inverse square law is not a belief, because it can be measured and verified. A belief is an organizational filter that gives meaning to experience. (Do you believe that?)

[Bullshit makes the flowers grow, and that's beautiful.]