2025-01-09 #
Recall the Book of Job, in which a man's faith is tested by Satan and God when everything he has is taken away from him. From this parable, it seems that the benevolent God makes himself known by allowing Satan to cause tragedy after tragedy, taking away his wealth, daughters, and painfully disfiguring him. Job questions God, suggesting that the wicked go unpunished while the good suffer. Remind anyone of the problems of judicial systems today?
The epilogue of Job's health being restored and things returned to him, is somehow more unrealistic and implausible than God making himself known to Job. Perhaps it takes away from the lesson of this parable, that good people have to suffer, and people of even stronger moral character suffer more.
2025-01-07 #
What is The Truthβ’? There's the misconception that truth prevails over falsity. What the truth is in practice:
- What the average of your closest peers think.
- Consensus by self-proclaimed experts, bureaucrats, and the political class.
- Behind closed doors, the truth is what the most powerful person in the room believes.
- Information which may harm those in power.
There are narratives which in all likelihood don't tell the whole story, but the people are powerless to challenge it: might makes right.
2025-01-04 #
Hell is other people. The interpretation of this Sartre quote at face value is almost always wrong, it doesn't mean that other people make life miserable (but this is also the case). Once one is dead, the perception of that person is fixed, it can no longer change, hence that person is trapped in Hell on Earth. A person is truly dead when they are forgotten, often this happens before the physical death. I keep reminding myself of this as I think about my own mortality.
2025-01-01 #
Time is a flat circle. The same things keep happening over and over. What did I want to do differently in this life? It's absurd yet also realistic to think that today could be my last day, or it could be years from now. I think not about how I wish to be remembered, but how I may be judged by God. Not really sure why I'm here at all, though my art gives me some sense of fulfillment, and my writing at least puts my worldview out in the Γ¦ther. This is for sure a Hell realm we inhabit here on Earth.
While kings may be buried with their lavish possessions, I may as well leave nothing behind but this webbed site. Most people depart this Earth with nothing but relationships to others, I have relatively few of those. I don't intend to unalive myself, but I'm pre-occupied with the thought that life is so short.
There is this concept of the death drive which manifests itself in self-destructive behavior. Some might even argue that a will-to-death is what motivates human behavior. Becoming a martyr, whether one chooses to or not, is a noble death. I disrespect people who mock how people died, especially their enemies, it reflects that they live for no values at all.
