Lonly Traveler

It has become so cold here,
That my flowerbed
Has come down with a severe cold.
My petunias wither
Right before my humid eyes
And fall to the ground.
Times are so cruel.
My comrades of the olden times
Were unable to bear
The hardships of the path
And left me alone midway.
I walked the path
Through rocks and thorns
With tired legs and bleeding feet
All the way up
To this place of early winters,
Of the unknown,
Of loneliness,
Of nostalgia,
Of weeping eyes,
Of cold-stricken petunias,
Of friendlessness,
Of bottomless pit of despair.

One day,
Spring will return
From behind the bend
In the wintry road,
And my heart will warm up
With the rays of a sun
That does not crawl into bed
Early in the evening
With exhaustion.
On that day,
I would like you
To be next to me,
To see that
The everlasting snow
That has fallen on my hair
Does not thaw
With the rays of the spring sun,
And to know that
Every spring
That comes and goes
Could be the last
For this traveler
Of the roads of loneliness.

You chose not to be
The walker of this hard path.
You,
And my comrades of the olden times,
All left me alone half way.
I pray that
You be prosperous in your staying.
In my traveling,
Though,
I did not find a souvenir
Worthy of bestowing
Upon the bleeding feet
Of a tired itinerant.

I watch the trays
Of the balancing scale:
On one the time past,
On the other the time to come.
How heavy is the time past!
And how light is the time to come!
So much is the difference
That I know,
For sure,
That one of these days
I will experience my flight.
I am tired.
And the road in front of me
Is still hard,
Despite the gigantic difference
Between the past and the future.
I long for a kind companion,
Who would hold my hand in hers,
Who would whisper
Words of hope in my ears.

By golly, I love this journalistic assignment. Every book, every article I have read so far has demanded that I be aware that there is no absolute black and white, that all issues fall on a continuum of gray spectrum. Now here, I am told, “there is no standing on the fence,” that this is an “either or” situation. I either have to side with science and technology or should dispel them as detrimental to humankind’s well being.

The first article that I presented to the revered editors of Butterfly Effects was flatly refused. I was told that I had been “all over the place in my article.” The implication: I had failed to take a stand. And I would not have been able to take a stand for or against science, had I not been introduced to a powerful new religion, the Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster. Ironically, the person that enlightened me as to this amazingly comprehensive worldview is a science teacher. But Spaghetti Monster works in mysterious ways! He is able to get his message across in so many unorthodox ways, including through a Physics instructor.

The Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster was founded by Bobby Anderson in an effort to provide a final and all-inclusive explanation to the theory of creation, putting an end to the controversial issue of evolution versus intelligent design. In his detailed letter to Kansas School Board, Bobby Anderson writes, “We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it” (FSM website).

The result of my investigation into the Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster was such a strong revelation that I can no longer trust anything that the mundane human knowledge can offer. Science is not but a body of knowledge about the world that humankind would be better off not knowing anything about. It is not that the Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster is the first religion to declare this fact about science. The word science can be traced back to its Latin root scientia meaning “knowledge.” Today’s science is an accumulative collection of everything that humankind knows – or thinks s/he knows – about the universe. The old testament makes it clear to its followers in the book of Genesis that Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden because they had eaten the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and had, therefore, learned what the Lord knew:

Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground - trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” (The Holy Bible, NIV)

Knowledge, obviously, was not very helpful to Adam and Eve, the Lord’s favorite human beings. How stupid of us, ordinary men and women, to think that it can be of any help to us!

Knowledge has brought us not but misery and misfortune, and I do not just mean the atomic bomb, pollution, hazardous toxic and nuclear waste, or a hole in the Ozone layer. It has turned us into knowledge-hungry animals whose thirst for more to know can never be quenched. The more we know, the more we want to know. A vast amount of human wealth and energy is invested in the dissemination of knowledge. All these schools, colleges, and universities are a waste of resources when all the answers are provided to humankind by religious institutions, and specially this latest addition to the vast pool of human’s spiritual treasures, Pastaferianism – the Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster.

I strongly recommend that the readers of Butterfly Effect closely examine this new theological system and the answers that it provides to the crucial questions of life and death. Before becoming a Pastaferian, I was a follower of Zoroastrianism, one of the oldest religions of the world. By some estimates only two to five hundred thousand of the followers of this religion have been able to endure the persecutions of other more populous faiths. Today, many Zoroastrians live in India. There are so few Zoroastrians in the United State that when I told my professor in my Intercultural Communication class that I was a follower of Zarathushtra – Zoroaster – he reacted with the happiness of an insect collector that has come across a disappearing monarch butterfly.

The problem with Zoroastrianism, and for that matter any other religion, big or small, is that although they categorically declare that knowledge and science are a hindrance to the ultimate discovery of the spiritual truth, they are too tolerant and forgiving in their handling of different scientific disciplines. Some religions even allow sciences to be taught in universities that are funded by them. Take a Catholic university such as Gonzaga for instance, an absolute contradiction in terms! How can one be a Catholic and yet allow sciences to be taught in a university that should be entirely dedicated to stopping the free dissemination of knowledge? After all isn’t Catholicism the proud pioneer in persecution and punishment of the like of Galileo Galilee, who attempted to block humankind’s ascend towards celestial spiritualism through his knowledge-seeking scientific experiments? Sadly, most religions show great tolerance towards the evil propagation of knowledge!

As a Zoroastrian, I was a knowledge-hungry person much like all the students in college and university classes. I thought, for instance, that the Intercultural Communication class would give me the knowledge to deal with my “blonde” American girlfriend, and I mean “blonde with a capital B.” Spaghetti Monster forbid, I do not mean any offense by saying “my ‘blonde’ American girlfriend.” To be honest with you, I was once married to a “blonde” Iranian brunette. My “blonde” American girlfriend and my “blonde” Iranian brunette wife had two things in common: They both lacked savoir-faire and were challenged by knowledge; and, frankly, they were both much happier than I have ever been.

All these experiences and the incidental introduction to the Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster by the most unlikely person – a physics instructor - brought me to the sudden revelation that humankind can be happier not knowing all the things that we know today. I then had no doubt in my mind that I wanted to convert to Pataferianism, which is probably the only religion that categorically dispels any kind of science and scientific finding. I was inducted into the Faith in a simple ritual in the Old Spaghetti Factory. And now I have no need for science and the technologies that it makes possible.

To a Pastaferian, science is but a body of knowledge that complicates clear judgment, and therefore blinds one to the glory of the great Spaghetti Monster, the omniscient, the omnipotent, and the omnipresent. He knows it all for all of us, so we do not have learn!