The Ridiculous Work of a Prophet:

Six years ago today, I found a Beak on the porch outside a University of Pittsburgh building, showed it to some friends (without actually touching the filthy thing, of course), and set off a slow-motion freakout that continues to this day.

Having declared myself Prophet of the Beak, I had unwittingly handed myself a list of responsibilities I didn’t fully understand, since most of them were quite silly and unnecessary. What the hell did a prophet — and an atheist prophet at that — actually do? I couldn’t see the future, and even if I could, that seemed like a needlessly literal interpretation of the job description. I couldn’t lead people out of slavery or oppression. My attempts to found a religion met with little success, though I stand by my claim that the religion itself was solid.

But I had already registered the domain name, so I stuck a blog on there and ignored it for months at a time. Recently, I cleaned up the HTML and made the page a bit prettier, and that motivated Horatio and me to post more (like, a lot more), but it still didn’t seem like the work of a prophet, even when you define prophet-work as broadly as I do. Indeed, I was beginning to regret bestowing that title on myself.

My friends were (and are) a nice mix of mystics and atheists, with plenty of gray in between, but I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the mystic faction. If they believed in what they were doing in the woods (or wherever the hell people do that stuff), why were they so reluctant to talk about it. When I asked them how X worked, the reply was inevitably, “Well, X can’t really be explained.” If that was true, wouldn’t that imply it could still be explained badly? I was willing to settle for that. Prophets need to do their research.

But what do today’s mystics — the sort of people who fancy themselves prophets and take it seriously — really hope to achieve? They aren’t doing Harry Potter magic, and even the magic you read about in new age bookstores is mostly discussed in terms of metaphor. As the owner of a useless English degree, I like a good metaphor, but I didn’t want my spiritual well-being to hinge on my ability to talk myself into taking it literally.

All the trappings of mysticism — magic, meditation, and a whole range of rituals of varying craziness — are metaphors for perfectly mundane thought processes (relatively speaking; they’re still pretty weird, but there’s a boring, rational explanation for them). Just because I reject the metaphors doesn’t mean I have to reject the results. A ritual achieves nothing that simply sitting down and thinking about a problem won’t achieve just as nicely. The only difference is that most people regard their rituals as “special,” and as such assign undue importance to the topics addressed therein.

Saying you want something is just saying it. Praying about it is… also just saying it, but you’re making a bigger deal out of it. And that’s the only reason it works. People stick to their promises once they think God is involved.

If I didn’t believe in any of the available metaphors, what the hell did I believe in? Very little, it turns out, beyond a sense that humans possess a talent for thinking their way out of some really horrifying problems. And that’s more than enough to be a damn good atheist prophet.

You want some prophetic advice? How about this? You know all those problems that you ignore until you get the brilliant idea to ask the gods or spirits or tarot cards or whatever for help? Spend some time thinking about them in a totally non-mystical setting. Let them into your brain and leave them running as a background process while you go about your day. I have no idea how well that works, but I know it isn’t any less effective than eating Jesus-bread or tracing pentagrams in the air.

For all the people who have been wondering for the last six years, that’s it. That’s the mystical philosophy of the Order of the Beak. All the benefits of spiritual weirdness, with none of the dogma or discipline; “Know thyself” with a fresh coat of paint and (if I’m lucky) a fat price tag for any chumps who want further instruction.

It’s September 25, 2008, and the State of the Beak is strong.