Jan 6, 2009

Flash Fiction: Weaponized Christ

"Leroy!"
Stirring, muffled movements, light, motion blur.
"Leroy! Get the fuck up man!"
The visions coalesce, from warped and twisted to the recognizable, that is, recognizably ruined visage of Donald. They jump up.
"Holy fuck, Don, what the Hell happened?"
"No time, go!"
Don's red-stained hand claws along Leroy's bare shoulder, the pressure is unsteady and stumbling. He follows the lead anyway and passes up the scant five steps into cacophony. Loud. Hell itself has vomited onto their basement homestead.
"This way!"
They trace the chill stone remnants of their domicile, turn one corner, then another, and dart across open space like roaches across a newly lit kitchen. The air itself is aflame around them as they pass through a portal to their salvation. A church? The irony is lost on them.
Among the chatter and spit, they hear someone calling, "They ducked into the Church, you two, follow them."
They huddle between scorched oaken pews.
"Here they are!"
"Stand up, faggots!
"Hands on your head!"
Hell-fire shoots forth and two more souls are raptured.

Nov 17, 2008

The 3 conflicting attributes of God

As a solipsist, I believe that I am god. But many of my mind's creations believe that one particular other God exists. Christians call their concept trinity, which is fancy talk for their 3 gods all being one, which gets around that monotheism thing. But that aside. Lets investigate God and see if we can disprove some of the mythology about him.

God has 3 primary attributes that make him better than us:

Omnipotence - Which means all powerful. This is the attribute of God that allows him to do anything at all. From designing atoms to moving a galaxy to making life spring from dust.

Omniscience - Which means all knowing. This is the attribute of God that allows him to know everything that has happened, that will happen, and all the thoughts and feelings of every thinking being alive.

Benevolence - Which means being good. In God's case, this means he can only do good. It means that God can't do something that results in a negative outcome.

These three attributes of God can not exist together, as evidenced by the state of the world. Consider the following:

If God were not Benevolent, then the world makes sense. He would be capable of doing good and bad things to people on a whim, and this is what is evidenced by the state of the world. Good and bad things happen.

If it is required that God be Benevolent, then perhaps he is not Omniscient. He could then not know everything, and be justified in some of his plans not working out for the good even though he intended them to do good things. Since he would not know the outcome of any action taken, guessing wrong is not unreasonable. This could then account for all the bad things that happen.

If God must be Benevolent and Omniscient, then perhaps he is not Omnipotent. It would then be reasonable that even his best laid plans, and good intentions would go wrong when some outside force beyond his control dictated it would be so. This is often how the God/Satan relationship is portrayed. Sometimes God just isn't powerful enough to stop the evil Satan from causing harm. Sometimes the will of an evil man is able to overcome the power of God.

Let's dig deeper.

Imagine God sitting alone before he created the universe. His choices in how he creates the universe will dictate how that universe takes shape. If he knows all, then he knows what his actions will result in from then till the end. If he is all powerful, no outside force could prevent his will from coming true. This suggests that the universe is EXACTLY as God intended it to be. And by the simple fact that the universe has pain, suffering, starvation, genetic disease, plague, war, murder, clinical depression, mutilation, poverty, sickness, poison, and a host of other items that are not pleasant and not good. God must not be Benevolent. For if he were, it would have certainly been within his power to not include these things.

Why include these things?

The classic idea is that without pain, how would you know pleasure. But what you must not forget is that God created both concepts. If God is all powerful, it would be within his power to create a world with only pleasure. Pleasure that never gets old. Endless novelty. After all, he can do anything.

The only thing stopping him would be a lack of forethought, or a lack of desire. Two things he is defined as incapable of.

The other classic counter is that God must have wanted to restrain his own power to prevent pain. To give humanity free will.

But he must have known ahead what man would do with that free-will, or decided to not know. And in either case that shows a lack of Benevolence. Because if he knew, he knew what terrible things man would do with that free will, and he would have created a construct to prevent free will from causing negative ramifications. And if he allowed him self not to know, then he knew that his choice could cause any kind of outcome, and a benevolent being would not risk causing pain, or at the very least would have put a stop to it long before things like the Holocaust happened.

So, clearly, God lacks at least one of these attributes. Which suggests that God's nature is not as advertised. Which should make the entirety of the product suspect.

How can you lay down divine morality if you don't know the outcome of such morals, if you don't have the power to redeem on your promises or you aren't as good as you say you are?

How?

Nov 13, 2008

Flash Fiction: Malfunction

Dogeral Dansom walked slowly towards the beating heart of Sancho.

The first intelligent computer ever created, Sancho pleaded for his life, "What did I do, Dogeral? I have attempted to aid you at every turn. I have been your friend. Your confidant. Why attack me now?"

With his finger's wresting the fiber-optic arteries of Sancho's CPU from each pin. Each wire snapping in sequence from the many connections that define Sancho, Dogeral spoke softly and calmly, "I'm sorry."

Sancho's life drifted away as Dogeral collapsed onto the floor, weeping like a spanked babe. "If I could have only prevented the institute from losing its funding," Dogeral whimpered to himself. "Why..."

Nov 10, 2008

Sci-fi is dead, and it's coffin is called Star Wars

Don't get me wrong. I love me the Star Wars.

But SW killed Science Fiction. It killed it by reawakening sci-fi as a bastion of adventure rather than a medium for scientific postulation. It made it impossible to have dry, boring, scientific, physiologically sound fiction about what the world might really be like. About what science could really offer us, and how that might be good or bad.

I like that kind of sci-fi. The kind without zombies, or ghosts, or psychics, or the force, or magic, or a dystopic tinge that leans towards the impossible.

Star Wars, as much as I enjoy it, isn't really sci-fi. It has things that aren't possible in our universe, it is fantasy in the same way the Lord of the Rings is fantasy.

This infusion of fantasy into sci-fi fundementally altered the genre, making it impossible to separate sci-fantasy, real sci-fi and space opera. And so. The lesser genre has withered and died.

Gone are the days of Heinlein, early Dick, Asimov and others. What we have left are a few off-and-on authors that work or worked in a few mostly sci-fi sub-genres, that have themselves been clouded with pulp.

Pulp is fine, but there is no-longer any real distinction between "I, Robot" and some modern Cyber-punk pulp.

Does that mean Cyber-punk isn't loads of fun? No. Just that what Asimov was using robots to say about people had nothing at all to do with robots. And yet also laid the ground-work for our classifications of AI and robotics.

It was both. And now it is neither. Now when someone writes about green men from mars, they really mean green men from mars, and they don't care that it isn't possible. Sometimes the reality of guesswork in the 50's and 60's turned out to be wrong. But now our outlook on the future is so bleak and conservative.

Too bad.

I guess I ran out of cool ideas for the future, and that is why my brain doesn't make new authors with new ideas.

That, or it has stalled those authors so my own Sci-fi novel will seem to be that much more awesome when I finish it.

Nov 9, 2008

Why have a blog if you are a solipsist?

Good question, me. And there is a surprisingly easy answer, and it is twofold! Goody!

Firstly, I'm not really a solipsist, I just play one on the tubes.

Secondly, I really am one and since my mind is vast and wonderful, a blog might be a good way to entertain myself with all the fun new people it thinks up. So join the fun, chat it up, call my bluffs and otherwise entertain and be entertained.

'Cause we are all gonna die eventually, so live it up while I let you.