Tag: #God

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.
So Socrates gave birth to Western reason through a religious quest?

October 10th, 2023

“The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David

I mentioned a while back that I’d been getting into Socrates. Obsessed is a better word, trip down the rabbit hole is fully under way.

So when my Unitarian church said nobody was lined up to do a sermon this week, I raised my hand and went “me me me me!” I could talk about Socrates!

Only to realize I’d bitten off more than I could chew. I’ve only read a few of Plato’s Dialogues and watched a handful of videos. I had to cram and write at the same time.

It went OK. And I learned a few things.

I was surprised to learn how much of a role the Oracle of Delphi and the temple of Apollo played in his life. For another, just how rooted his rationalism was in his religious faith.

Socrates’ guiding principles were right there on that temple at Delphi. One column had inscriptions that read, “know thyself,” “nothing in excess” and “surety brings ruin.”

Socrates was shocked when he learned the Oracle had told his friend “No one is wiser than Socrates.” Seemingly a clear statement, when they were typically riddles.

Instead of gloating, Socrates’ treated it as yet another riddle to be solved. The meaning appeared obvious, and yet that warning: surety brings ruin.

Socrates was knew he wasn’t wise. There were so many questions he couldn’t answer, but he believed Apollo could never lie. So he began searching for anyone wiser than himself to prove he wasn’t wise, so he could go to the Oracle and ask what Apollo meant.

But time and time again, people who claimed or were thought to be wise, revealed under Socrates’ questioning that they had no idea what they were talking about. Which we all know landed Socrates in a lot of trouble after he pricked too many tender egos.

Another thing I didn’t realize was how many chances Socrates had to get out of it. He could have chosen exile and could have escaped. Instead he drank hemlock to show his dedication to Apollo. He cared about his mission that much.

Socrates’ method outlived him and changed the world. To me that shows that it doesn’t really matter if a god is real in a material sense. If enough people think it exists, they’ll make very discernable changes to the material world on its behalf. So it might as well exist.
Boss God of the Gaps

May 4th, 2023

You know how everyone gets to define God however they want? Here’s a definition I’ve been toying with: Boss God of the Gaps.

That’s an amusing thought, because it is kind of a cop out to just say “God” whenever you don’t understand something. So many “unexplainable” things have already been explained by science that it seems pointless.

But what if it’s true, just not the way science deniers think? What if you take it all the way? Maybe God is the last unknowable thing.

Maybe it’s way more important than all those things we can discover, as mind-blowing as some of them are. Perhaps it’s reality itself, the glue that holds everything together.

Would that imply any kind of consciousness? Who knows? It’s unknowable, just like consciousness.

Tag: #God

What would make a god turn evil?

How an angry god can seem like a loving one

So Socrates gave birth to Western reason through a religious quest?

Boss God of the Gaps