> Or simply, agnostics say, "We don't know." When asked what he would say if he met
> God following his death, Michael Harrington commented that he would ask God why he
> mumbled to humanity so much. Assuming there is a God, why the guessing game?
>
> However, simply asking that question doesn't preclude an answer. Maybe there is a
> purpose to the guessing game.
>
> The only reason I am agnostic rather than atheist is simply because I one day
> looked around and found it amazing that anything exists. Anything at all. Just
> the basic point that we take for granted. Why does anything exist at all? Where
> did even the potential for existence come from?
>
> And then to watch a colorful plant come out of a seemingly formless ground; yes,
> we can reduce much of the mechanisms to systems of knowledge; but just the fact
> that it can happen. The fact that chunks of dust and steam from supernovae can
> come together and become aware of themselves and everything around them. It
> sounds trite until you think about it, but it really does suggest an author.
>
> Maybe the author is only as far as a rough draft.
>
> Or, maybe it is random and void of any meaning or purpose.
>
> I don't know.
>
> But dialectical materialism, of which I used to believe vehemently, is simply an
> attempt to state that there is a purpose and meaning, but avoid the inevitable
> question of a source of that meaning. It's just "there." If we start trying to
> look beyond for a causation, we risk losing a grip on the tenant of "materialism."
>
> Materialism is what allows us to assume that morality is relative, except where we
> choose to impose it.
Eric is overlooking the really hard question here: where did all the chaos come from?
The answer is found in the only holy book silly enough to ask the question in the first place: *Principia Discordia*. (The answer Eris ['mongst the Greeks, Discordia for the Romans], Goddess of chaos, chance and confusion. Which makes those of us who worship her Eristocrats, I guess.)
After all, with perfect order nothing would ever happen at all.
(However, I have it on very good authority that she appears most often in the modern world under the aspect of her avian form -- the penguin.)
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"