My first girlfriend converted me to Christianity. This was somewhat shocking for her, since she wasn't Christian and hadn't tried to do anything. In fact, she tried to convert me back, but the damage had been done. I'm not any more, but the revelation she provided me with sticks with me to this day, influencing my views on existence.
Let me back up a moment.
Her name was Melody, and she was a nihilist at the time. Not just any nihilist, but a world-hating, existence-is-pointless, the-universe-doesn't-give-a-fuck nihilist. I know, sounds like a real peach, but I was too so we got along pretty splendidly. We could hang around and hate the world together, throw rocks at the speed limit signs on the roads, steal her dad's cigarettes, and generally have a meaninglessly good time. I'm pretty sure her dad abused her. I just didn't get my xbox that year and got a little angstier than a normal 16 year old would get when he didn't get what he wanted.
As a nihilist, I believed very firmly in evolution since belief in the randomness of life is pretty much a keystone of that philosophy. Life, all life, is just a series of molecules that happened to come together in a way that replicated itself, and from there it grew and evolved through mutation. Eventually you get mankind, bears, sharks, emus, the flu bug, mosquitoes, and Samuel Beam. All freak chances of mutation to the basic, self-replicating genome, building up over time. There was no creator, there was no intelligent design, nothing helped us on our way except for some UV radiation and natural selection.
This, however, was proved conclusively incorrect to me by Melody. Because of her, I understood that there must be some sort of design behind it all, that life, as we know it, could not have been random.
This was because of her period.
At 16, I did not know very much about women, physically or mentally (I'm still figuring out that second one). Being world-hating buddies, we ended up messing around a bit, nothing really serious, depending who you ask. Anyway, we were in one of our make out sessions and I decided to grope a bit. She said no, she was on her period. I knew the basics of how to get a girl pregnant from sex ed class, but this was a foreign concept to me. She explained it to me, since the girls obviously had a different sex ed class more oriented to their gender-specific issues.
A few weeks later, it hit me.
How in the hell can this be an evolutionarily selected trait? What is it about bleeding because we didn't get pregnant that made mankind more likely to survive than our competitors? Where did this gene come from anyway? You don't see your dog walk around bleeding once a month because she didn't get her freak on. They don't close down the Chimpanzee exhibit at the zoo because their female is having her time of the month. No other life forms have this peculiar trait.
It convinced me that there must be some sort of intelligence that not only singled out mankind as separate from the rest of animal life, but also that whatever that intelligence is, it's a bit of a dick and hates women.
The menstrual cycle of women is what makes me believe in Satan.
ReplyDeleteThat does seem like a pretty reasonable conclusion as well, but I suppose that to believe in Satan is to believe in his opposite. In my 16 year old mind, it fit very well into the Garden of Eden story, with Eve being cursed for her failure to resist temptation.
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