Christopher Munoz 1302.

57
The Illusionist Sees Nothing
There is an itch within my being that few words in our language can articulate. As children, the
thrill of understanding a world which spat you into existence seemed to be the objective at hand. Those
who showed us the tools in going about this world had their own view as to what it is but as a child I was
enraptured by its processes and inner workings. Ive learned firsthand that the child-like wonder could
be perverted and sold under the guise of hope and faith. Theres no doubt that writing has proved to be
among civilizations first great work and arguably the most important. What would there be without it?
Looking back on how I learned to read and write I discovered that there was probably not a more
defining text to which I can attribute who I am to more than the American Standard Version of The
Bible. It took years to develop my writing style and critical thinking to finally free myself from the
bondage of faith but that struggle shaped my being, my morals and my skepticism for which I use to
hunt for truth.
Think of when you were a child, a little sponge taking in all thats around you in the day to day of
childhood. Waking up to your mothers voice as she turns on the light because you didnt hear her try to
wake you or she decides to rip off the blankets after the next time you dont respond. You went to
school and your teacher is trying to keep you focused on the task at hand but for some reason some of
the children arent paying attention. The task isnt deep enough and it doesnt captivate you. I recall this
one instance on some mundane school day we were directed to draw an activity that we liked to do at
home. I dont remember the instructions verbatim or if I even cared to follow them, but I began to draw
an alien the size of the paper. As I go through the memory of this day I can remember that I was wearing
a long sleeved shirt as my little hand went on about doodling. Im sure at some point I got bored with
just the outline of the alien so I began to draw the guts inside his body. I had watched The Magic School
Bus regularly and by recalling what I had learned from the human anatomy episode, I was able to
accurately draw most of the digestive system of human beings and was able to explain the names and
functions of the organs I drew. (I was 4). Now this may seem tangentially related to my development in
writing but is a necessary precursor and a hint at my desire to step out of the realm of banality and to
explore the imagination with the fresh eyes of a child captivated by the understanding of the truth that
is going on all the time around us. These are the spaces where mankind has gone to ponder ideas and
thoughts into invention and rhetoric that change the world. There is not a beauty or pleasure quite like a
truth of the natural world. But as it has been demonstrated countless times before, innocence and the
thrill of exploration take a backseat to reality in the adult social environment. This is where I found fault
and discourse in the adult view and found myself pushing harder and harder away from it as it tried to
force itself down my throat and nearly succeeded.
I remember in my youth sitting in a small classroom on Saturday mornings that closely
resembled the classrooms I would attend during the week but there seemed to be one main difference.
I say main difference because it wasnt a huge difference but there were symbols of the Christian
cross on the assignments done by the children who attended the private school during the week. I
thought it was strange but shrugged it off being the child I was. So in these classrooms wed go over the
stories of the bible as if it we were learning history in public school. This seemed perfectly logical to me
being that I was around 8 years old. The story of Noah from the Bible was uttered in Saturday CCD
classes all throughout the Catholic denominations and of course children like me believed what these
adults were telling us. I believed the stories of creation and the Bible to be separate from science just as
history is separate from science but I turned out to be right about that in very much a different way than
Christopher Munoz 1302.57
I had expected. As far as I could tell, they had yet to conflict with each other. No doubt the work to hide
the truth of the actual nature of this world and the people within it.
By this time in public school we were putting together strings of sentences that were not yet
whole paragraphs or at least not in what I can remember. Maybe it was my fascination with marine life
that sucked away my attention from the weekly activities in class but I was definitely hooked by the
almost ridiculous displays of the evolutionary capacity to thrive within the realms of The Deep. There
was a book that I no longer have that classifies many fish and sea life and I remember vividly stumbling
onto a page of an Angler fish. A deep sea angler fish has a little tentacle from the top of its forehead
with a luminescent tip to attract small fish near its mouth in the darkness of deep ocean waters. It is one
ugly fish and is one that always stuck out to me as a kid. So I wrote a lot about the ocean and the
mysteriousness of its vast uncharted depths. By its sheer mysteriousness, a lot of the information I got
about deep sea creatures was from mythology and old stories of supposed happenings in the Unknown
of what could actually be down there. Things like the Kraken or giant squid isnt far from truth when we
uncover very old fossils of ancient fish that were immensely huge. Even today there are remnants of a
colossal past in giant fish such as the whale shark, which at maturity can reach over 40 feet long and
weigh up to 47,000 lbs. (about 1,000+ lbs. per foot in length.) As I read over my writing, I can feel the
nostalgia of my old interests setting into this still young scientist just as it did when I was a child and
there is no doubt that is the very nature which urges me on.
Fast forward to about 8 years later and I am beginning to undergo a religious sacrament within
Catholicism is called Confirmation. It is a reestablishing of your baptismal promises that the parents
make for the children when they are infants. At normal length as determined by the church to attend
Wednesday church class for 2 years but in my 2
nd
year I began to have doubts as to whether I wanted to
pledge my allegiance to the Catholic Church. I did not do so that year. Instead I began to read the works
of the Quran and The Old Testament closely and compared all three major religious works. I did not yet
excite an idea of non-religion and determined that I could practice Catholicism and still tolerate the
other religious beliefs. That in a way sounds arrogant and in retrospect is. The idea that someone can
just accept another individuals views existence without questioning those views and your own is to
accept that you avoid ideas that may change narrow perspective and in no way is that open minded.
Religious tolerance is just a way of saying, Dont talk about mine and I wont talk about yours. Theres
no dialogue or exchange of ideas. Not knowing then what I know now, I mistakenly went about
completing the sacrament of Confirmation. Only after did I exercise the idea of non-religion and after
scrupulous analysis have I determined that modern humanity can do much better than those fables and
stories.
I think by practicing to write as we get older we become better writers but only by applying
essential questions and thought can we generate meaningful substance on things that the previous
perspectives may have overlooked. With a decline in Fundamentalist Religious practice in recent
America I believe there is to be a true awakening of what I can only describe as an honest introspection
of our reconciliation with the human condition. Exercising doubt and skepticism of antiquity is the only
way our species will truly begin to understand ourselves and our place in the cosmos.


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