A good use for Omegle

I got into a really interesting conversation on Omegle the other night. It illustrated a worthwhile use-case for Omegle: fishing for a sounding board.

Here's how it works:

1. Identify some topic that isn't clear in your own thinking, that you'd like to work through.
2. Come up with a pick-up line and an initial conversation script.
3. Go fishing. Launch into your pre-planned conversation until someone bites.
   
4. Have the conversation.

So, for example, I have all of these doubts about whether the Bible is actually any different from other scriptures in a way that could be compelling to modern people. I want to work through these doubts. Recently I read the Koran, so I came up with a pick-up line based on that. I went through maybe 12 or 15 conversations before I found a good Stranger. And he was perfect! He let me do most of the talking, but he didn't really let me get away with any crap. I was very happy with the experience.

I present it to you here in its entirety:

Stranger: Hi
You: Hi! Have you ever read the Koran?
Stranger: Nope, have you?
You: Yeah.
You: It was repetitive.
Stranger: I'll bet
Stranger: Should I read it?
You: Have you read other scriptures?
You: Yeah, probably.
Stranger: I've read other scripturess.
You: There's two things about it.
Stranger: Yes?
You: On the one hand you have about 40 different statements (not many) that get said like 1000 times.
Stranger: Right...
You: Then you have maybe half a dozen that only get said once.
Stranger: Sounds about right.
Stranger: What's your favorite book, if not the Koran?
You: Well, I'm a bible fan, to be honest.
Stranger: What's the difference?
You: I read the Koran because I wanted to see what it was like.
You: (compared to the bible, that is)
You: First of all, it is a lot less homogeneous.
Stranger: How do you mean?
You: Like, you have some repetitive parts, sure. But not nearly as much repetition.
You: There a greater variety of genres in the bible.
You: History, myth, poetry, letters, etc.
Stranger: That's true. That's probably because it was written by multiple people.
You: s/There/There's/
You: Right!
Stranger: So was the Old Testament.
You: I also find the stories to be much more human.
You: There's a complexity that you don't (I didn't) find in the Koran.
You: For example, the heroes in Genesis, for example, are shady characters.
Stranger: That's okay - the Zen koans aren't complex either, but there's a lot to derive from them.
Stranger: Right...
You: So you've read in Zen?
Stranger: Not much - just picked up a couple of books in high school.
You: Right.
Stranger: Actually, I'm not very interested in religion - it all seems homogenous to me.
You: Yeah?
You: Have you read Genesis? :-)
Stranger: I have
You: Didn't do anything for ya.
You:That's fair.
Stranger: It's a nice set of stories, but it just borrows from other creation myths
Stranger: Plus, there are conflicting stories right within the text
You: Which ones? Have you read them?
You: (the other creation myths)
Stranger: Yes, like Gilgamesh.
You: Have you read Gilgamesh?
Stranger: No, just heard it recounted
Stranger: I took a religion course in Uni
You: Word.
Stranger: The way I see it...
You: Yes?
Stranger: 2000 ~ 5000 years ago, people generally lived similarly to one another. Many were nomadic, or lived in small tribes or villages. They needed explanations for things they couldn't explain, and moral rules for things that would destabalize their fledgling groups. The Old Testament, the Bible, the Koran... these all meet that need.
Stranger: At the same time, none of those books are able to look past the age in which they were written, and are generally inapplicable to modern thought.
Stranger: For every "do not kill" there's a "sacrifice your daughters to the mob instead of letting them take these two male strangers".
Stranger: What do you think?
You: I think that your view is the majority view of Internet people.
Stranger: I'm not sure - I've met many internet people who think otherwise.
Stranger: But in my country it's the majority view generally speaking.
Stranger: Are you in the USA?
You: You said "Uni" ... UK?
You: Yeah, USA.
You: I'm frustrated by this view, to be honest, because I don't think it's adequate to the texts themselves.
Stranger: How do you mean?
You: I.e., if you actually read Gilgamesh, it's very different from Genesis.
You: Let me couch this a bit.
You: What I want to think is that Gilgamesh and Genesis have "important" differences.
You: And the study I've done to date bears that out.
Stranger: What kinds of differences?
You: I want to do more study, because I want to know.
You: For example, in ...
You: Ok. Back-pedal. :-)
You: I haven't actually read Gilgamesh. :-D
You: But I printed it out.
You: It's short, first of all.
You: And I have a good friend that read it.
You: (I'm sounding lamer to myself here.)
You: :-)
You: But the idea is that in the other creation myths ...
You: humanity is an after-thought
You: humanity is the mud that falls from the gods' shoes
You: a nuisance
You: In Genesis, creation is good, humanity is good.
You: Those are the sorts of differences I mean.
You: I think, at least, that it is worth actually studying.
Stranger: But if humanity is good, then why in Genesis does God choose to destroy all humanity except for one family?
You: Though it's another leap again to say what the differences mean for the modern world.
You: Do you know of Joseph Campbell's book, Hero with a Thousand Faces?
Stranger: No, I haven't heard of it. What is it about?
You: He takes all of the world's mythologies and religions and psychoanalysis to boot ...
You: And he kind of lets his vision go all blurry until they line up.
You: It's definitely my favorite non-religious book.
You: (To answer your earlier question. :-) )
Stranger: Hmm, sounds interesting.
You: So what he comes up with is a basic story line.
You: It is!
You: It's where George Lucas got Star Wars from.
You: Literally.
You: "I am your father!" is straight from that book.
You: So the "monomyth" as Campbell calls it (the term is James Joyce's, I believe) ...
You: is basically ...
You: naive villager goes out exploring in the wild world
Stranger: I can imagine! Boy with uncertain parentage, has great fate in store for him, goes on quest, meets teachers, topples the old regime...
You: has adventures
You: right, right
You: exactly
Stranger: Haha, I see we're talking about the same thing ;)
You: he journeys to the center of the universe
You: there he finds his father/mother
You: the father/mother is an ogre
You: hero steals the fire
You: or the father is beneficent, grants the boon
You: and the hero returns/flees with the boon back across the world
You: (adventures)
Stranger: I see!
You: and then the hardest part of all: crossing the return threshold
You: back into the village
You: and delivering the boon to the still-naive villagers
You: who do not understand the gift
You: EOF
Stranger: EOF? And you said I was an internet person! ;)
You: :-P
You: Did I say I wasn't? :-P
Stranger: You did not.
You: Anyway, I basically love Campbell.
You: I read the old testament especially that way.
Stranger: So that said, doesn't that put the bible into perspective as on par with other books of mythology, long since abandoned?
You: So this is a roundabout answer to your question about the flood.
Stranger: Yes, let's get back to that question first...
You: Well, but it's the details that make it interesting.
You: This is funny, cause we were reading Noah last night at our bible study.
You: Which is called Bible, Bourbon, and Bull. :-)
You: You know what?
Stranger: Yes?
You: It's funny.
You: I don't fit in either place.
You: Here on the Internet I say the things I'm saying here.
You: Last night I was cybering on omegle during bible study.
You: Just to shock the other guys there, you know?
Stranger: Right...
You: On my iPhone.
You: Anyway, Genesis.
You: Flood.
You: It's the details that set it apart.
You: You know what, forget that.
You: It's the details that make it interesting.
You: Genesis is a very rich story.
You: There is a ton of nuance.
You: Much more than Gilgamesh, or anything else.
You: But that makes it interesting, not relevant.
You: No ... (I'm thinking out loud here, sorry)
Stranger: No worries...
Stranger: I'm following along
You: The idea would be that it encodes a certain insight into the human condition that is somehow unique.
Stranger: Genesis, as opposed to Gilgamesh?
You: Yes.
You: And it's not as if Gilgamesh encodes *nothing*.
Stranger: Just nothing sublime, right?
You: Here's the thing (maybe):
You: Right.
You: I guess.
You: Is what I'm saying.
You: Or not as.
You: So there's sublimity(?).
You: I am interested in the relative sublimity of the various religious texts.
You: I think it's an inadequate view that they are all of equal sublimity.
You: But to discover otherwise is a lot of work.
Stranger: So, my question would be, which text can be said to offer more of this extra insight than others? What are some examples?
You: And I'm not sure whether the promise of sublimity is enough.
You: Well, in the Koran, for example ...
You: the contrast is cranked way, way up
You: All of the nuance is lost.
You: Though I want to be tentative here ... I've only read it once
You: But you have these really strong passages where Muhammed equates himself with Allah.
You: Allah and His Prophet.
You: It's throughout, inescapable.
You: One of the 40 * 1000.
You: It's like he takes one facet of being human, and wails on that way out of proportion.
Stranger: To me, in the Bible, the prophet of God is explicitly equating himself with God too, right?
You: Right!
You: But first, there are multiple prophets.
You: And second, the thrust is that *everyone* is a prophet!
Stranger: How so?
You: The vector of the Bible is that every individual knows God directly!
You: May I post a passage?
Stranger: Sure
You: Behold, the days come, says Yahweh, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they broke, although I was a husband to them, says Yahweh. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says Yahweh: I will put my law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people: and they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know Yahweh; for they shall all know me, from their least to their greatest, says Yahweh: for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more.
You: It's this part:
You: "they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know Yahweh; for they shall all know me, from their least to their greatest"
You: Or you have the story of Jacob ...
You: He wrestles with an angel (basically understood to be God)
You: And he wins!
You: He rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two handmaids, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford of the Jabbok. He took them, and sent them over the stream, and sent over that which he had. Jacob was left alone, and wrestled with a man there until the breaking of the day. When he saw that he didn’t prevail against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh, and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was strained, as he wrestled. The man said, “Let me go, for the day breaks.”

Jacob said, “I won’t let you go, unless you bless me.”

He said to him, “What is your name?”

He said, “Jacob.” He said, “Your name will no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have fought with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.”

He said, “Why is it that you ask what my name is?” He blessed him there.
You: --------------------------------------
You: Important part: "Your name will no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have fought with God and with men, and have prevailed."
You: You just don't find God losing in the Koran, e.g.
You: Basically, the Internet has made me a radical individualist. And so far I think that I'm able to reconcile that with Christianity.
Stranger: But then God never loses in the Bible either. He let Jacob win because his plan all along had been to form the nation of Israel from Jacob's sons. God was setting things in motion, intentionally losing to Jacob so as to rename him and start the whole Bible.
Stranger: To suggest otherwise would be to suggest that God was surprised to have lost to Jacob, would it not?
You: God let Jacob win, correct.
You: Jacob fought him to a draw, basically.
Stranger: Well, fighting to a draw with God I would call a Win any day ;)
You: :-D
You: Then you have Jesus, of course.
You: That's a bit of a special case.
You: :-)
You: No, what I want to say is ...
You: There's a theme in the Bible of equality with God.
You: Of being God's peers.
You: While at the same time of course being his "creatures."
You: It's that tension that really makes the bible great.
Stranger: But then it's those two ideas that I can't reconcile.
You: (I wish Omegle had a "typing" indicator. :-) )
Stranger: Humans are God's peers as long as they do what he commands, lest he wipe away their entire species, and possibly many animals/plants as well.
You: Forget the old testament bullshit.
You: Chalk that up to nightmares.
Stranger: (I think the "typing" indicator is when the favicon flashes. This is more evident if you're using a tabbed browser, of course)
You: Collective nightmares.
You: I had seen that ... am I wiggling right now?
Stranger: Nope
You: I think it's when you aren't on the page and there is a message waiting.
Stranger: Perhaps it's not the typing indicator after all
You: Don't get me wrong, it's neat. :-)
You: Try it ...
Stranger: That must be it!
Stranger: Good call.
You: Yeah.
You: Word.
Stranger: We've covered a lot of ground. Unfortunately, it's time for lunch (I'm more than 10 hours ahead of you in time). It was a pleasure talking with you!
You: So all of the scary genocide horrible God that RDawkins makes fun of in his intro ...
You: peace :-)
You have disconnected.

I cut off the conversation really quickly because most Omegle conversations are short and abrupt, and this trains a reflex.At first I regretted it in this case, but now I'm glad for it. It solidifies that this conversation was for the sake of my working through an issue and not for the sake of "converting" Stranger. Stranger is just fine. Feed back to Chad Whitacre.