WHY DO YOU THINK WE ARE HERE? WHY DO WE EXIST?

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- the parallels between idiot-engineer God and idiot-engineer Logik are astounding.

You're starting to sound like Nick_A.

[Logik]

You're starting to sound like Nick_A.

No. Nick_A believes in an intelligent creator.

I believe that IF there is a creator (s)he's a total idiot.

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You're starting to sound like Nick_A.

No. Nick_A believes in an intelligent creator.

I believe that IF there is a creator (s)he's a total idiot.

I knew I would be held to provide an explanation.

The shtick of Nick_A is that he's the holder of the secret. The initianti. He is closest to god among us.

Yours is that you resemble your creator. In fact, nobody can tell the difference. -- No offence meant.

[Logik]

Yours is that you resemble your creator. In fact, nobody can tell the difference. -- No offence meant.

Of course I resemble my creators. I got my mother's eyes and my dad's baldness.

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I believe that IF there is a creator (s)he's a total idiot.

Give the creator some slack, will ya. Maybe s/he is just a creator-intern. Or this is a project s/he had to prepare in second year undergrad, majoring in creation. S/He probably got a C- on it, the bulk of the passing mark coming from Effort. In fact, the entire shkebam smells of perspiration and resembles a close-to-deadline blotched-up-job.

[Logik]

In fact, the entire shkebam smells of perspiration and resembles a close-to-deadline blotched-up-job.

PRECISELY! Budgets. Deadlines. Shortcuts.

The works!

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Generally speaking, I wrote this short story on the identical theme way back when:

When Black Turns To Grey

The Lord thinketh and thinketh. He was deep in thought; the angels around Him did not dare to disturb Him, they walked around on angel wings. ("Ouch! Get off my wing, you idiot.")   
They did not know what He was thinking about. He was the handsomest of the lot: He had pitch-black shiny, thick hair, a muscular body, and perfectly nice-smelling skin. He was a man, a nice Jewish boy; but it appeared that He was an orphan. Some feared that all that thinking would lead to no good, because what good can come of a Jewish boy with no mother.  
He was deeply engaged in thinking, and one day He stopped and announced what He had been thinking about:  
"I will create a world and an Earth. I shall populate the sky with stars, and the earth with animals and plants, and I'll see that it will be good." The angels all clapped and danced and laughed in joy. How nice it will be, a world! Full of stars and animals and other things. It will be good, too. The Lord spoke so!  
So there they all were, and the Lord drew up the plans and He created a hierarchy of lines of command among His angels to carry out His orders in the task of creation.  
According to the plans, it would be a perfect world: no suffering, no pain, no fear, no hatred. That was actually not part of the plan, to exclude these things, as no paradigm for suffering or pain or fear or hatred had ever existed. The creation of the world was really a make-work project, with no exciting new or original thought put into it. The ideals and the mechanisms and the concept had already existed: everyone will be happy and satisfied (as had been: Himself and the angels); the stars will move about their celestial pilgrimage in precise clockwork movement (with the same precision and beauty that He had been interacting with the angels); and every living thing with wants will be provided for, just as He and the angels never lacked.  
The work got underway. Sand and clay and water and air were brought in. Water was combined with fire, oil was mixed with earth, and the stars were born. The angels wanted to celebrate, but the Lord said, "No, we shall wait for the seventh day and then we will rest." The angels were not happy to hear this. They wanted to play with the new sparklers, they wanted to see them twinkle like a bunny's eye, and they wanted to spell the name of the Almighty on the backdrop of the dark, blue sky by waving the sparkles in the dark to form letters. They muttered, "What a killjoy," but went dutifully on their way to help the Lord in His creation.
 
It was angel Satan who first noticed an impurity in the perfection of the creation. He quietly approached the Lord and said, "Dear Almighty, I ran some calculations on these molecular structures and gaseous eruptions of nuclear furnaces in the larger celestial bodies. It turns out that... well, they shan't last forever." "WHAT?" thundered the Lord. "Well, it's simple. Though Thou created matter and energy which are indestructible and more can't be created, the energy levels equalize in the system and therefore the molecular structures... well, they will age. This thing will fizz out in another hundred thousand billion years." "HUMBUG!" thundered the Lord, "Your calculations are faulty. Check your numbers again. We'll go on with the creating of the world that will be perfect, will last forever, and it will be good."
So the work continued. But the second day after the Earth was created, a volcanic eruption occurred. The angels had to work overtime to hide this from the Lord, who was known for some of the times being a mean and jealous God. Luckily, the eruption occurred on the far side of the globe, facing away from the Lord, so He never noticed the fault and the restorative work could be carried out undetected.

They were putting animals together, when someone ran excitedly to the Almighty. "Lord! Lord! The lion, who was supposed to lie peacefully with the kid... he hurt one of them!!" "WHAT?" "True! And... and... Thou rememberst those strong, pointy teeth Thou hath us put in his mouth? They penetrated the kid's neck... and then the strong lion shook the kid in his mouth until it expired... and then... oh, horror... he ate him!" And the angel broke down crying.
The Lord hurried to the scene. The lion cubs were finishing up the remains of the poor little goat. "Destroy all lions!" ordered the Lord immediately. "How can we? Without killing them? Thou shalt not kill, remember?" Satan approached, with a notebook full of numbers and equations. "Lord... if Thou destroyest the lions, then Thou shalt have to destroy all carnivores. Which will make the deer population explode and there will be great famine among them. But they're a necessary link in the chain of life. The grass will not find a purpose to exist if no herbivores eat it. In fact, the explosion of grasslands will squeeze flower-bearing wild flowers out of existence, which will make the bees and the wasps disappear. What will the birds in the sky eat then? Oh, and those little, tiny animals Thou hast createth to help the digestion of deer, they mutated and they now live in the muscles of deer instead of in their stomachs. It causes the deer great pain. I predict some will pass away. But the lions are good to weed out the sick ones... no, don't destroy the lions."
The good Lord stood there, listening incredulously to this tirade by Satan. His brows furrowed, his eyes darkened; the vein on His temple pulsated dangerously. He ground His teeth. "Satan... I'm warning you. One more piece of bad news and you're gone. And I mean it." Satan bowed respectfully, and left the room backing out, bowing in the Lord's direction constantly.

The problems multiplied. Ants would eat picnic food instead of their planned food. Mosquitoes would suck blood instead of sing on treetops and carry messages of the greatness of the Lord. After man created watches (after the lord created man), they were either slow or fast, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot, but none was able to keep on time even for a second.
Then, there was the patch-up work. The dinosaurs were given feathers (they looked really stupid in them) so they'd survive the meteorite hit that would come later due to an inaccuracy of the clockwork movement of celestial bodies. Fish were made to breathe with gills, animals with lungs, because it turned out that no single biological oxygen-uptake mechanism could work in both air and water.
The Lord went to bed on the eve of the sixth day with a huge headache.

On the sixth day, He got up and announced, "I will create man. He's going to right all the wrongs in this universe. He will be created in my image, for several reasons: he'll be infinitely smart plus infinitely beautiful, so that he can do my work and I can still collect my paycheck without punching in every morning; and shall make him in my image also because I'm infinitely conceited on top of being infinitely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely good. So there you have it."
The angels went to fetch the ingredients. The Lord rolled up His sleeves and made man. As He was placing the brain in the cranium, Satan was no longer able to suppress his urge to speak up. "Thou wantst to place this essence of man into the complete darkness of his head cavity? Thou will make his senses forever blind to the world; he will look but not see, he will learn but not know, he will love but blindly." "SHUT UP," whispered the Lord. "I'll create the tree of infinite wisdom, and he can eat its fruit. The problems you mentioned will all disappear." "Well... all right," said Satan. And he stayed around, watching the creation come to life as the Lord breathed life into him.

Man walked around in the Garden of Eden. He knew everything, which made him want to forget everything. To forget he needed a distraction, but all the animals and fish and birds could not make him forget his loneliness. He bugged the Lord until He made woman. The Lord was worn down by then; He had so many problems with this creation of His. There were too many things that went awry, amiss, or downright catastrophic and all as a direct result of inaccurate plans. He had left the lines of deduction incomplete when He should have worried about "what would happen if" and this was backfiring on Him. He was really at His wit's end. He had lost His credibility in front of the angels, and Satan was constantly on His heels, telling Him why He could not or should not uncreate parts of His work, since that would make the whole system collapse into nihil.

So there was man, with his newest toy, woman; the exasperated Lord, with His tattered self-respect; Satan, with his wisdom; and the angels who were not the happiest bunch these days.

The Serpent offered an apple to man and man took it on woman's insistence. The Lord watched this with misgivings; Satan with the interest of the investigative scientist; the angels with immense anxiety (what's going to happen next?).

Man took a bite and forgot everything he had ever known.

"ARRGGGH!" the Lord cried out in pain. "You go to hell," He screamed, and He tossed Satan into the bowels of the Earth. The angels took off on their wings and circled in the air like a flock of wading birds startled by gunshot. Man and woman decided to feel guilty about everything and started to wait for the Messiah to stop this guilt.  

And the Lord fell into His chair, buried His face in His hands, and started to sob uncontrollably.

The angels, in hushed voices, seeing the example of what happened to Satan, tried to explain the situation to each other.
The upshot was that a major ingredient was missing from creation, or at least there was not enough of it added in. It was the only thing that could have made the creation a success and the Almighty had no way of obtaining it. Whether He had known that He had needed it and had gone ahead with the work anyway, or He had been oblivious to this, the angels did not know. But what they did know was that what turned the Lord's hair white overnight and made Him look much older than His real age, and what had made creation a disaster, was the fact that He had never had the touch of a mother. He had never felt her soft caress, He had never heard her calling Him sweet names, He had never been held in her arms. He not once could proudly say, "Look, ma, no hands."

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Yours is that you resemble your creator. In fact, nobody can tell the difference. -- No offence meant.

Of course I resemble my creators. I got my mother's eyes and my dad's baldness.

Lucky it wasn't the other way around. With all due respect to the old lady.

[Ferdi]

None of us have asked to be born.
We are here ‘not’ by our own choice but as the result of the natural breeding-urge of our forefathers. We have no say about our own quality. We are all born with a free will, but we are ‘not’ all born equal. We may be male or female, large or small, have different talents, faces, voices, colours; may be good, bad, clean, dirty, nice, nasty, sporty, clumsy, clever, backward, rich, poor, healthy or handicapped, etc. We have a “free” will but our will is limited by our individual abilities and influenced by our environment. Our primitive forefathers were led to believe that thunder, rain and volcanoes are produced by Gods and that a God has created the lot. For us science has since explained that the vagaries of nature are caused by living in the infinite universe on the crust of a planet with a hot molten core and an atmosphere subject to climate changes. I came to my conclusion that the label “infinity” explains whatever I sense to be there but is beyond my dimensions. Religious believers invented “Gods”, produced their Holy Books and narrowed some minds to such extend as to produce fanatics and Holy Wars. We are free to believe what we like.
We are born with whatever talents and a “free” will to be good or bad. We can kill, remove life, but we cannot restore life.
I find it logical that there must be an evaluation at the end of one’s life to assess how one has played one’s cards, if one has been good or been bad with the talents one has been given. I thus expect that at the instant of death, when one’s life departs from its body, time becomes instantly irrelevant because infinity applies and one instantly self-judges one’s earthly sojourn with the wisdom of the Universe from where one came at birth. Don’t fear a God, fear yourself.
I am in my 10’s decade, will know soon why I was here but won’t tell you, such is life !

[gaffo]

None of us have asked to be born.
We are here ‘not’ by our own choice but as the result of the natural breeding-urge of our forefathers. We have no say about our own quality. We are all born with a free will, but we are ‘not’ all born equal. We may be male or female, large or small, have different talents, faces, voices, colours; may be good, bad, clean, dirty, nice, nasty, sporty, clumsy, clever, backward, rich, poor, healthy or handicapped, etc. We have a “free” will but our will is limited by our individual abilities and influenced by our environment. Our primitive forefathers were led to believe that thunder, rain and volcanoes are produced by Gods and that a God has created the lot. For us science has since explained that the vagaries of nature are caused by living in the infinite universe on the crust of a planet with a hot molten core and an atmosphere subject to climate changes. I came to my conclusion that the label “infinity” explains whatever I sense to be there but is beyond my dimensions. Religious believers invented “Gods”, produced their Holy Books and narrowed some minds to such extend as to produce fanatics and Holy Wars. We are free to believe what we like.
We are born with whatever talents and a “free” will to be good or bad. We can kill, remove life, but we cannot restore life.
I find it logical that there must be an evaluation at the end of one’s life to assess how one has played one’s cards, if one has been good or been bad with the talents one has been given. I thus expect that at the instant of death, when one’s life departs from its body, time becomes instantly irrelevant because infinity applies and one instantly self-judges one’s earthly sojourn with the wisdom of the Universe from where one came at birth. Don’t fear a God, fear yourself.
I am in my 10’s decade, will know soon why I was here but won’t tell you, such is life !

Freewill is an illusion, man is just another social animal. its just DNA programming.

[Ferdi]

Re Gaffo
Were you not free to enter your illusion, be it within the rules of the game?

[seeds]

None of us have asked to be born.

How could something that does not yet exist ask for anything?

In which case, isn’t it necessary that it be done for us?

We are here ‘not’ by our own choice but as the result of the natural breeding-urge of our forefathers.

No, we are here because something beyond our present comprehension was able to arrange the fabric of reality into just the right configuration to awaken us into existence, not because our forefathers were horny.

We have no say about our own quality. We are all born with a free will, but we are ‘not’ all born equal. We may be male or female, large or small, have different talents, faces, voices, colours; may be good, bad, clean, dirty, nice, nasty, sporty, clumsy, clever, backward, rich, poor, healthy or handicapped, etc. We have a “free” will but our will is limited by our individual abilities and influenced by our environment.

And if our momentary existence within this limited dimension of reality was all there is to life, then what you have pointed-out would seem pretty unfair to those of us who received the short end of the stick via the circumstances of our birth.

However, many of us have intuited (either through deduction or divinely inspired revelation) that our present situation is merely a prelude to a transcendent level of reality...

...(in the same way that our momentary stay within our mother’s womb was a prelude to our present level of reality).

Our primitive forefathers were led to believe that thunder, rain and volcanoes are produced by Gods and that a God has created the lot. For us science has since explained that the vagaries of nature are caused by living in the infinite universe on the crust of a planet with a hot molten core and an atmosphere subject to climate changes.

Are you talking about the same “science” that insists that the unfathomable order of the universe is a product of chance?

Take another (more thorough) glance at the post I linked you to earlier (the one with the GIF and earth/sun shot in it): viewtopic.php?f=12&t=23943&start=45#p357784

I came to my conclusion that the label “infinity” explains whatever I sense to be there but is beyond my dimensions.

I suggest that the label (word) “infinity” is merely a reference to size and distance and has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with explaining anything.

Religious believers invented “Gods”, produced their Holy Books and narrowed some minds to such extend as to produce fanatics and Holy Wars. We are free to believe what we like.

Yes, and just as science seems to be an ever-improving process of zeroing-in on higher truths with respect to material reality, likewise, so is the zeroing-in on spiritual truths an ever-improving process.

I find it logical that there must be an evaluation at the end of one’s life to assess how one has played one’s cards, if one has been good or been bad with the talents one has been given. I thus expect that at the instant of death, when one’s life departs from its body, time becomes instantly irrelevant because infinity applies and one instantly self-judges one’s earthly sojourn with the wisdom of the Universe from where one came at birth. Don’t fear a God, fear yourself.

Are you suggesting that you will still be alive in some form and context after the event of your physical death?

If so, then try to describe what you imagine that to be.

Furthermore, after one has “self-judged” one’s earthly sojourn, then what?
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[Dubious]

...because within THIS universe the possibility existed. Ergo, here we are!

[Ferdi]

Re “Seeds” of 23-3-2019 @ 16:56.
I much appreciate the detail of your comments for all to see.
Our view is through coloured glasses, coloured by the environment in which we find ourselves placed. As we grow-up, question, observe, learn and make decisions, we find our way through live and come gradually to the realisation that we are not all born equal and that the decisions of others affect us for better or worse. Some ‘one’ or some ‘thing’ placed us in that position on this peculiar planet earth. It makes no sense to blame a “thing”. I grew up to believe that someone, a creator, had made all, but from my long life among so-called civilised societies on opposite sides of the globe, I have come to my conclusion that it is not some “one” either because our planet and the universe are so complex that it requires an almighty power. The almightiness of our alleged creator is in conflict with the countless faults of the design; and, if you reckon that I am wrong, do not blame me but blame the maker! An almighty designer would inherently create a perfect world.
QED: we are here as the naturally evolving events of the universe. We developed science, found that 1+1=2 and 2x2=4 led to Einstein, etc. but infinity remains intrinsically beyond our grasp; we just know it ”exists”, as does LIFE. We are alive. Our heart beats, not under our control. We breathe, not under our control while we sleep, but we can control breathing while awake. To stay alive we must eat and move to find or grow food. We are so clever as to have developed tools. Man has walked on the Moon but we are still so stupid as to not live in peace. We have not been able to live and let live. Greed rules our world. Greed must figure large in our conscience at the instant of reckoning at death when the individual ceases to exist, becomes absorbed back into infinity, where good, bad and our dimensions do not apply.
If I am wrong it is not my fault, I’ve listened, learned, made my decisions to the best of my ability, but I’m only human!

[seeds]

I grew up to believe that someone, a creator, had made all, but from my long life among so-called civilised societies on opposite sides of the globe, I have come to my conclusion that it is not some “one” either because our planet and the universe are so complex that it requires an almighty power.

I can’t figure out what you are getting at in that statement. What do you mean by an “almighty power” if you are not making reference to a Creator?

The almightiness of our alleged creator is in conflict with the countless faults of the design; and, if you reckon that I am wrong, do not blame me but blame the maker! An almighty designer would inherently create a perfect world.

What makes you think that the world isn’t perfect as it is?

What if the intention of the universe was to make humans doubt that a designer exists?

In which case, wouldn't the “countless faults” you are alluding to be a perfect way of establishing that doubt?
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