Limited Good Choices

Lee Berman · 13 Aug 2010, 06:17 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 02:17:25 -0400
Subject: (urth) Limited Good Choices
Message-ID: <SNT123-W254627ED5FBF198B1EB3A0CF980 at phx.gbl>

>Jeff Wilson: I think this assertion has weak empirical and logical support. Humans 
>make poor choices even when they have reasonable knowledge of the 
>consequences, and there's no treatment of the idea that G-d may choose 
>not to foresee everything

Jeff, I am not religious and I suspect we are thus too different in our thinking
to even discuss this topic but I'll give it a shot.

You mention "poor choices" but the issue of morality or postive/negative consequences
is far, far from the point I am trying to make. I am discussing the very capacity to
make a choice.

Let's look at Original Sin. From Adam and Eve's point of view they had a choice on
whether to eat the forbidden fruit. They didn't know the future and they felt like doing
it so they made a choice and they ate.

>From God's point of view it is a different story. God made Adam and Eve. He gave them a
sense of curiosity and a susceptibility to temptation. He put them in a garden with some
very interesting fruit and a serpent to tempt them. From God's perspective there was no
choice for Adam and Eve. God knew he'd given them enough curiosity and enough susceptiblity
to temptation that they would have no choice but to eat.

In hindsight we can recognize God's Plan. I think we can be pretty sure that God did not intend
us to spend eternity running around primitive and naked in Eden. God could not have erred so 
badly in making us.  He surely intended Adam and Eve to succumb and be kicked out of Eden and 
become fruitful and multiply become civiized and build a Babel tower and speak various languages
and become thoughtful and scholarly and everything else we are today.

(if you think I am being presumptuous and sacriligeous in deigning to try understanding the world
from God's perspective, perhaps you are right. But I think BotNS does something of the same sort)

I know this has strayed too far off topic and this will be the last I'll discuss it. But I do
think the general philosophy relates to BotNS and sort of explains why so many bad things have to
happen to Severian and Urth to allow the future to fulfill itself.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net