Almig’s great what a guy what a guy,
So you best praise Him often you know why you know why,
Because He isn’t always listening
In the spring of 2003, Kent Candlewood was a Cognitive Science student at Yale University kicking around ideas about the mind, truth, computer science, and animal psychology. Actually “kicking around” is putting it mildly. “I was obsessed,” he says, “with knowledge. I wanted to build AI." This pursuit of knowledge as an absolute end was making him depressed and miserable. "You can’t know everything," he says, "You can’t know your way to God. Our rationality is inherently limited. I started thinking, why are we obsessed with knowing our way to truth...why can't belief be just as true?”
He took off from the insular world of New Haven Yalies to spend time studying rhesus macaque monkeys in Puerto Rico. It was there in the hot tropics, at a time he describes as his “first time really in a foreign land by myself as an adult,” that he developed what he calls the “AWPish” faith (“AWP” stands for “Almig Worshipping Person”), though he is quick to correct me when I call him its creator.
“I didn’t create Almig. He was revealed to me by the prophet,” he says with a wry smile (wryness is central to this religious exercise). He is about to tell me the story, but first some context. The month of May in 2003 was notable for a number of reasons: The SARS epidemic was finally ebbing in Asia, the worst heat wave since the 17th century was sweeping the European mainland, Slovakia and Lithuania both voted overwhelmingly to join the EU, and, as many will I’m sure nostalgically remember, our humble US President George W. Bush basked in military victory aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln declaring “the end of major combat operations in Iraq” in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner. But to those future practitioners of the AWPish faith, there was no more important event than the release of that most prophetic of movies: Bruce Almighty.
For those who haven’t seen it, Bruce Almighty tells the story of Bruce Nolan (played with aplomb by Jim Carrey), a television reporter passed over for an anchor job and then fired. He complains to God (the always wise and grave Morgan Freeman). God is the “one who should be fired," he yells to the heavens. So God, seeing an opportunity for lesson-teaching, secretly invites Bruce to an abandoned warehouse and gifts the bitter man with His absolute powers. Bruce of course makes a mess of things, cleans up his mess, learns his lesson (humility) and lives happily ever after.
Or, as it is sung in the morning prayer of AWPs (to the tune of “Over the Rainbow”)(Also a note: capital “G” is never used for Almig as “god,” I am told, it’s saved for the real one):
Somewhere there is an Almig way up high
He is a fair and just god, and quite an okay guy
And it is to this Almig we do pray
For peace, His health and wisdom and an un-boring day [And ****jobs]
When Bruce was not an anchorman he knew god did not have a plan and complained to him,
So god came down and spoke with Bruce and gave him all His powers true and that is how he became
Aaaaalmiiig
Okay, let’s take a step back. Some explanation is in order. As Kent tells it, he and a group of fellow researchers were going to see this latest gem of Hollywood cinema in the town of Punta Santiago when they passed a sign that read simply “Bruce Almig.” Another of the researchers joked that the locals, not being native English speakers, might mistake “Almig” for the actual word of the title, not recognizing it as a shortening of the word “Almighty.” And what’s more, this guy (“the prophet” Kent calls him), wondered (this came in a series of zingers that alternated from obnoxious to silly) : what if some locals didn’t realize that it was a fantasy movie? What if someone thought the story of Bruce Nolan, the field reporter being given the powers of God, was documentation of an actual event?
The question stuck with Kent. He took it even further. “What if this was real,” he says, “What would it be like to believe that this terrible Hollywood movie was scripture. To look at Bruce Almighty as a Christian looks at Gospel. As the Word of God?”
At the time Kent was, like any good Ivy League scientist, an atheist. He grew up in a Jewish household but says that, by the time he reached his Bar-Mitzvah, he realized that he simply did not believe in God. And yet he was unsatisfied. “Atheism is boring,” he says, “but you can’t just suddenly have faith.”
I asked him the pressing question: Was Almig just a cure for boredom? “Maybe a little bit,” he says. He is telling me all this in the shady and abundantly growing backyard of his New Orleans home. His wife Veronica, the second of three or four AWPish practitioners back when the fake religion was in full swing (“AWPish was actually the religion listed on my medical records for a little while” she says), is beside him. “If you don’t believe, you don’t believe,” she says. “Exactly,” Kent picks up, “but then, I also didn’t want to be an atheist for very practical reasons. It wasn’t just boredom. I was miserable. It’s a very useful thing to have, God.”
He gives an example:
“I’m looking at that orange tree,” he points to a small tree growing in potted soil, “and I know that I’m neglecting it. I see some yellowing leaves and know there’s not enough soil. It’s nice to say, ‘God willing’ [the tree will stay alive] and feel a little less anxious about it.”
“It’s a bad example,” he’s quick to add, “but you get it.”
Veronica chimes in: “It’s a way to externalize responsibility and externalize explanations for things.”
“Yeah,” Kent continues, “a young child dies, you want to say ‘there must be a reason.’ For me not having God meant I didn’t have that. Then it was just, ‘the world fucking sucks.’ So that’s what Almig was for. Almig was, ‘well what if you start without faith, and have the absence of faith and know that it’s fake. That what you’re worshipping is fake, pure idolatry, and the idol is not even a symbol for anything.”
Kent, ever the philosopher and scientist, considered his lack of belief in God neurologically. “We have this part of our brain, this faith/God part of our brain,” he explains, “but could that part have been killed by this hyper-rational linguistic 21st century American academic bullshit? So I was trying to use behaviorism to hack back into it. And it works.” He became a zealot for Almig. For three years he prayed multiple times a day to Almig. He incorporated the language “Almig willing” into nearly every sentence. He celebrated Almig’s Birthday on any day he wasn’t feeling great (observance always involves eating a cake). He wrote songs and prayers and invited other Atheists into his new fake religion. Most treated it as a joke. Which, of course, it was. Sort of.
Doing the behaviors zealously is vital to the fake religion. With a cosmology based on a silly movie, it's not the substance of the rituals that matters, it's the actual doing of the rituals that, however ridiculous they may be, re-circuits the brain to accept truths that are separate from logic. This takes serious commitment to certain daily behaviors, just like with a quoteunquote "real" religion. To be a practicing AWP means adhering to that commitment, to praying every day, performing the specific acts of Almig worship (this includes developing your own Almig worshipping sound and hand motion, saying “Almig Bless” instead of “God Bless” to which the proper response is “yeah whatever,” and eating the holy sandwich whenever possible: a 6 inch Subway sub of tuna on honey oat) and living with Almig in your heart. The silliness of the religion is critical to its efficacy. It makes prayer and ritual fun.
According to Kent, over time these steady and continuous behavioral changes put him back in touch with the part of his brain that accepts faith. Think of like doing exercises to strengthen a muscle that's atrophied over generations.
“I think the behavior turned into faith in Almig when I was in Israel,” Kent says. That was two years after the prophet’s revelation. “I spent a lot of time in the desert, in the mountains, by myself, a lot of time in Almig. I did the behaviors of Almig for a year and a half before the faith started to come. Three years of faith in Almig before the real one crept back in. But I think the real one actually came in right away. That’s the same time I stopped believing in free will, started believing in signs.” It was also in those years that Kent met Veronica at Yale. In the fall of 2005, Veronica was a Katrina refugee. She was supposed to be starting her freshman year at Tulane University. With New Orleans under water, Veronica drove up to Yale and talked her way into enrollment. She and Kent met in an EMT class. “Believing made it easier for us to get married,” Kent says. “Though I don’t think I came out of the God closet for three years.”
The connections between Almig faith and Kurt Vonnegut’s knowingly fake religion Bokononism from his novel Cat’s Cradle are not lost on Kent. “I didn’t realize immediately that Almig was totally derivative of Bokononism,” he says, “but it makes sense. It’s one of my favorite books.” Indeed both AWPishness and Bokononism are steeped in ironic humor and knowing falsehood. “Almig is a weak, shitty god,” Kent says, “He’s not really all powerful. Maybe he has the power, but he has no idea how to use it. He’s surfing all the time, he’s barely paying attention, he’s kind of a stoner. He’s basically worthless most of the time.” Indeed, in the cosmology of AWPishness, Almig is a terribly ineffectual God. While the phrase “Almig willing” becomes attached to any stated wish or desire, it’s understood by practitioners that Almig’s help is generally non-existent or very poorly executed. As the psalm says, "he isn’t always listening."
And yet at the root of both fake religions, AWPishness and Bokononism, is a humility associated with the unknowability of the answers to the ultimate questions of God and Being. Vonnegut writes, “She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing.” This sentiment strikes directly at the heart of Almig worship. “The most important thing you can say about Almig,” Kent says, “is ‘He works in mysterious ways.’ That’s the response to all questions. That was the part of God that I wanted. The explanation. The whys. Why is that horrible thing happening? Oh, ‘He works in mysterious ways.’”
This gave rise to the most famous of Almig prayers (to the tune of U2’s ‘Mysterious Ways’):
Almig’s great
Almig’s great
Soooooo great
He works in mysterious ways
Veronica adds, “There’s not much better than giving that answer to a bunch of Ivy League intellectuals. They don’t know what to do. Some laugh, but some are offended at just the shittiness of that answer. I mean, that’s part of the fun. But it also works. It’s holy irreverence.”
“You can’t get to God with just knowledge,” Kent says, “that’s what I understand now. Knowledge and belief are on separate tracks. It’s not like you can know enough to believe in God. But you can hack your way there.”
“Irritating intellectuals was a juicy side effect of saying He works in mysterious ways,” Veronica says. She reflects on the whole experience, “The main points were, I think, to maybe stop spending quite as much time arguing about Why Things Are The Way They Are so as to get on with actively engaging in life. It was an attempt to take a break from exclusively using the logic tool and learn to use the God tool too.”
So you believe in God now? I asked him.
“Yes,” he says, “And Almig helped me get there.”
“Bzzzzz” he says and makes a “raise the roof” gesture with both hands.
Stay tuned for the next post where I write about some of Kent’s ideas about the “real God” and some of my own take on the relationships of irreverence, absurdity, and mystery with spirituality.
And to end this story in the traditional AWPish manner: Anyway, less or more, that’s how it happened.
Yeah whatever.
So you best praise Him often you know why you know why,
Because He isn’t always listening
In the spring of 2003, Kent Candlewood was a Cognitive Science student at Yale University kicking around ideas about the mind, truth, computer science, and animal psychology. Actually “kicking around” is putting it mildly. “I was obsessed,” he says, “with knowledge. I wanted to build AI." This pursuit of knowledge as an absolute end was making him depressed and miserable. "You can’t know everything," he says, "You can’t know your way to God. Our rationality is inherently limited. I started thinking, why are we obsessed with knowing our way to truth...why can't belief be just as true?”
He took off from the insular world of New Haven Yalies to spend time studying rhesus macaque monkeys in Puerto Rico. It was there in the hot tropics, at a time he describes as his “first time really in a foreign land by myself as an adult,” that he developed what he calls the “AWPish” faith (“AWP” stands for “Almig Worshipping Person”), though he is quick to correct me when I call him its creator.
“I didn’t create Almig. He was revealed to me by the prophet,” he says with a wry smile (wryness is central to this religious exercise). He is about to tell me the story, but first some context. The month of May in 2003 was notable for a number of reasons: The SARS epidemic was finally ebbing in Asia, the worst heat wave since the 17th century was sweeping the European mainland, Slovakia and Lithuania both voted overwhelmingly to join the EU, and, as many will I’m sure nostalgically remember, our humble US President George W. Bush basked in military victory aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln declaring “the end of major combat operations in Iraq” in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner. But to those future practitioners of the AWPish faith, there was no more important event than the release of that most prophetic of movies: Bruce Almighty.
For those who haven’t seen it, Bruce Almighty tells the story of Bruce Nolan (played with aplomb by Jim Carrey), a television reporter passed over for an anchor job and then fired. He complains to God (the always wise and grave Morgan Freeman). God is the “one who should be fired," he yells to the heavens. So God, seeing an opportunity for lesson-teaching, secretly invites Bruce to an abandoned warehouse and gifts the bitter man with His absolute powers. Bruce of course makes a mess of things, cleans up his mess, learns his lesson (humility) and lives happily ever after.
Or, as it is sung in the morning prayer of AWPs (to the tune of “Over the Rainbow”)(Also a note: capital “G” is never used for Almig as “god,” I am told, it’s saved for the real one):
Somewhere there is an Almig way up high
He is a fair and just god, and quite an okay guy
And it is to this Almig we do pray
For peace, His health and wisdom and an un-boring day [And ****jobs]
When Bruce was not an anchorman he knew god did not have a plan and complained to him,
So god came down and spoke with Bruce and gave him all His powers true and that is how he became
Aaaaalmiiig
Okay, let’s take a step back. Some explanation is in order. As Kent tells it, he and a group of fellow researchers were going to see this latest gem of Hollywood cinema in the town of Punta Santiago when they passed a sign that read simply “Bruce Almig.” Another of the researchers joked that the locals, not being native English speakers, might mistake “Almig” for the actual word of the title, not recognizing it as a shortening of the word “Almighty.” And what’s more, this guy (“the prophet” Kent calls him), wondered (this came in a series of zingers that alternated from obnoxious to silly) : what if some locals didn’t realize that it was a fantasy movie? What if someone thought the story of Bruce Nolan, the field reporter being given the powers of God, was documentation of an actual event?
The question stuck with Kent. He took it even further. “What if this was real,” he says, “What would it be like to believe that this terrible Hollywood movie was scripture. To look at Bruce Almighty as a Christian looks at Gospel. As the Word of God?”
At the time Kent was, like any good Ivy League scientist, an atheist. He grew up in a Jewish household but says that, by the time he reached his Bar-Mitzvah, he realized that he simply did not believe in God. And yet he was unsatisfied. “Atheism is boring,” he says, “but you can’t just suddenly have faith.”
I asked him the pressing question: Was Almig just a cure for boredom? “Maybe a little bit,” he says. He is telling me all this in the shady and abundantly growing backyard of his New Orleans home. His wife Veronica, the second of three or four AWPish practitioners back when the fake religion was in full swing (“AWPish was actually the religion listed on my medical records for a little while” she says), is beside him. “If you don’t believe, you don’t believe,” she says. “Exactly,” Kent picks up, “but then, I also didn’t want to be an atheist for very practical reasons. It wasn’t just boredom. I was miserable. It’s a very useful thing to have, God.”
He gives an example:
“I’m looking at that orange tree,” he points to a small tree growing in potted soil, “and I know that I’m neglecting it. I see some yellowing leaves and know there’s not enough soil. It’s nice to say, ‘God willing’ [the tree will stay alive] and feel a little less anxious about it.”
“It’s a bad example,” he’s quick to add, “but you get it.”
Veronica chimes in: “It’s a way to externalize responsibility and externalize explanations for things.”
“Yeah,” Kent continues, “a young child dies, you want to say ‘there must be a reason.’ For me not having God meant I didn’t have that. Then it was just, ‘the world fucking sucks.’ So that’s what Almig was for. Almig was, ‘well what if you start without faith, and have the absence of faith and know that it’s fake. That what you’re worshipping is fake, pure idolatry, and the idol is not even a symbol for anything.”
Kent, ever the philosopher and scientist, considered his lack of belief in God neurologically. “We have this part of our brain, this faith/God part of our brain,” he explains, “but could that part have been killed by this hyper-rational linguistic 21st century American academic bullshit? So I was trying to use behaviorism to hack back into it. And it works.” He became a zealot for Almig. For three years he prayed multiple times a day to Almig. He incorporated the language “Almig willing” into nearly every sentence. He celebrated Almig’s Birthday on any day he wasn’t feeling great (observance always involves eating a cake). He wrote songs and prayers and invited other Atheists into his new fake religion. Most treated it as a joke. Which, of course, it was. Sort of.
Doing the behaviors zealously is vital to the fake religion. With a cosmology based on a silly movie, it's not the substance of the rituals that matters, it's the actual doing of the rituals that, however ridiculous they may be, re-circuits the brain to accept truths that are separate from logic. This takes serious commitment to certain daily behaviors, just like with a quoteunquote "real" religion. To be a practicing AWP means adhering to that commitment, to praying every day, performing the specific acts of Almig worship (this includes developing your own Almig worshipping sound and hand motion, saying “Almig Bless” instead of “God Bless” to which the proper response is “yeah whatever,” and eating the holy sandwich whenever possible: a 6 inch Subway sub of tuna on honey oat) and living with Almig in your heart. The silliness of the religion is critical to its efficacy. It makes prayer and ritual fun.
According to Kent, over time these steady and continuous behavioral changes put him back in touch with the part of his brain that accepts faith. Think of like doing exercises to strengthen a muscle that's atrophied over generations.
“I think the behavior turned into faith in Almig when I was in Israel,” Kent says. That was two years after the prophet’s revelation. “I spent a lot of time in the desert, in the mountains, by myself, a lot of time in Almig. I did the behaviors of Almig for a year and a half before the faith started to come. Three years of faith in Almig before the real one crept back in. But I think the real one actually came in right away. That’s the same time I stopped believing in free will, started believing in signs.” It was also in those years that Kent met Veronica at Yale. In the fall of 2005, Veronica was a Katrina refugee. She was supposed to be starting her freshman year at Tulane University. With New Orleans under water, Veronica drove up to Yale and talked her way into enrollment. She and Kent met in an EMT class. “Believing made it easier for us to get married,” Kent says. “Though I don’t think I came out of the God closet for three years.”
The connections between Almig faith and Kurt Vonnegut’s knowingly fake religion Bokononism from his novel Cat’s Cradle are not lost on Kent. “I didn’t realize immediately that Almig was totally derivative of Bokononism,” he says, “but it makes sense. It’s one of my favorite books.” Indeed both AWPishness and Bokononism are steeped in ironic humor and knowing falsehood. “Almig is a weak, shitty god,” Kent says, “He’s not really all powerful. Maybe he has the power, but he has no idea how to use it. He’s surfing all the time, he’s barely paying attention, he’s kind of a stoner. He’s basically worthless most of the time.” Indeed, in the cosmology of AWPishness, Almig is a terribly ineffectual God. While the phrase “Almig willing” becomes attached to any stated wish or desire, it’s understood by practitioners that Almig’s help is generally non-existent or very poorly executed. As the psalm says, "he isn’t always listening."
And yet at the root of both fake religions, AWPishness and Bokononism, is a humility associated with the unknowability of the answers to the ultimate questions of God and Being. Vonnegut writes, “She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing.” This sentiment strikes directly at the heart of Almig worship. “The most important thing you can say about Almig,” Kent says, “is ‘He works in mysterious ways.’ That’s the response to all questions. That was the part of God that I wanted. The explanation. The whys. Why is that horrible thing happening? Oh, ‘He works in mysterious ways.’”
This gave rise to the most famous of Almig prayers (to the tune of U2’s ‘Mysterious Ways’):
Almig’s great
Almig’s great
Soooooo great
He works in mysterious ways
Veronica adds, “There’s not much better than giving that answer to a bunch of Ivy League intellectuals. They don’t know what to do. Some laugh, but some are offended at just the shittiness of that answer. I mean, that’s part of the fun. But it also works. It’s holy irreverence.”
“You can’t get to God with just knowledge,” Kent says, “that’s what I understand now. Knowledge and belief are on separate tracks. It’s not like you can know enough to believe in God. But you can hack your way there.”
“Irritating intellectuals was a juicy side effect of saying He works in mysterious ways,” Veronica says. She reflects on the whole experience, “The main points were, I think, to maybe stop spending quite as much time arguing about Why Things Are The Way They Are so as to get on with actively engaging in life. It was an attempt to take a break from exclusively using the logic tool and learn to use the God tool too.”
So you believe in God now? I asked him.
“Yes,” he says, “And Almig helped me get there.”
“Bzzzzz” he says and makes a “raise the roof” gesture with both hands.
Stay tuned for the next post where I write about some of Kent’s ideas about the “real God” and some of my own take on the relationships of irreverence, absurdity, and mystery with spirituality.
And to end this story in the traditional AWPish manner: Anyway, less or more, that’s how it happened.
Yeah whatever.
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