Tag: #Edward Ka Spel

What would make a god turn evil?

October 16th, 2023

Edward Ka Spel – “O From the Great Sea.” What’s Ka Spel telling us? It’s obviously a horror story from the point of view of the monster. But what kind of monster? “Go back to the mirror, look again!”

A while back I wrote about the Angry God as an answer to the problem of evil. But I proposed a worse answer to why bad things happen to good people: there’s an all-powerfu god and he’s being cruel on purpose.

Which immediately made me think of the Edward Ka Spel song “O From the Great Sea,” about a god that dishes out suffering and seems contemptuous of the pitiful humans who can’t figure out why it’s so cruel. “Go back to the mirror, look again!”

Obviously a horror story from the monster’s point of view, but as long as we’re doing that, what if you were that monster? What would make you behave like “O”? What would put you in that mental state if you were something as powerful as a god? I want to go with nihilism.

As civilizations evolve, people kill and revive and alter their gods, merge them or separate them into parts, put words in their mouths. What if these entities have been running on our meatware for so long, they’ve become self-aware? The original AI?

Maybe “O” is what happens to a society that thinks it killed god, but only pushed him to the corner, where he reassembled himself like Tom Cruise in Interview with the Vampire.

Maybe “O” figured out what he is and resents his lot. Maybe he lashes out from revenge or disgust. Maybe he feels he’s been around too long and he’s bored. He’s like a kid torturing bugs: nothing personal.

Maybe “O” is having an existential crisis. He ‘s seen this civilization thing run its course just too many times and can’t take one more cycle. Maybe he’s suicidal. Maybe he’s teaching those people cruelty so they’ll kill each other off and he won’t be resurrected.

Or maybe he just really wants us to look in the mirror.
How an angry god can seem like a loving one

October 11th, 2023

Legendary Pink Dots – A Message From Our Sponsor. Pondering the problem of evil and the possibility that God doesn’t interfere because of his personal ethics.

How God’s punishment can feel like love: It’s an old principle. God destroyed the Israelites periodically to teach them a lesson but he still loved them and they were still his people.

Jesus loved me because he I loved everyone I’d been singing “Jesus loves me” since I was four. But God? I was not so sure. God to me meant God the Father, the vengeful angry one. but he loved us too in his way.

It seemed to make sense. Why would God bother punishing you if he’d already cut you loose? He might destroy you but he wouldn’t punish you. It’s really a kind of Stockholm Syndrome but it worked on me for a very long time.

Julian Cope – St. Julian. Another answer to the problem of evil: Maybe God doesn’t fix things because he’s oblivious or maybe incompetent?

But it is one answer to the problem of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people? Maybe it’s a form of discipline. Of a person or of a nation.

Bad times will come as bad things do. Maybe you know why you deserved it and maybe you don’t. But if he could do that, maybe he could do the opposite if you followed the path, send something good your way, or maybe it served some larger purpose.

God still loved David after what he did, after all. Didn’t work out too well for his baby with Bathsheba, but it was something. We got a Solomon out of it. I believed that for a while when I was a young Christian.

When I did something I knew was wrong, the next bad thing that happened to me had to be payback. If things went OK for too long I got nervous. When was the other shoe going to drop? How much trouble was I in?

So the disaster was a relief when it came. I paid a high price, but I’m still on the path. I was terrified of leaving the path.

But when you can’t see a pattern anymore, “The Lord works in mysterious ways” stops sounding like a good excuse. Sometimes there’s no possible lesson that would make sense, punishment is out of proportion or it’s indescriminate.

Then you look for reasons. You don’t want to be an atheist and piss off Mom and Dad, plus thaat would REALLY piss off God. Pascal’s Wager, you know.

God isn’t real is the theory of last resort.

Could be you settle on Deism. So there is a God who set it all in motion, but he doesn’t intervene. God makes the machine and lets it run. I could live with that, kinda. At least I didn’t have to claim the “A-word” as an identity. But it wasn’t very satisfying, plus, what the hell kind of fucked up machine is this?

It occurs to me there’s a worse possibility. Maybe there is a Supreme Being, but he’s essentially the Joker in space. Maybe he’s active in the world, but considers us play things. Maybe you had a tragedy because God just has a more complicated sense of humor than you do.

If there’s an all powerful god who makes us suffer for his own amusement, that would be the worst case scenario wouldn’t it?

What would this look like from that cruel god’s point of view? There is a song by Legendary Pink Dots singer and songwriter Edward Ka Spel that got me thinking on this topic. I’ll get into that in the next post. Good topic for Halloween season.
Deja vu all over again

March 28th, 2023

Sting – Russians (This one came out in ’85, one year after I didn’t get Raptured)

A friend just texted me a story about something the Chinese government said and commented “scary.” I wasn’t scared. Not scared of getting nuked by China or Russia. If you’re my age, you’ve heard it all before.

Those regimes don’t want to get Mutually Assured Destructioned any more than the US does. If it happens, it happens, but I’m not going to spend my time fretting over it.

I did enough of that as a kid. Movies and TV shows were full of nuclear apocalypses. I used to have nightmares about seeing mushroom clouds outside my window.

Being a Southern Baptist, those fears got mixed up with the other thing they taught us to fear and/or look forward to: The Rapture, followed by the Time of Tribulation (or the other way round, depending on who you asked).

In any case, I tried to mentally prepare myself for both.

Content warning: Upsetting imagery. The Christian Nightmares Tribulation Band covering the 1969 “classic” Rapture song I heard who knows how many times, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” (The films weren’t this bad, but I got a steady diet of this kind of messaging in the ’80s.)

I would get Raptured if possible. If not, I’d go through the whole Left Behind thing (same plot, but this was before the book series). If it was nukes, I’d wonder about who might want to restart the human race with me and where I might find a good cave to hide in.

It was an obsession when I was a teenager. I was like, can we get this over with so I can make the Rapture? I feel some sinning coming on and I can only hold it back for so long.

But there came a point where I had quit dwelling on it and live. So I did. As traumatic as recent developments have been, I still have to live as long as I’m alive. Sing While You May.

Strangely enough, I’m borderline obsessed with The Legendary Pink Dots and their singer Edward Ka Spel, who sing about all sorts of apocalypses. I find it cathartic. Exposure therapy I suppose.

Edward Ka Spel – Dotzsong

Tag: #Edward Ka Spel

What would make a god turn evil?

How an angry god can seem like a loving one

Deja vu all over again