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Mere poetry and speculative theology, don't mind me

Started by The Wizard Joseph, February 01, 2015, 03:50:53 AM

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The Wizard Joseph

I wonder if God's thought
just before saying 'Let there be light.'
might not have been
something like
'Damn man, THIS is really going to hurt'  ...

If God is
OMniscient
then clearly God
is acquainted with pain
and horror
more intimately
than even is
humanity.
By far.

So the workshop,
and 'assistants' that God made
for making and molding
folding and holding
the material universe
as we know it,

what might be called heaven and angels,
existed in a painless way

before the fall,

where all
experienced pain

and some,
the unvictorious,

left to live in a partition
on the C:osmic drive
made to contain the pain
for now,
and called hell
by some.

And humanity got caught up
in this somehow also doomed
to unfamiliar suffering
and grim mortality
allegedly.

I think
we were always mortal
in body

for as long as our best science can make of it,

but that before the fall of man
our souls were developing
peacefully
if in slow agony
and not in some
contrived contention.

If before
all that fall
there was no suffering for the angels
then I think God must have been
holding out on them
from the Beginning.

It was not for them
to know
or endure,
yet for man
I think strife natural
a critical if oft
criticized development,

both an incentive
and test of sorts,

in the bio-evolutionary
and also spiritual sense.

And here was the danger.
This was a first for the Earth project team.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

The Wizard Joseph

I'll add more as I get it out, but I just wrote this and had a quiet joke to myself about how urgent it felt abour RECITE and how the Prophet Muhammad is said to have heard this imperative.

What was weird was after my inner amusement died off it almost felt like a residual impression of WELL GO ON THEN. I got more but it's trying to come out like prose and I had to spruce it up a bit to make it poetry and understandable.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

rong

"a real smart feller, he felt smart"

The Wizard Joseph

You don't even want to know what God keeps on the Thumbdrive, much less where it's kept.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Doktor Howl

Molon Lube

The Wizard Joseph

Thanks guys!

I can take credit for the poetry part but the content is an amalgam of my thought and surely influenced in great part by the folks here. Thanks twice!

You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

The Wizard Joseph

God set a ban on
interference with
the corporeal parts
of the creation.

This brought doubt,
then fear, then discontent,
and ultimately war

and separation.

All of it a reaction
to the suffering
God was working
to spare them from.

That God must have
known was inevitable.

That God could not explain
meaningfully
and also spare them from.

That it would serve
God's ultimate interest
as related to Humanity
to keep the host
from ever truly knowing,
for their sake.
And our sake.

Yet still folly brought on tragedy?


What if it was all
part of the process
not in error or folly
that this all happened?

Just no nice way
to go about it
if You want
real people
made of clay.

People that understand things
Your other underlings
are meant to find a mystery. 

Something more
like Yourself.

Something that knows what it's like to break.

Knows why
breaking is needed
and when,
not just how.

Knows that
going On
is all that
truly matters.

Knows that
Love is the only
Way to go
On.

Knows just
how it feels,
and how to
live with it.

Without letting it rule you.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

I liked that one, it's an interesting take on the whole Creator issue.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


The Wizard Joseph

Well the thought that sparked this was a big 'what if' about the pain and omniscience. Then a whole lot of 'if so then what' in context of the hearsay we have regarding such sublime events.

The part that's driving me to express it is a thought of sympathy in that 'if we pay in the coin of pain for life then how much more so must an omniscient creator?' bit I'm chewing on here.

Best answer I have is an amount equal to humanity's total collectively and retroactively, plus whatever is relevant to the troubles of the Earth project, plus the sum of the rest of the cosmos. For my purposes I'd prefer to simply note that last bit and leave it out of the equation function as an obscuring absurdity we cannot know.
God is really good for those.

I very glad you liked it Nigel! I'm going to see this one through till it's done. Strife is somehow key to our experience and I get the feeling the better we learn to suck it up without getting jaded the stronger and better adapted for the challenges of the future we will become.

In spirit this sets me at odds with every book of easy answers ever sold. So be it I guess.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

The Wizard Joseph

The following discourse happened in the Boomtime Cabal FB page after I posted the poetry there.

The names of the questioners and conmenters have been removed save for those I mark T.W. Joseph.

Those are the ones I wish to draw from here, but find it fitting to show the questions that provoked my need to reply and expand my speculations some. There are only 2 responders so far. I shall arbitrarily dub them CBM1 and CBM2 as short for cabal mate in the order that they first post.


CBM1
"Awesome, in both the old and and new senses of the word! I love this ideas expressed, and the eloquent way they are expressed (with the appropriate respect for their Ineffable Mystery).

I have long spoken with friends about the necessity of suffering in creation; I have come to a similar understanding of Heaven and Earth, and have come to see the fallen angel as a symbol of creative forces (and the suffering they produce just one of many side effects); thus Lucifer (or Hecate as I prefer to call that spirit) is the equal opposite to Christ (although I am still confused about what is up or down, since Fire goes up and Water goes down). Oh Divine Mysteries!

This also links well to the idea of Antifragility.

I would love to continue discussing this with you, but not here maybe. I sent you a friend invitation!"

TWJ
" Accepted, and my thanks for your kind words. Happy to discuss, but curious as to why not here? I fear very little about what others might think, and would like discussion to be open.

This is my musings on God and strife and poetic expression only. I have embraced agnosis from my upbringing in Theism. I've had to because all of these ideas that we have about divine things are wild speculation about a truly unknowable factor at best, outright malicious lies long swallowed at worst. Atheism makes some fine points about whether such might exist at all and I simply chose to not know, to decide that it was truly unknowable. It is best to admit it when you don't know.

If there is a fallen entity at all like the Lucifer some folks envision, then it's like a broken string on the cosmic violin. I see no co-equality to be had, other than in the surely inaccurate and likely entirely false stories humans tell each other about these things. A most dubious source indeed."

CBM1
" Not here and now I mean, mainly because I was busy.

I apologise if I gave the impression of having definitive answers; divinity is for me the ineffable mystery of life, and I see mythologies as models for the structure of the unknowable and ineffable in human perception. Models are merely tools for (very crudely) sketching reality or for somehow dealing with it, and as such I have a skeptical pragmatic attitudes towards them. I was just presenting my model, I thought I was clear about that.

So is Heaven the verbal and Earth ineffable, or vice-versa? Christ the unwording, Lucifer the birth of a distinction? More than elsewhere, meaning in mysticism and poetry is prone to be turned on its (god)head.


TWJ
"I was just qualifying, man it's all good. Will take up consideration when I'm done working this evening. You have some good questions there! :) "


TWJ
I suspect that if there is a Heaven then "hell" must be somehow of the same stuff. I've read some bits that place the realms of this world's so calked Heaven and Hell in the 3rd "heaven". The first being the literal area between the surface of the planet and the edge of the orbit of the moon, the second what we might call outer space, perhaps covering this only this solar system, but really seemed to me to imply the entire realm of the stars, ALL OF THEM. A literal astral heaven. The third is a realm of some mystery to me. IF, if there is a soul it is of this third realm's substance it seems. Something that doesn't quite deal with spacetime in the way that we think of it, not necessarily subject to silly things like photons and atoms bouncing off.. mostly. I think the material universe and this other would be equally vast, but temporality attenuates the "higher" you go.

To some several heavens more
Or so asserts some lore of yore

The border of this in our spatial locality, where our material world's timeline of events is perhaps most visible, would be where we find the paradisical repose and also "independent" faction.

I suspect this separation is a most uncommon state of affairs in the rest of the universe. This would make "Lucifer" a local problem. And I'd venture to say merely one of many here.

I don't know about Jesus actually being GOD anymore than I do about him being an equal of Lucifer. If the prophets are any source, then it would seem to me that Jesus fulfilled them. I suspect that he was the promised Messiah, but have no proof. Prophets are a notoriously shifty sort..

I'll say that I derive thoughts much from the story in the gospels about Jesus basically being offered the whole world if he'd "just kiss the tip... just once... Won't tell anyone...promise!" Jesus turned Rex Mundi down and basically told him off. A muddy little shit spat on the offer of a self-styled GOD. Perhaps this is where Luci lost it and wanted him dead! The sometime bright Morning Star probably didn't even fully understand what he was dealing with and DRAGGED A PROFOUNDLY POWERFUL SOUL NOT HIS BY ANY RIGHT TO HELL.
Checkmate.

Just a guess of course.
Any thoughts or shall I go On?
I'll reply as I can."

CBM2
" I'll ring a bell to that."

TWJ
"At some point here I intend to copypasta much of this convo, sans names, back to the PD thread. That prose speculation and explication seems to have reignited my poetry need. Not sure where it will go, but the muse is politely tapping me on the brain. She's kind of a jerk."

CBM2
" Hey don't try to be calling "kallisti", dude, brotha!"
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl


The Wizard Joseph

You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl