[NetBehaviour] god neutral

Alan Sondheim sondheim at panix.com
Sun Jun 23 06:02:35 CEST 2019



god neutral

http://www.alansondheim.org/mass.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/maya.mp3

Whatever god or gods there be, prayers and supplications are useless; 
energy and common sense are wasted on such actions. There is no reason 
whatsoever why deity should concern itself with the preservation of 
human or other species; genocide is as value neutral to theology as the 
enactment of good deeds. It is not that 'we' are left alone; it is that 
'we' cannot presuppose that any intervention or none at all is 
beneficent. The same deities that pervade the air of paradise preside 
over the destruction of Buddhas and the depredations of ISIS. It is 
obscene to assume otherwise, but obscenity is in our minds, not those 
of deity. If deity serves, what species in the world would it serve? 
That of plastic or that of caddisflies? To serve one is to negate the 
other. To serve all is just as much an absurdity as to serve any 
particular. Deity is neither for life nor death; there is no evidence 
otherwise. It is a disconnected adjunct to our concerns, a dream gone 
sour. There is as little deity in birth as in death, in prayer as in 
torture. There is no 'our' god; sovereignty as such is worthless. What 
occurs, occurs within an inconcivable universe whose useless adequacy 
is ours to judge. What we do, what is useless: judge. Think of nothing 
but words, buildings, books, hymns, anything you like: it means nothing 
except to you in your mistaken beliefs for which you might well kill or 
die for. So much wasted energy. Whatever exists is of no concern of 
ours; whatever concern existence throws in our direction is useless, 
scorn, debris. Our world is fundamentally obscene; we hide the truth 
from ourselves, give it the name of one god or another, so be it. 
Further than that, nothing more than the recognition that obscenity 
istself is only our, our only going concern, with no basis in anything 
but the desperation of belief. We do ourselves in, we do the world in; 
anything more than that further harms the tatters of fictional truths.





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