god

I.

i’m back at mit for iap now (basically over the month of january you can take 4-week-long classes and do some other programs; actual semester starts in february) 😮 over winter break i:

• started (and finished 😀 ) watching death note. the show does a very good job of maintaining lots of suspense and retaining attention despite not having much action or a fast plot. in fact it probably has the highest suspense-to-action ratio out of any movie or show i’ve ever watched 😮 my main complaint is that the ost is for the most part not very memorable and the show doesn’t ever explore the morals of its subject matter (even though there’s very obviously a ton to discuss)
• crammed coding interview questions for a week and then had an interview and some real bs garbage happened update later
• finished my first draft of an a cappella arrangement for ohms! i’ll post the finished version here when i’m done, though it’ll probably take several weeks of edits and suggestions from more experienced arrangers
• reviewed a lot of usamo proposals yikes ._. and wrote some problems of my own for the first time in a while
• cooked a lot because my mom doesn’t trust me to cook by myself over iap??
• hung out a bit but not that much because lack of car access
• read to kill a mockingbird and it was really good 🙂 super touching characters + character development and the last 3 pages (no spoilers i promise) must be some of the most beautiful narration i’ve ever read: 

We came to the street light on the corner, and I wondered how many times Dill had stood there hugging the fat pole, watching, waiting, hoping. I wondered how many times Jem and I had made this journey, but I entered the Radley front gate for the second time in my life. Boo and I walked up the steps to the porch. His fingers found the front doorknob. He gently released my hand, opened the door, went inside, and shut the door behind him. I never saw him again. 

Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad. 

I turned to go home. Street lights winked down the street all the way to town. I had never seen our neighborhood from this angle. There were Miss Maudie’s, Miss Stephanie’s—there was our house, I could see the porch swing—Miss Rachel’s house was beyond us, plainly visible. I could even see Mrs. Dubose’s. 

I looked behind me. To the left of the brown door was a long shuttered window. I walked to it, stood in front of it, and turned around. In daylight, I thought, you could see to the postoffice corner. 

Daylight… in my mind, the night faded. It was daytime and the neighborhood was busy. Miss Stephanie Crawford crossed the street to tell the latest to Miss Rachel. Miss Maudie bent over her azaleas. It was summertime, and two children scampered down the sidewalk toward a man approaching in the distance. The man waved, and the children raced each other to him. 

It was still summertime, and the children came closer. A boy trudged down the sidewalk dragging a fishing pole behind him. A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips. Summertime, and his children played in the front yard with their friend, enacting a strange little drama of their own invention.

It was fall, and his children fought on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Dubose’s. The boy helped his sister to her feet, and they made their way home. Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day’s woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive. 

Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog. 

Summer, and he watched his children’s heart break. Autumn again, and Boo’s children needed him. 

Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough. 

…

“Yeah, an‘ they all thought it was Stoner’s Boy messin’ up their clubhouse an‘ throwin’ ink all over it an‘…” He guided me to the bed and sat me down. He lifted my legs and put me under the cover. 

“An‘ they chased him ’n‘ never could catch him ’cause they didn’t know what he looked like, an‘ Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn’t done any of those things… Atticus, he was real nice…” 

His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me. 

“Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.” 

He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning. 

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II.

it turns out i watched some more movies between the last post and this one:

• the imitation game was a great glimpse into alan turing’s mind and did a very nice job of making him a relatable human being; i definitely enjoyed it 🙂
• frozen 2 was pretty entertaining and had really good music though the song lyrics felt a bit lacking in effort, as in a lot of the lyrics felt extremely literal like they were just narration being sung- i think this is a common weakness of lower-tier musicals? like frozen 1 avoided this issue because many of its songs were more universal in nature while these songs definitely relied more on powerful vocals and osts instead of eloquent lyrics. the only real exception to this was ‘some things never change’ which really caught me off guard; i was literally crying a minute into the movie because (imo) it’s about all the people you’re not friends with anymore
• the irishman had good acting but the subject matter just didn’t appeal much to me.. it’s also 3.5 hrs long wouldn’t really recommend unless you enjoy this genre (which i don’t)
• edge of tomorrow was a pretty standard action movie idk also wouldn’t recommend
• the two popes was good at explaining why religious people act the way they do and what drives their beliefs and helped me understand them a lot better 🙂 more on this below

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III.

in 4th and 5th grade i went to church with a friend from a religious family. i liked the free snacks and there was a points system where you could exchange points for a variety of prizes; at the end of every semester i would exchange all my points for as many mechanical pencils as i could. church times were every friday night though (this was a kids program, not an actual church service) and it was sad because that meant i was never able to watch new episodes of the clone wars on cartoon network. 

in 6th grade i stopped attending. that was when i started reading the bible and finished a while later. not because i was particularly religious or anything- i more or less spent all of 6th grade reading books that most people would probably consider boring and my excuse was something like “it’ll help with quizbowl” (but also the bible is shorter than the harry potter series and most of it is mildly interesting so i’m not sure why so few people have read it)

in the summer after 7th grade i took geo3 at awesomemath with cosmin. on the first day of class we learned about pascal’s theorem (for hexagons) and he chose to introduce pascal with “you’ve probably heard of pascal from pascal’s wager…” instead of any of the hundred other things you’d expect awesomemath students to know pascal from and that confused me. it took me a long time to realize that for many people pascal’s wager is the only thing they know about him

sometime after that i stopped thinking about god; i think i simply became too busy with math and school and whatever to care. i don’t exactly know when this happened and i wasn’t even conscious of it until sparc after 10th grade when i got into an argument with vinjai and collin about the historical impact of religion and realized that i no longer believed a lot of the things i thought i believed in and there was actually no way to justify the argument i was in

after 12th grade i returned to sparc and was surprised when yan said he still talks to god and wishes god existed. because if god existed then maybe we would actually have morals and meaning and the world could be more beautiful, but instead we have to figure everything out on our own

now im a freshman and i watched the two popes last week. despite its name and content i’d argue it’s not about catholicism or christianity at all and shouldn’t be taken literally- the story of pope francis as a man who heard a call from god to spend the rest of his life serving the poor and weak is obviously a vast simplification of the truth. if anything the story is a metaphor for the ideals of what faith and love could be if we were better human beings. it’s about the freedom and empowerment we’d feel to wholeheartedly help other people if we genuinely thought that was the primary purpose of our existence; it’s about the simplicity and beauty and compassion our lives could take on if we had stronger beliefs. thats why religion is still beautiful, why i’m still in awe when i think about the towering spires and stained glass windows we saw at salisbury last summer- not because religion has actually done a great job of demonstrating service and empathy, but because at least it gave us the idea of trying to

in 11th grade i caught a particularly bad case of the flu. this was in the middle of the 11-month cough i got at 2017 imo, when i was thoroughly convinced i’d be sick for the rest of my life and that all the little illnesses would pile up until i died an early death because my body wasn’t meant to survive natural selection. it was nothing short of an obsession i had. so when i started feeling numb everywhere and shivering so badly i couldn’t move i was terrified and all my fear of the supernatural suddenly returned. in that moment i thought i was terrified of god and i told myself so many things that i would do differently if or when i was healthy again but really i was just scared of hell and pascal’s wager and when the flu went away and i never did any of the things i said i would do i realized that i didnt truly care about god anymore

nowadays when i think about religion i can’t avoid thinking about the sheer implausibility of such a thing- everything else has fit together smoothly so why introduce god to fix problems i dont have, discrepancies i dont observe? but a voice in the back of my head still whispers, “and what if you’re wrong?” and it’s the voice of irrationality and leftover habits from childhood but it’s also the voice of pascal and simple arithmetic, of a boy longing for a world with more love