As you have no doubt noticed, the publishing schedule around here has gotten a bit less dependable. Thus far, all that has been affected has been the afternoon article. But this may just be the beginning. I’m trying to be solid with the anniversary and music posts. I’ve managed to get the last couple of 11:05 publications up just because I happened to be able to. They weren’t done the day before as used to be the case. Now everything just gets jammed into the little bit of time that I manage between other things I’m working on.
Currently, I’m managing writers, writing my own freelance stuff, rewriting a book for publication, and taking frequent breaks to scream into a pillow. It’s madness. I don’t deal well with this level of stress. And I do believe that some day soon they are going to have to take me away to a quiet place where the most upsetting thing will be sparrows chirping in the morning. And even that may be a bit too much to take.
So I’m thinking I’ll let the days float. What is there to talk about anyway? Doing the anniversary posts are interesting because they constantly remind me that nothing much has changed. And the morning music posts remind me that perhaps not everything in the world is terrible.
God and Ice Cream
It reminds me of some philosopher I was reading who was talking about the nature of God. Like a lot of people, he was interested in theodicy and why God allows evil in the world. But he was quick to note that there isn’t just evil in the world. He specifically mentioned ice cream. If God were evil, would it actually allow anything as wonderful as ice cream? I forget where he came down on the issue.
To me it is clear enough. The way I see God is a given. God is just a word that explains why things exist. The Bible claims, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It does show how God is just a linguistic trick that allows us to talk about the ineffable. But whatever you want to think about God, you can’t possibly think that it is something that cares about us in the same way that a mother cares about her child. If there is such a thing as God’s love, it is only in the sense that to exist is a favor. Regardless of how horrible we may perceive existence, at least we get to perceive it. Most things don’t get that gift.
Personally, I don’t buy that. There is life and there is not life. Life is nothing but a chemical process. Our consciousness nothing but trick. And as much as we like to think of ourselves as independent organisms — universes in ourselves — it sucks to perceive ourselves in such a way that we find painful. And in that context, God is an utterly useless concept. There is good and evil in the world simply because there is good and evil in our conception of the universe.
William Lane Craig is one of the people who has decided that my way of thinking is wrong: God defines good. And that means that Craig has defined good and evil out of existence in the context of our consciousness. But I think Craig is a huge liar. He’s lying to himself in his zeal to believe a truly ridiculous dogma. He must know, once you peel back the barriers he’s built to protect God, that we are all alone and that we have no clue why some things give us pain and others give us joy. There is no reason that humans will ever be able to understand why they can be licking a delicious ice cream cone just as someone stabs us through the kidney.
So we go from the ontological “Why does anything exist?!” to the Schopenhauerian “Why continue on within our own little universes?!” And the answer to both questions is the same: we don’t know. So we muddle on. And that is what I will continue to do: muddle on with Frankly Curious. At this point, it is the closest thing I have to a social life, so I hope that I can keep you all interested enough to keep stopping by. Hopefully, for the regular readers, it comes down more on the ice cream side of the universe than the knife through the kidney side of things.
What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?
Trump won the 
And I think I’m being way too generous to Rubio. I doubt there is much of an appetite on the part of Cruz voters for Rubio. If Hillary Clinton has a problem in terms of seeming authentic, Rubio has the problem in spades. But he’s coming at it from a position of weakness. That’s why I think it is much more likely that the Republican establishment would say that they can better live with a Cruz candidacy than a Trump one, and force Rubio out of the race. That, at least, seems like a plausible way to defeat Trump. Because we all know that Rubio will do whatever the establishment tells him to.
