[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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