I make a sucky Voltaire.

Some random observations.

One:

When I had met Luce for dinner, he had been talking to me about Dawkins, and after dinner, he bought me his book. Basically, he agreed with Darwinism, and the whole idea that it was essentially our genes that controlled us. Natural selection works for the sake of passing on the best genes. Trail and error.

I don’t believe in trail and error. If you recall anything that has been done by trail and error, you know it’s the most painful way to learn. But the world is really too beautiful and too perfect to look like something borne out of trail and error.

Then after that, while we were having coffee (not very intelligent thing to do at 11 p.m. at night, but he says people should sleep when they wish to, and not because the night made it right to sleep) he starts talking about structure in nature. About how complex the functioning of some creatures were. In the way they built their houses, in the way they organized themselves as a community. And all this, without self-awareness. And when you put self-awareness into the picture, the human capability for logic, then it is impossible that we are made out of random selection. How can we be such existentially rational beings, with the ability to even place logic behind the most illogical things, and yet be biologically random. Perfect societies (in that societies have form and function, that they work out or not is inconsequential to the point I’m trying to make) from random biology? So our fundamental being is haphazard, our grounding, our foundation is just chance, while the surface is so structured?

Even the most haphazard architecture stands because, and precisely because, it’s grounding is perfect!

Two:

Forget all your theories on God. Love, Justice, Peace, Wrath. You put that altogether, and what you’re going to get is a being that is neither here nor there. If we are truly made after his image, and a person can never be entirely defined as good or evil, then God is neither Love or Justice, or is Love and Justice. Either way, that makes him a perfectly impassive creator. The best sort of art is art with structure, not art with feeling. Sometimes, I think he does everything to amuse himself, just as I feel the purpose in life should be. A constant search of newer and newer experiences and expressions. Amusement is neither good or evil; Anyway the argument cannot be validated, because we are in no position to judge what is good or evil.

Are there really choices that are of God and not of God?

Is there really a wise choice and an unwise one?

Or should all choices be made on the basis of what brings pleasure? Because if life is transient, and capricious (as we all know it is) then whatever we do does no matter, because we all die eventually, and the decisions we make have, possibly, as many good outcomes as they have bad. But you are eventually beholden to yourself and only yourself. That quality is intrinsic, that is why we must seek to follow the whole doctrine that greed is good, and believe in a win-win situation. Before anyone else, we desire for ourselves. And if we desire for others, and for their happiness of others, it’s because it gives us joy to see them being happy. It atones for some sort of moral bias we have.

Three:

Justification. People with no absolutes in their lives (read: me) try to justify everything they do. Well, people with absolutely in their lives try to justify the need for absolutes just as much as people who don’t rationalize why it should not be.

Four:

Morality makes misery out of people. Immorality makes misery out of people. Looks that way if you define if from an absolute standpoint. If you started doing what you felt like, you might at least be sure of immediate happiness. In the long run, you’re going to be miserable anyway, just as much as you will be happy. Outcomes are of no importance to the individual, it’s what is made off those outcomes. It is preferable if you have an idea of what you want in the first place of course, but it’s fine if your idea of what you want is to never know what you want.

I can never respect or appreciate you, but there will be someone out there who will.

<>

xoxox