I am in love with Parmenides' thoughts. That we cannot think of nothing because "nothing does not exist." Only Being is. In fact, existence is not a true predicate at all as Kant argued and I think he is right. Imagine how stupid our prose would be with: "John, who exists, went to the store, that exists, to buy some milk, that exists, for his kids, that exist." As if to clarify what things do and do not have that attribute.

If that is the case, I would need to know what kinds of things do not exist. The usual response I get from others are examples like unicorns, centaurs, mermaids, ghosts, etc. and sometimes even God. If I say to them to prove they do not exist, they always argue that I have the burden of proof. That's not my point, I reply, you cannot prove that something does not exist. That's contradictory!

Now why do things like centaurs, mermaids, ghosts, etc. not exist? They, especially the scientists, say they cannot be easily instantiated. They say if you provide them with evidence of centaurs, mermaids, ghosts, etc., then they will consider it. But what if I told them such things are products of the human imagination or thoughts about real things and that what they are really complaining about is what we say such things are or their predicates. For example, if I told you there are such things as ghosts. And they are explanations people make up to understand their fear or they are a hoax, but they are not once living beings that die and come back from death to bother us like zombies. And so it is their description of things (that exist) that is the problem.

I was an atheist for many, many years until I finally read Spinoza's Ethics and after doing so, I began to embrace his imperfect ideas of what God is, but he isn't anything like the one found in sacred texts. The one in sacred texts were obviously written by stupid people. God is Being without any qualification. That means miracles never happen as God never changes the laws of the Universe to our advantage and eternal life is mumbo jumbo and we should be glad about that. No matter how wonderful or terrible an afterlife might be, the fact that it is eternal actually describes a hellish existence with no escape. God is not cruel in that sense.

Since God is Being and the Universe and everything else is in God, then it would be absurd to believe that God is concerned about us at all especially our suffering and evil deeds. We matter as much to God as much as harmless bacteria matter to us.

Schopenhauer argued that every life is a history of suffering. That life has no intrinsic worth and your happiness is irrelevant. God could not care less about our well being. If we destroy ourselves as a human race, and I think we will with pollution and when we run out of resources or deploy atom bombs, God could not care less, especially because it would be ridiculous to argue other life does not exist in the Universe and and thus we are just one living planet among many others.

Here is the kernel of my reasoning, by saying "God must be good and cannot be evil." Then you are complaining about how the Universe works the way it does: nasty and nice. Instead of protesting against this and say the nasty stuff shouldn't happen, we should try to understand its nature and try to "deal with it ourselves" because God is not going to change things for us.