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June 9, 2006 Picture the work of an insidous worm that makes the pixels on your computer screen light up and present the following imagery: Fred the Red Baron flies across your computer screen in his antiquated triplane trailing this long wavy banner which reads "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? --Epicurus, 341BC--" Heck, I say. Who is perplexed by Epicurus? Ah yes, the old issue of evil. Evil keeps coming back like that old die-hard worm that you haven't yet extricated from your hard drive...the good people (you) against the bad people (who eat worms or who send you worms via email attachments.) But look. Whether God created the universe or not, what happens happens, and some people will be harmed by what happens and some people will be benefited. Like for example, when there is a plague and ninety-five percent of the people die, well, that makes a lot more room for more poor people. When it rains and floods out the ball game, well, if the farmers were praying for rain, then they were thankful. If God really is up in heaven, making things happen, doncha think He knows that He can't please all the people all of the time? A big event is good for some of the creatures and bad for some of the creatures. This is true whether there is any God or not. Even an asteroidal impact is good for the species that don't go extinct. They multiply and over the eons they evolve and fill the world up with new species. Certain processes keep on making things happen and we keep on finding out more and more about existence. Fred says "humanists are the good guys," but don't humanists sometimes ride into town on horses with bandannas covering their faces and rob a bank? And don't atheists sometimes rob, as Bob Dylan suggests, "with a fountain pen"? Well, I guess you can tell that I'm cutting into Fred Smith's onion. But I'm not crying yet. How about a little good humor, eh? Maybe God has a funnybone, so He plays tricks on humans who are determined to be so very very seeeerious. Same as David Gleeson and Frederick Smith, I know that nature's grand! No doubt about it! King David also wrote a number of pieces declaring the glory of nature's handiwork! David Gleeson and Fred Smith just don't want to give the cosmic destroyer-creator and recycler a human face and a human personality. They don't want to believe that God ever takes a human form and they don't want to celebrate some divine Incarnation or Avatar who walks and talks with people on Earth. But what about all this bugaboo about "good" and "evil"? When it comes to good and evil, isn't it all relative? What's bad for you and me isn't so bad for somebody else. Even if our universe all goes down a Big Black Hole, (well, on second thought, I guess a point singularity can't be big, eh?) somethere else a new universe is being formed. What is good just depends on where you stand. It's not good for you if you stand on a volcano and it blows. But if you are super-rich, after the eruption your heirs will enjoy spending your vast fortune. Well, so let's not worry too much about good and evil and the good guys versus the bad guys. Imagine, if you can, that some time ago a trans-galactic starship landed on the dark side of the Moon. The centuries pass and eventually the transgalactic crew decides to beam down to Earth a radiant Psychic Albino Being or PAB whose mission is to talk sense into people and feed people a bit of PABlum...since humanity is still an infantile consciousness. The gigantic size of the PAB and the thundering sound of it's engineered-to-humble-all-humanoids voice will be enough to strike fear in people, and as soon as some fearful human idiots shoot the PAB it drops dead and springs back up re-created four-fold by the same power that beamed down the first PAB, that will discourage people from continuing to attack the PAB. After all, the PAB gets its life from the distant starship implanted in the Moon, not from the Earth. And since the Earth people have no knowledge of the implanted alien form, the humans have no way of understanding the source of the PAB. And so, even though Earth people hate the gargantuan PAB and want to kill it, they do not dare shoot it becaue already by shooting PABs, humans create more PABS. The vocal PAB now speaks to the people, saying: "Behold me! I am like one of your gorillas. I live in peace with the forest that sustains me, and I sustain the forest by urinating in it and defecating in it. This is good for me because it makes me feel good to relieve myself. It is also good for the forest. As a gorilla, my pooping and peeing is in no way evil. I am totally free of sin." The PAB continues to speak: "Behold me! I am also like one of your spiders. I spin my web with no desire to bother you or harm you, and I consume large numbers of flies and other noxious insects. But you swat me, you stomp on me, you spray me with deadly poison, and you make me the bad guy in many of your tall tales and your fairy stories." Remember, I am psychic and I know all that you do, say, and think. I also let my body waste fall as it may and it fertilizes the holy ground. All of my brothers and sisters do the same. We are all sinless and we are all holy." "Behold the human race! Take a look at yourselves! You are afraid of your bodily waste. You hide it and you make no effort to reprocess it. You are afraid of your bodily dead and you don't know how to just give of yourself back to the holy ground. Yet myriads of other forms, the perfectly natural and sinless forms, simply let their wastes fall upon the holy ground without feeling bad about it. When they die they go back into the holy ground and merge with holiness. Why are you always feeling so unholy and so evil or so good? Why do you feel so alienated from nature?" "Behold me! Where I come from there is always joy in being in the present and living in the present. Everything is holy. There is no badness. Existence is provident, radiant, and good. Dying is provident, radiant, and good. There is not this split between good and evil. You humans are obsessed with this split. You want to always have a battle and so you invent this evil god and call it Satan. You imagine there is this battle between your good God and your evil Satan. Always you want to have a battle." As the PAB speaks these words, hundreds of armed men stand by with loaded bazookas and machine guns. They want to riddle the PAB with bullets or blast it to Kingdom Come, but they now that shooting this one PAB will only cause other PABs to be created! Already twelve PABs stand radiantly shining within half a mile of the PAB that is thundering out its message to humanity. This is because the first PAB was attacked by humans and had to be regenerated with added backup vocalists. Imagine the IMPACT this MOVIE would have on today's sci-fi adults and kids. Lots of them would want to buy inflatable PABs that tower over the ecocidal powers-that-be and offer sound ecological advice and do other provocative and outrageous things. Think of the troubles that kids would get into for bringing their PABS to school. Barbie and Ken, move over! Seriously, folks, the universe is out there and all around us, and there are some big dangerous rocks out in space that will hit Earth sooner or later, and if not safely and sanely managed, the Big One will destroy the human race. Humanity needs to put away the hate, the germ warfare, the bombs, the email flames, and the guns and get serious about the realities of space. The main devil is these rocks. There are lesser devils, such as the rising oceans and the mighty super storms to come. There are super heat waves, super big earthquakes, and volcanic upheavals. There is the end of cheap oil and gas, after the present stores have been exhausted. Featuring some ancient sayings of Epicurus is really not addressing the problems at hand. Most of what is evil is in our imaginations. If we unite, we can deal manage the space debris, maybe even mine it! Otherwise, one of these days the Earth nations are likely to just start nukin' it out. That's probably a more likely END than asteroidal impact, 'cause God or no God, that old Devil's still inside of our heads. We just can't get rid of the demons. Biff! Bam! Pow! Sock! BOOM! Folks, we just gotta make peace with ourselves. ------------ About the author: John L. Waters is an amateur psychologist and independent researcher on self-healing, integration, and problem-solving. John has created art, music and songs, prose and poetry, and helped people solve a difficult problem. For more information, read: John's letters of recommendation: http://members.tripod.com/johnlwaters/recommendations about John's self-healing and integration: http://members.tripod.com/johnlwaters/index.html about John's independent research: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jlw47/index.html about John's seeking an agent or a publisher: http://www.writers.net/writers/39295 Email: blueguntwo@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. 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