simont | *sniffle*

My hayfever has been mostly unproblematic this summer, but it seems to be seizing its chance to have one last go at me this week. I've had several sneezing fits already this morning, and I'm currently sitting here experiencing physical symptoms that feel exactly as if I've been crying: the puffy eyes, the lump in the throat and the sniffling all match. But I haven't been crying, of course; I've just been sneezing.

Curiously, this is having an emotional effect on me, presumably by associative memory. On the very rare occasions that I do do serious crying, I tend to feel fragile afterwards: prone to treat minor setbacks as major, on the basis that I've only just returned from beyond the limit of what I can cope with and so even a minor frustration pushes me perilously close to going back over that limit. And what's odd is that I'm feeling very much like that now, for no better reason than that my current physical state is similar to the way I would be feeling just after a crying fit. I keep having to actively remind myself that my life is quite good at the moment, that nothing has gone seriously wrong recently at all, and that it's only hayfever.

I think I've mentioned before, haven't I, that the human brain is a shoddily designed piece of ad-hoc-ware and should be sufficient in itself to refute any feeble excuses a creationist can come up with? Well, perhaps it's worth saying it one more time. If I were an omnipotent god, or even just a finitely-but-extremely potent one, I'm sure I could do a better job than this, and if I couldn't then I'd deserve to have my deification revoked.

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I prefer to think of it as a quirky and phenomenally endearing (if occasionally crazy-making) symbiosis between two remarkably flawed yet impressively adaptable pieces of squishy stuff. Sort of a Hollywood romantic comedy, only with more gunge.

Sort of a Hollywood romantic comedy, only with more gunge.

This is a fantastic sentence and I'm sure there ought to be other uses for it :-)

So am I, but in the absence of good ideas on how, I thought I'd give it some exercise in front of a person likely to appreciate its elegant build and devastating good looks :)

Hmm, yes. Interestingly, it still kind of holds true even if you take out the physical part...

Sorry, what holds true? That the human mind (rather than the physical brain) is a badly designed pile of junk, or something related to my second paragraph, or what?

I didn't think it through, but I think I meant, that there's no particular reason that if one thing upsets you, you should thereafter feel shit about everything else as well, but there's a definite tendency to do so I'd be tempted to design away?

> I'm sure I could do a better job than this, and if I
> couldn't then I'd deserve to have my deification revoked.

This doesn't actually refute the existance of God, of course.

And besides, why do you think the whole thing went Bang! in the first place?

This doesn't actually refute the existence of God, of course.

True, but it does mean he either doesn't exist or is unworthy of his title, and in either case it therefore makes me cross that creationists persist in glorifying his name unto the heavens.

If I were an omnipotent god, or even just a finitely-but-extremely potent one, I'm sure I could do a better job than this, and if I couldn't then I'd deserve to have my deification revoked.

hmmm, interesting. Are you assuming that the purpose of physical creation would be that it works? I would say that a lot of the "design features" are deliberate errors, as it were, with the ultimate aim of revealing people's need for God, i.e. inability to work properly on their own. :)

if people don't see a general need for God (i.e. why is there injustice in the world, why do people mug/rob/kill/hurt each other etc etc) and a personally specific one (i.e. why do my emotions work in this apparently crazy way) then they are likely to blame everything on "other bad people" or deny any problem.

Of course, it would be much easier to just reveal yourself if you were a God like that, but then you have issues with the whole free will thing. If you happen to be an infallible, loving, omnipotent, omnipresent and perfect Deity then revealing yourself only leaves the free will choice of not accepting, loving and worshiping you to..umm..well the really stupid and deeply masochistic i guess.

so, what does one do if one values freely given love?

well, thats all of my ramble-y thoughts and opinions at least. :)

m

deliberate errors, as it were, with the ultimate aim of revealing people's need for God, i.e. inability to work properly on their own

No, hang on. Those deliberate errors don't reveal people's inability to work properly on their own; they cause people's inability to work properly on their own. (Assuming they do; in fact I for one am able to function in spite of these errors, I just get annoyed about it all the time.) If they are indeed deliberate errors with this aim, they are unconscionable. If I were to deliberately cripple my own children because I liked them being dependent on me and wanted them to remain so forever, you would not react to my action or my motivation with anything less than horror and condemnation, and rightly so.

Of course, it would be much easier to just reveal yourself if you were a God like that, but then you have issues with the whole free will thing

I've always had trouble with this one too, actually. You have revealed your existence to me: I've met you in person many times, I've hugged you, I've helped you wrestle with a recalcitrant superglue tube, and as a result I have plentiful evidence of the fact that you definitely do exist. Yet I can love you, or hate you, or be indifferent to you, or quite like you, or anything in between, as I choose, and nobody would question my free will on the matter.

I honestly don't see how it constitutes a restriction of somebody's free will to provide them with the facts. Indeed, it is often considered to constitute a restriction of somebody's free will to conceal the facts from them! So if a God wanted me to freely choose whether or not to love him, surely he should make his existence obvious, and then I could decide whether I approved of what he'd done to humanity, whether I liked what he did to me, what I thought of his personality and his relationship with me, and whether to love him. The idea that first I have to play cosmic hide-and-seek before I can even be sure he's there seems to me to inhibit my ability to make this choice freely, not enhance it.

sniffle

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