I read it.

My default setting was somewhere in England and it abruptly changed to New York.

The simple solution to this conundrum is to stop thinking of God as either omnibenevolent or omniscient/ omnipotent or else to simply stop thinking of God at all. — Janus

Good solution.

To be ominbenevolent would be to wish no harm or suffering on any being. — Janus

Just wishing? That ain't good enough to be benevolent.

Is the notion of omnibenevolence at all coherent? You can make up as much crap as you'd like concerning God. Religious faith doesn't hinge on arguments. It's like fawns burning in the forest. Shit happens, like faith or the lack of it happens.

Maybe suffering is God's favorite condiment (the ketchup of creation).

Maybe God is feeling it all and that it continues is testament to his will that it is all worth it.

I live in a reality where we spell zanny with one z turned on its side, unless zanny is slang. All this time I thought it was spelled with two side-turned z's and the dictionary says otherwise. I think I've entered another dimension.

The amount of energy spent in the way of living our mundane lives is absurd.

To be productive, and therefore turn the economic wheel, requires a huge and unsustainable energy expense, most often to satisfy superfluous wants, but we all know this.

I too am afraid God might exist. That is why I read the bible and try to distill its perennial wisdom, to hedge my doubt.


Disclaimer: I do not read the bible.

And I don’t get it. What exactly is going on with that? — Brett

Because of the politics his narrative supports. The hate just reflects the polar divide of our political landscape.

He's a religious conservative who fears big government because the USA could become communist if we don't stop all this postmodern neomarxist monkey business (whatever it is).

Yea, it's a play. What were you doing, a documentary? — frank

Ha! Yeah, I get it.

It's getting expensive.

Could we have the whole thing spoken by Jonah while he's sitting inside the whale? Maybe he's explaining all this to Pinocchio. — frank

Don't be stupid Frank.

Jonah and Pinocchio are fictional characters while Attenborough and Herzog are hot stuff.

So there is no answer. Ha!

The Eye of Providence brings to mind political conspiracy (Illumanatism), what with its Masonic origins.

Because God is now dead, his eye has been inherited by the special interests of the state, which gain more power through the market of surveillance capitalism and state corruption.

If the eye turns against itself it could mean self-exposure of the surveillance activities of a neofascism.

When the Eye turns Inward and the mouth speaks to the public, it Wikileaks a tear for the state of the nation.

The F word is jarring. It's something that best comes out in character dialogue with appropriate context rather than third person narration. I'm thinking we should get David Attenborough to do the audio version but edit it more towards a BBC wildlife documentary style.

After some transition, where the monkeys become the inheritors of the earth, you can switch to Werner Herzog, so he can drive home the existential gravity of how fucked everything might be.

And the winner of this years Golden Drama award goes to the only true being in this lonely universe, Wallows, who stands in the center of it all, owner of the last remaining soul of Libertarian Free Will.

The rest of us are merely the detached seeds of the tree of life: vegetal parts blown by circumstance.

Sounds like Ashbury is just reflecting upon his creative process.

Trying to achieve what works
Gleaning bits of inspiration
Waiting for something with the body of a spirit
The critic speaks
As draft edits yellow the green leaves

This is probably wrong and unsophisticated but oh well.

The community college I attended is right next to a state run psychiatric hospital and I can tell you I'd never want to be committed there, or work there for that matter.

Voluntary commit to an institution?

I'm not making this shit up. — Wallows

Do they really keep you or isn't this always a temporary situation. Or are you talking about jail?

Does anyone know how to go on? — Wallows

What is the alternative to not going on?

How long do we have to wait for the answer of the riddle?

You have two eyes of a moderator and the power to silence fools. :P

It's single, not a pair. One Eye.

The eye sees through itself to see what it was already looking at, itself looking at itself, but looking at itself is no different than looking outwards at the world. The eye's self is the world.

What it sees outwardly constitutes a vantage from a distinct point of view and that view is a kind of inward looking because it is distinct (a point focus), which makes the world sensible.

If this is the Eye of Providence, then its is a mere surface painting, or a dream image, which causes us to paranoid about what we think we ought to do against what we want to do. God's Eye is the security camera of Thrasymacus, whose justice is the right of kings. It means: "Watch out, for you are being watched."

You're going to have to see the answer for us.

God is always looking at nudes. He is constantly unclothing the world and driving spiritless machines to replicate. He's a psychopath. If he is a cyclops that just makes him more creepy.

Depends on what self is doing the seeing?

It sees whatever it intends to see, which is the self it already intends for its focus.

A brain has to decide what to see given it has infinite options of focus and range. It's predetermined to see what it sees by natural law.

There is far too much for an-all seeing eye to see.

What animal sees with the all seeing eye?

Do other people's experience (being) in the world consitute a single possible world apart from others, or do we all live in one world?

What happens when the all seeing eye turns inward? — Wallows

Sauron looks at orc porn when his gaze is directed within.

Don't ever take any recreational drugs with an anxiety like this.

It might be better to believe that a bundle of calcium rods wrapped in meat tape, holding up a glob of prejudiced fat all resisting the dispersing flow of entropy is enough to make you want to not exist.

This miracle is yucky on the days it isn't insufferably dull.

My wife insists that the lights and decorations do not get interrupted and that that part looks just like the rest. — Sir2u

Maybe she spins the tree around when you're not looking. :P

Active drug addicts might as well be classed as mentally ill, especially long time meth users. I can see how housing these folks would be an intractable nightmare.

Am dealing with a squatting (in tent) meth user. There is a bit of a social network of the underclass where I live which makes me nervous about using the police to evict them for fear of retaliatory property damage. Would have left them alone except for evidence of trespassing.

For the psychological desire for symmetry, an unfinished tree lingers in the imagination like a half mowed lawn.

Don't put any mistletoe above the bidet. I'm told this is one of the few things God can't stand, a tier of importance beneath the golden rule.

These demonic people want to control everyone. — Noah Te Stroete

Do you really believe in supernatural entities or is "demon" just a label for unjust and predatory exploitation by those with power over those without?

If a mustache connects to a beard, does it share its being with the beard?

You might have to block out mustaches depending on how you want to do the judging.

In fact, will have to block out the philosopher entirely and just see the beard, to be anally objective.

I'm guessing basic fear. — praxis

The fear is culturally supported though by the taboo. I'm not sure if it was Thailand or Malaysia but there was a Nat. Geo article about poor folks living inside a cemeteries exposed openly to the remains of the dead. Families will exhume their relatives and takes pictures with them, with young kids present. The smoked corpses of some Papua New Guinea tribes is something most Westerners would find truly disturbing (the definition of nightmare fuel). In parts of Africa they pose the deceased in a scene which illustrates what they did in life, even as they bloat and rot, while folks eat and party nearby.

Whereas our culture seems to strictly keep the dead out of sight and mind. We cold put it down to the fear of disease I guess, an emerging formality around the natural disgust toward things that are dead and our hygienic expectations.

I was taught to avoid it whenever possible. — praxis

I guess I was fishing for an anecdote or recollection. I can't imagine any mother or f
ather sitting their kid down and saying directly how their kids ought to avoid death. Anything that harms us without killing us can teach us to avoid death. I'm not sure telling anyone not to do something is always that effective. Was there any moment of stress about death in your childhood that you remember?

My mother had in-home hospice care at the end. It seemed ideal, given the circumstances. Far better than dying in a hospital bed attached to tubes and various machines. — praxis

When I look back at how my grandmother died, to a lesser extent my grandfather, I feel that they were somewhat neglected by family out of convenience. My gran became very difficult to deal with due to strokes and she was kind of left to a care facility which drugged her to keep her manageable. Yes, I don't think we treat the elderly all that well but part of the problem is that sometimes they don't resemble who they used to be.

There was a case of a doctor recently being held accountable for the murder of 25 near-death do-not-necessitate patients because he ordered lethal doses of painkillers for all of them. Seems like what he did wasn't all that terrible but I guess the law is the law.

I abuse the demonic people on TV and the demonic people on the other end of the tech company surveillance devices. These demonic people want to control everyone. — Noah Te Stroete

It could be just the impersonal effect of the way we collectively must organize ourselves in mass. Freedom must be constrained because there are so many of us vying for resources and all resources are owned property and subject to laws for the preservation of social order. The pressure to be efficiently productive (competitive) breaks a lot of people.

The real monster (divine or hellish) is the totality of being.

Sorry if you suffer hallucinations and paranoia.

The scariest agents for non-schizophrenics are other people.

Especially if we begin to regard others as moving purely out of a predetermined condition, lacking a sense of free will.

The psychology of resentment hits so much closer to home in Joker than in John Wick. I felt a lot for the character and the tone of the movie is quite serious. Any of the forces responsible for a violence born from this kind resentment are already primed by corresponding social conditions (or perceived injustices).

I could barely stand to sit through John Wick because it was so boring (action sequences were so repetitive). There is little emotional resonance with the protagonist.

Where are the private investigatory critics? Don't count your eggs before you have any.

The first couple lines of Randy333's Chaos Cosmology:

I pass bare, black trees in the shadowy wood, not much living in sight, crooked branches twisted betwixt each other in the silent gray gloom, a cold veil without light or life, comprised of nothing but opaque smog... No stars or moon illumine my path, nor lantern to guide me.

The descriptive redundancy is maddening and there is this thing about seeing without light. You must be dreaming then... confabulating...

The paragraph doesn't end for the entire sample, which is 5 pages, enough to fatigue a reader. Breaks help us to read comfortably.

Do you even edit drafts bro?

The second argument, known as the Theory of Recollection, asserts that learning is essentially an act of recollecting things we knew before we were born but then forgot. True knowledge, argues Socrates, is knowledge of the eternal and unchanging Forms that underlie perceptible reality. — SparkNotes: Plato

Sounds like Socrates is baggering Meno with his annoying rhetorical method. If only Meno could give him a dose of his own medicine. How does Socrates defend his theory of recollection?