> From this.

You know, I thought of what I would ask for if God asked me like He did Solomon what I desired above all else. Solomon asked for wisdom when God appeared to him in a dream. It is a commendable choice, not to ask for riches or even for a long life; God gave him riches also because He so loved that Solomon chose what he did. I, not being a king and so not requiring the greatest of wisdom therefore, would instead ask for humility. (Note that pride is the worst sin, but that doesn’t mean humility is the greatest virtue; it doesn’t work like that: love is the greatest virtue.) I have my reasons for my pick.

My choice comes from the experience of my life. It can be seen to be because all the problems in my life seemed to come from the lack of humility. I thought on more than one occasion that I could literally take on the world. I have thought I was bigger than Jesus. Seriously, I thought that. Harder, better, faster, stronger than Jesus of Nazareth. When he became Jesus Christ to me, that flew out the window. That required me kicking my own ass, so to speak, for thinking as I did about my comparing myself to our Lord. Blessed be his name. Also factoring in my choice, I thought it would be really neat being humble. I would think it a really cool thing to be like so humble that God would not be offended at my presence before him. Just cool beans. Yeah, parts of me are still a child.

> From this.

I took the first printout of the original document of true love, and on March 1, 2013, at about 10pm EST, I put on some blood red lipstick and I kissed it, then I crumpled it up and threw it away outside, in the apartment garbage. For as you know, Philip K. Dick saw God in the trash layer of the universe, after all. Where else could I petition Him better? I had made a second printout to keep for posterity, and I kissed that after I had kissed the original document, and then I laminated it (badly — there were creases in the plastic on the reverse side; oh, well). I also have tucked away the tube of lipstick I used to kiss. I wonder what will become of such things.

I was told to do this ritual by the Lord, so let it be said of me, “He is an unprofitable servant. He only did what he was told.” Such is my greatest desire, actually, that I may be called so, a true servant of the Lord this would be. Scripture says as much. So this is my letter to the world, that never wrote to me, except that one time I did get this eviction notice… but that’s another story entirely. I must say, the more the penmanship of the world resembles a typewriter, the deeper in trouble you tend to be.

> From this.

And now for something completely relevant:

Can God make a rock He can’t lift? No, He can.

(The question has always been of a light, mocking spirit, meant to make fun of the faith. If a believer tries to answer in all seriousness, then the questioner has won, for the believer mistakes the spirit of the question entirely. Why shouldn’t there be a quippy response to such tongue-in-cheekness? If the believer ignores the question, the questioner has again won, for the believer is admitting there is no proper answer. This answer I give, and let it be all I’ll say on the subject, this answer is in the same spirit as the question, and pokes back tit for tat.)

> From this.

I read once that one might wonder if just the fact that God knows exactly what we will do removes us from true free will. This is absurd. This is not a toy world (that reality’s not kid stuff could also be an explanation why there are such things as pain), a world which only has a freedom within tiny limits. Why did God create creatures that are capable of doing wrong? Reminds me of U2 lyrics: “Don’t believe the Devil / I don’t believe his book / But the truth is not the same / Without the lies he made up”. We derive significant meaning to this life because we have that freedom: when given the choice to do wrong, to do right instead. God is great enough to have given real free will to His creations: to inflict injury or permanent death, or to use it for the cause of good.

Even were this world completely deterministic, we could still be blessed with real, free will: just suppose, what if God knew what you would choose of your own free will and determined everything to that? That solves predestination and free will both together as compatible, don’t you think? Quite the opposite of where we started, in this little blip. And I’m not even being serious.

> From this.

We all have our own points of view. I was shown this quite graphically once. I was staring at page one of this old Bible I had, the Book of Genesis, with the “Let there be light” and all on it. I forget how it came to be, but, gazing at that one page, I was privy to how that single page qualitatively changed — when seen through this and that other person’s view, personages from throughout history. I got to see the world from other people’s eyes, as close to literally as one possibly might figure you can. I would bet you never really thought about it, and neither did I, before this. We look at the world, and a printed page is a printed page is a printed page. Except I found out that people’s experiences are indeed personal, each one of us our own. We surely have specific eyes that view the world, each viewpoint especially just, singly for each one of us.

Albert Einstein had something like an Earl Grey flavor type of filter — yes, like an Instagram filter these were. But founded, as if each filter were a natural seeing, if special. Vincent van Gogh had something like a margarita. I saw my own, from times back, and that was like lemonade. (I regretted looking through Hitler’s, similar to Albert’s, but with a strange sticky coldness that I have come to know as the sensation of a personal evil.) The best may have been Leonardo da Vinci’s, who was, as Vincent put it, “stingy with his stuff.” It was like the hint of looking at the original Declaration of Independence, that Bible page.

The most curious was Jesus Christ’s. I couldn’t hold onto even a fraction of his point of view. Every time I looked through it, it flowed around and through whatever sigil I was looking at. It was the opposite of madness, a supreme Reason did it seem to portend: Order opposed to Chaos, however much it was in motion — that I could not fully wrap my mind around, but comprehended was present. There was so much of it, shifting in my eye, ungraspable like dense but transparent smoke. It meant one thing: he really is infinite. He really is the Son of God. Fancy that.

> From this.

Reality may be described by one, two, and three things: structure, information (descriptive structure), and quality (interpretive structure). Structure is that which may be understood as existence itself, and is likened to Kant’s noumena, which cannot be directly observed (existence apart from anything cannot be observed on its own). There can only be observed information, which is to say, things that exist, which is likened to Kant’s phenomena. Information thus is sufficient to model the universe in ways that comprehend everything in it. However, one might go further in its description. One may say that quality is how anything experiences anything else, or anyone. Or in other words, the means by which reality is measured is how quality is manifest, quality being the measurement itself, and a third means of describing the universe.

Though one can describe everything with information, the subjective reality requires an interpretive referential. It is the means by which every story is born. Note that quality itself can also be described with information. Which is just manifestation of structure, in the way that can be observed — structure comprising all that exists. And then all observations (for these are measurements) are of quality. One, two, three… infinity.

In a less analytical version of what reality is, what is real may be described as that which has true quality. And to be true means that it has natural structure, which is to say, it is a complete structure. This should hold even if we apply it to that which is not exactly real-seeming. For instance, when the apostle Paul went blind, Ananias of Damascus receives divine instruction to cure him of his blindness. As these events relate to the physical world, they have quality true. That all these events join without incongruity, and that they complete all expectation, it means they have a natural, or complete structure. If the accounts may be believed, they are real, and in this case, that which is of the spiritual world can be said to be reality as much as the physical world. Of course, that is if you believe the accounts.

When you behold a deception, it does not have a natural, complete structure. What is promised does not come to fruition in the case of a lie. If no one had been waiting for Paul, then we would doubt that what he saw was in any way real, for it is then tantamount to a lie when he is told that someone would indeed meet him. We may, in fact, find true quality in the event of a deception, but that would mean the revelation of that deception not having natural, or complete structure. In this way we do not make any lie true. There are ways, however, to do just that…

> From this.

Epicurus said:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

The big problem with the claim(s) of this argument is that it presumes that God has to use our logic to do things. To give faith a chance, though, think of the possibility that He knew that evil would happen, but that His purpose would be served better if He allowed it to happen than if He did not? That the most good would come about as a final result, which would exist in eternity? (Note that this counterargument is not to say that the end justifies the means — for He Himself does no evil, giving only freedom.) Perhaps we merely act upon the argument that we do not prefer things to go wrong, but when they do, we make of things better than if the wrong never occurred? If there is an eternity, an afterlife, we lose no chance to make it up to those destroyed by the world.

Many questions that deny the existence of God seem merely to underestimate Him, or think that He operates in a way that is trivially understood by beings that are far, far inferior in wisdom and of purpose. And to harp on the point that God is willing and able to stop evil: we call it Judgement Day. Just because He doesn’t follow your timeline doesn’t make Him incompetent. It is no longer thinking out of the box to claim ignorance of the existence of God. Now that we see a bit clearer things of scale, find a place for infinity in the finite: see how well that fits in your world.