Friday, September 18, 2015

Fiction

Saw a vid of a woman who had been in her car when a sinkhole suddenly opened up right beneath. The six or so meter wide water-filled hole began swallowing the vehicle but she managed to get out through the window after she phoned for help. In the interview she said she's still around because a higher power was looking out for her. (Wonder if it ever occurred to her to thank the mobile phone manufacturer, the phone battery company, the phone company, and the lady who pulled her out of her car)

I don't understand why not a few attribute their salvation to their pet higher power whenever they escape impending doom (although strangely they neither thank nor blame It when they end up losing loved ones). It's like, why didn't It prevent getting you in the damn pickle in the first place?

Superman (as we've constructed him) can't be saving everyone everywhere all the time. He's a super dude but even he's got limitations including the (made-up) fact that he doesn't have some sixth or six hundred sixty sixth sense to know when some catastrophe is in the works and then be there before it poses any danger. But that highness in the sky is all-knowing and all-powerful. And unlike Superman It can be in all places all the time saving all souls and can prevent any and all calamities and harms and could even have designed a universe without suffering but which nonetheless can teach humans the lessons of care, empathy, etc. Ergo, there shouldn't be any casualty, injury, much less fatality and gruesome ones at that. .

To those as in that woman above, please be honest with yourselves. The ad hoc rationalizations that she and you whip out to try and explain these lapses in supposed omnimax beings are offered simply to save cherished fictions. Believing that you're saving a real albeit invisible client from being prosecuted and indicted is yet another fiction. At least have the intellectual integrity to admit that. You don't know that those so-called explanations are actually true. Saying that you know implies you have substantive, verifiable evidence or incontrovertible proof, which you clearly don't. They're claims. They're hypotheses at best.

Word of advice. Start from the most fundamental claim and make sure it's true--that there is, empirically, a sentient, intelligent, noncorporeal higher power. Once you're able to hurdle that then you can move on to backing up your claims about the properties of this phenomenon--for instance, its nature of being omnibenevolent.

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