Upheaval

Not even sure how to write about the last few days. Something huge is shifting, something about the way I see reality. I don't think that I'm discovering a solution, sad to say. It just seems like something big is changing. Watching a Richard Dawkins interview; he says that it really bugged him to try to explain the apparent design in nature with a designer: it only begged the question of where the designer came from. I just now realized the mind-blowing obviousness of the question, because I've never allowed myself the right to ask about the designer. I've always had this unconscious lid on top of that question. I started to say that kind of question, but maybe that's the only question of its kind. I'm not sure. I'm pretty stoned at the moment.

What if the end of all this is that I convert back to being religious, but worshiping a different god? One who's much more powerful than Yahweh? Or, although it makes me cringe to think it, that it really is Yahweh and I've misjudged him? No, the only way I know Yahweh is via the Bible, so yeah, if there is a god, it's not Yahweh.

Denys Turner now, he's making a case that god is the thing that comes to you in a flash of inspiration when you're at wit's end. I call that the "It was in the last place I looked for it!" principle. Of course when you have a good idea, it gets you out of the place you're in. If you hadn't had a good idea, then you wouldn't have noticed it. Confirmation bias, it seems like.

Drug-induced Poetry

What is this experience

It bears some resemblance
to pain
a bone-crushing pressure
teeth being pulled
a jabanero on the lips
the jab of a broom handle
    in the hip?

It bears some resemblance
to something I can control
a muscle
some set of muscles
    that I've never used
as I never knew
    they were there.

It moves inside me
It surrounds me
It thinks for me
making me laugh for
    no reason at all
Forever reminding me
    that I'm not funny.

I endlessly cycle
forgetting the same
fifteen-or-so things
over and over.

Sometimes the
roar of the machinery or
the background music
will go silent
    surprising me.

On the problem of evil

I have finally figured out the problem of evil that philosophers and theologians have wrestled with for thousands of years. I finally get it, after a blinding flash of insight I had while considering Darwin's problem with the family of wasps known as the ichneumonidae:

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars...

But now I can see a reason why this terrible deity would, out of love (albeit a sick and twisted kind of love, the kind with which I'm most familiar), give us the example of the ichneumonidae: he wishes to show us that he really does mean business, that he really is willing to torture us if we don't love him.

The ichneumonidae could well be the most obvious sign of God's existence, character, and intentions that I've ever seen. Now I understand why God allows evil to exist.