[While his words are combative, House's tone is flat, tired.]
Why? Why would you accept this? When were you given the rules here? Not the hundreds of different rules laid out by a hundred different religions for all their different gods. I'm talking about the clearly delineated rulebook that says if you do X, you'll go to hell. You weren't. No one has been.
If god exists, then he's an asshole or he's indifferent. He doesn't hand out the right rules or sometimes any rules to everyone when they're born, and he gives us free will and then tells us not to exercise it or we're all gonna go to hell. Or are certain people going to hell part of the grand design? Because if he's meant to be omnipotent, then he knows what path you're heading down before you do. That's a crap way to manage creation.
I don't really care about the judgement from someone like that. Do you?
[He's had these discussions many times. Being a vampire and going in the company he had will do that to you. The answers are still well-rehearsed, even if they are beginning to fray when called upon to be more than words.]
If God exists, then we can't know his mind, and we cannot judge his design. Believe me - I've seen the gap in perception, in understanding, between the elders of my kind and even the wisest mortal. It's enough to teach anyone the folly of claiming we have any insight into the mind of the infinite. You are a doctor, you should know better than most that the greatest acts of kindness and care can seem strange and cruel to an ignorant eye. Faith means trust. And I -
[He wants to say, I still have faith. But it's hard to announce your devotion to a god who has already discarded you.]
I don't have a rulebook. I would agree with you, about free will. But I know that I am not a good man. I believe that essentially, we know what we are.
How can you 'know' anyone's mind? You're not inside their heads. I can judge the results of their actions, especially if those actions involve damning little kids and idiots to hell for arbitrary reasons like 'the grand design.'
I'm a crap person, too. Hale? Quark? Hamada? Frisk? Nah. Not so much.
I have faith and trust in individuals if I have to. Faith in some all-powerful being that's damned me to suffer for eternity? Pass. God gave up on us if he exists and this is hell. So he gave up the right to any of my faith or trust. Or yours. You're really gonna sit there and tell me someone slamming a door repeatedly in your face is doing it for your own good?
It's the failure to understand that makes you think of the grand design as 'arbitrary'. What do we know, when we say an action or result is good or bad? Only our limited vision. Our limited definition of good and bad - of time - of actions and results as a concept.
[The theology of it is easy. The other part, not so much. He understands House's anger and defiance. It compels and repulses him in equal measure.]
I don't know who deserves what. But if God is the reason - the alpha and the omega - then whatever his reasons are, they are the only ones that matter. He owes us nothing. He can give up on me, or you, or anyone he deems deserving, and we will be deserving by default. That is the point. To believe that there is a true answer - a true purpose - even if we will never know it, even if for us it means nothing but suffering. Because it still is. A truth that makes everything just.
Then nothing we do matters, and life itself really is ultimately meaningless. Faith and religion are meaningless. It was preordained. The choices you make have no relevance.
Before I got here, I'd just finished up teaching a class on diagnostics, filling in for some idiot who let his kids play with lead paint. 'World's #1 Dad,' my ass. [He's quiet a moment. But what the hell? Why not tell? It's not like this is a secret.] Three patients, three stories for the students to figure out. One of the stories was mine, my leg. I wouldn't let them take it off and complications happened. I died... technically, for over a minute. And you know what I saw?
Visions. Things that had happened, might happen, whatever the hell they were. All of that was just neurons firing, chemicals going crazy as my brain and body started to shut down. People say near-death experiences make you more religious. I didn't get any of that. I woke up and nothing was different, except my chest hurt like hell.
You choose to believe in god or not. There's no conclusive science to say there's anything there. Even all of this... it's not conclusive. It's just... more comforting to think that there is no god. Always has been. Because if there is a god, life has no meaning if he's dictating everything... or if you believe in free will, then it means that all of life is just a test. Either way, you're screwed because you were predestined or your life is under a microscope.
I never understood how people found that comforting.
[There's another pause, but House continues in the same monotone as before.]
Wilson's dead. Doubt he's coming back. He wasn't even mine, anyway. Timelines don't match up. Shouldn't matter. [But it matters.]
[That explains it, the call, the questions, everything. Wilson, House's friend - more his friend than Beckett has ever realised, to send House unravelling like that, falling open like that. Enough to come to Beckett. Or to God. And does either of them have an answer for him?]
Before I got here, I had a conversation with Cain. The Cain. Father of vampires. He had no answer to what was God's plan in cursing him - his reason for making him, and us - no more than anyone else. It's hard to be an atheist when you are yourself unquestionably supernatural, but to know from a firsthand account that God is, and that you will never know his mind in damning you and all your kin...
[Since House shared his dying story first. Well.]
Your visions may have meant nothing, but faith... my faith is not in revelation. Not anymore. The comfort isn't knowing the answer. It's - knowing that there is an answer. Life, the world, it has meaning to the one who made it. For us it might mean that all our choices were predestined but what is the other option? To be lost in a world where things happen simply because they do, because that happens to be the accident of chance? If I suffer, if I'm tested, at least God knows why. There is need for the test, for suffering. And perhaps there is grace...
[No. His belief only reaches so far.]
Otherwise, your friend died for no more reason than just the cold randomness of life.
Better he died because of cold randomness than some design that no one but one asshole can understand. I don't care if someone else knows why I'm suffering or being tested. I want to know why. The answer, itself, is what matters, not that there just is one. What's the point of having the answer there if you can't know it? It's as good as not having an answer.
And some all-powerful super being. If I can't figure out a way to explain something complex in a way that's generally understandable to the average person, then that's my failing as a teacher and a doctor. And maybe I can't explain something ultra complex in one sitting, but that doesn't mean it's incomprehensible. It just means you have to break it down.
Telling someone 'You won't understand,' is cheap. It means 'I don't have the time or inclination to break it down for you.'
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branchandroot
cw: discussion of religion (just sliding in this warning)
Date: 2016-12-04 11:07 pm (UTC)Why? Why would you accept this? When were you given the rules here? Not the hundreds of different rules laid out by a hundred different religions for all their different gods. I'm talking about the clearly delineated rulebook that says if you do X, you'll go to hell. You weren't. No one has been.
If god exists, then he's an asshole or he's indifferent. He doesn't hand out the right rules or sometimes any rules to everyone when they're born, and he gives us free will and then tells us not to exercise it or we're all gonna go to hell. Or are certain people going to hell part of the grand design? Because if he's meant to be omnipotent, then he knows what path you're heading down before you do. That's a crap way to manage creation.
I don't really care about the judgement from someone like that. Do you?
no subject
Date: 2016-12-04 11:39 pm (UTC)If God exists, then we can't know his mind, and we cannot judge his design. Believe me - I've seen the gap in perception, in understanding, between the elders of my kind and even the wisest mortal. It's enough to teach anyone the folly of claiming we have any insight into the mind of the infinite. You are a doctor, you should know better than most that the greatest acts of kindness and care can seem strange and cruel to an ignorant eye. Faith means trust. And I -
[He wants to say, I still have faith. But it's hard to announce your devotion to a god who has already discarded you.]
I don't have a rulebook. I would agree with you, about free will. But I know that I am not a good man. I believe that essentially, we know what we are.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-04 11:58 pm (UTC)I'm a crap person, too. Hale? Quark? Hamada? Frisk? Nah. Not so much.
I have faith and trust in individuals if I have to. Faith in some all-powerful being that's damned me to suffer for eternity? Pass. God gave up on us if he exists and this is hell. So he gave up the right to any of my faith or trust. Or yours. You're really gonna sit there and tell me someone slamming a door repeatedly in your face is doing it for your own good?
no subject
Date: 2016-12-08 07:23 pm (UTC)[The theology of it is easy. The other part, not so much. He understands House's anger and defiance. It compels and repulses him in equal measure.]
I don't know who deserves what. But if God is the reason - the alpha and the omega - then whatever his reasons are, they are the only ones that matter. He owes us nothing. He can give up on me, or you, or anyone he deems deserving, and we will be deserving by default. That is the point. To believe that there is a true answer - a true purpose - even if we will never know it, even if for us it means nothing but suffering. Because it still is. A truth that makes everything just.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-08 08:01 pm (UTC)Before I got here, I'd just finished up teaching a class on diagnostics, filling in for some idiot who let his kids play with lead paint. 'World's #1 Dad,' my ass. [He's quiet a moment. But what the hell? Why not tell? It's not like this is a secret.] Three patients, three stories for the students to figure out. One of the stories was mine, my leg. I wouldn't let them take it off and complications happened. I died... technically, for over a minute. And you know what I saw?
Visions. Things that had happened, might happen, whatever the hell they were. All of that was just neurons firing, chemicals going crazy as my brain and body started to shut down. People say near-death experiences make you more religious. I didn't get any of that. I woke up and nothing was different, except my chest hurt like hell.
You choose to believe in god or not. There's no conclusive science to say there's anything there. Even all of this... it's not conclusive. It's just... more comforting to think that there is no god. Always has been. Because if there is a god, life has no meaning if he's dictating everything... or if you believe in free will, then it means that all of life is just a test. Either way, you're screwed because you were predestined or your life is under a microscope.
I never understood how people found that comforting.
[There's another pause, but House continues in the same monotone as before.]
Wilson's dead. Doubt he's coming back. He wasn't even mine, anyway. Timelines don't match up. Shouldn't matter. [But it matters.]
no subject
Date: 2016-12-08 09:54 pm (UTC)[That explains it, the call, the questions, everything. Wilson, House's friend - more his friend than Beckett has ever realised, to send House unravelling like that, falling open like that. Enough to come to Beckett. Or to God. And does either of them have an answer for him?]
Before I got here, I had a conversation with Cain. The Cain. Father of vampires. He had no answer to what was God's plan in cursing him - his reason for making him, and us - no more than anyone else. It's hard to be an atheist when you are yourself unquestionably supernatural, but to know from a firsthand account that God is, and that you will never know his mind in damning you and all your kin...
[Since House shared his dying story first. Well.]
Your visions may have meant nothing, but faith... my faith is not in revelation. Not anymore. The comfort isn't knowing the answer. It's - knowing that there is an answer. Life, the world, it has meaning to the one who made it. For us it might mean that all our choices were predestined but what is the other option? To be lost in a world where things happen simply because they do, because that happens to be the accident of chance? If I suffer, if I'm tested, at least God knows why. There is need for the test, for suffering. And perhaps there is grace...
[No. His belief only reaches so far.]
Otherwise, your friend died for no more reason than just the cold randomness of life.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-08 11:00 pm (UTC)And some all-powerful super being. If I can't figure out a way to explain something complex in a way that's generally understandable to the average person, then that's my failing as a teacher and a doctor. And maybe I can't explain something ultra complex in one sitting, but that doesn't mean it's incomprehensible. It just means you have to break it down.
Telling someone 'You won't understand,' is cheap. It means 'I don't have the time or inclination to break it down for you.'