cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Start of Theory of Everything You wanna know where I'm at? And you probably do or you wouldn't still be reading this. I'm essentially an early Valentinian gnostic. For the last few months I've been studying Valentinian gnosticism on and off and that's right about where I am. The universe is potentially as good as its nature allows it to be. Does God exist? Well, I was thinking today that the belief in God is essentially like the equivalent of a homonucleotic theory of human consciousness, applied to the whole universe. And then it also occurred to me that the response to that is as simple as the model of psychology from which it is drawn, which is that its entirely possible that a system as complex as the known universe could constitute a conscious and self-aware entity in the same manner that the human brain, in all its complexity, manages to think about vaginas and the cost of gas lately. Which is to say that it really doesn't matter either way. Either model gets you to something that approximates a God figure. Then there is the possibility that even a system as complex as the universe does not become self-aware. Personally, I happen to think that any system of sufficient complexity will eventually become self-aware but that is a whole other story for a time when I am not this drunk. Anyhoo, like the early Valentinians, I believe in their very rational shortcut around the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil is a classic philosophical thing to ponder, and the thing goes thus: if God is omnipotent, omniscient and omni-good, then why is there evil in the world? Now you can hash out some of it out, like that Ted Bundy existed because of Ted Bundy's free will and because God figured that free will was the best path to personal redemption and admittance to the cool kids' club. If free will is to exist then God must allow people to do evil things with that free will or else its kind of bullshit, but perhaps the total goodness of allowing that free will will eclipse the evil that men have inflicted on their fellow men. That's all well and good. But what about, say, the Earthquake in Haiti? There is nothing good about that shit and it had nothing to do with the free will of any entities that we are aware of. It was pure evil and badness, and God let it happen. Therefore God cannot be all 3 of those things. Cannot be omniscient, omnipotent and omnigood. If God exists then he/she either did not know that the quake was going to happen (or did not know how bad it would be); was unable to prevent or stop or; or just didn't give a shit. Logically, there is no escaping this. Any explanation to dodge this means compromising the 'omni' of one of those 3 traits that have become staples of modern faith. I'm not much of one for faith. Never really have been. I believe what can be demonstrated, proven, or at least fucking witnessed. That said, I have witnessed and sort of demonstrated some pretty weird shit in my time. The Valentinians, and Valentius himself, believed that God is as good as his/her nature allows. And that sounds about right to me. The Valentinians ans I believe in a flawed God. We believe in a God who pretty much does the best he can under fucked up circumstances where shit keeps happening without a break and everybody is bitching for something and it had better be good if you are going to tear me away from this beer. We believe in a God who does pretty much the best that he/she can, but can't be everywhere at once and there are some things that are just out of the question. 'And for fuck's sake, can't you people just fucking TRY to deal with your own shit for 5 minutes before begging me to intervene?' Also like the Valentinians. I believe in a bureaucracy. I believe in a creator God with one or more lesser Gods who may possibly be more accessible at time. And I believe that if there is a self-aware and reasonably powerful God, he/she would at some point have created other self-aware entities with some type of power who last longer than the fraction of a second that human beings do, physically, on a cosmic scale. So there is a God thing, and another powerful creator thing, and other minor things who aren't as powerful as the creator but whom still have more power and perspective than I do. And those minor things may have a lot more time and ability to give a shit about any given problem than any demiurge does. Yeah, I'm treading on weird ground here. Actually its less weird than where I'd been for the last 5 years or so. At least this has some sort of rationale. I don't know how much more useful it is, since I still don't know shit about what the particulars of the bureaucracy is or who to appeal to for a given situation and what to offer and why. And the terribly stupid thing is that my thought at the end of all of this is the regret that I have no one to discuss any of this with. I would just like a woman with whom I could have an actual conversation about this with. I was having a conversation with Trish last night and it became clear that she had never even heard of Simon Magus (whom I happen to think very little of, temporary flying abilities not withstanding), and the conversation just sort of fell apart from there. 11:53 p.m. - 2010-11-25 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||