Man and Creativity

Feminism is, in the first instance, a rejection of human creativity, so, it will behoove us to consider it, as we walk away from it.

In considering the question of man's right to manifest the creativity of God, it is well to define creativity in its widest sense. Any action by man that moves creation in a direction not to be expected in nature is human creation. So, we will count one's home, garden, and morality as human creations. None of these would be expected to obtain in the absence of man, though a sort of morality occurs in nature, and that is the absence of inflicted harm for personal gain without need. But, even here doubt exists. Who is to say what need drives the criminal mind.

The question is: are these creations worthy? Or are they just reflections of a naive understanding?

The home, starting as a minimalist shelter was certainly admirable, but, as one's means rise, one quickly builds to exceed need and to provide one with luxury. This, God does not do. Only man feels the need and desire to take from the world whatever he can conjure up as a wish. And then, due to commitments to equality, he finds himself searching out ways in which every man can aspire to luxury, which then leads to environmental degradation.

Eventually, man conceives the need to defend his creation, the home, and that defense escalates year by year until he produces nuclear bombs, and still does not achieve security.

Then, the garden. Seemingly a manifestation of the work ethic, but, in actuality, once established calling on the ingenuity of man to fight unfairly with other creatures for the benefits of his industry. Not only does he require to have all he can eat, but, since he self righteously planted the garden, he won't be satisfied unless he gets each and every fruit and vegetable produced, to the extent of committing mayhem on every creature availing himself of his produce, demanding that they also recognize the law of man.

Next comes morality. How can one find something to criticize here? Only too easily. The question comes down to whether or not absolute evil exists. Of course not, would God create evil? Not if he could avoid it. Of course the absolutists will contend that He couldn't avoid it, that to create good, as the world undoubtedly is, evil must exist to distinguish it. This argument has a certain appeal, I agree, but, none the less, it sells God short. For evil to exist, from listening to The Rolling Stones essay on the subject, "Sympathy for the Devil", we will see that the doer must consciously perceive his deeds as evil. To believe this, of even the most depraved violator of convention, is too much. No doubt there are the naive playing with concepts, that eventually find themselves caught in the grips of logic they fail to comprehend, but true evil must comprehend itself to be worthy of the name, and such cannot be found in this world.

What can be found are complexes. These mental constructs are so lacking in ordinary experience they find themselves pursuing the most impossible rationales in pursuit of fulfillment. Chasing ghosts and evil, lashing out at a society that terrorizes and tortures them with complete unconcern in its hubristic righteousness.

So, no, there is no devil, only naive humans, thinking that they can improve on God's handiwork, and the religious are as bad or worse than the rest because they dream up these impossible moralities, like eating or not eating fish, thereby sentencing man to an endless supply of complex driven lunatics. There is revenge, endlessly supplying motivation for further revenge, but this is only fairness, and incrementalism is the pathway along which humans proceed to bizarre retribution. There is sadism and masochism, but these also proceed from the human creation of complexes. God would not saddle us with such things, and no one would suppose that a creation with these built in, as it were, would survive. The living things must want to go on living for creation to succeed.

So, I'm afraid moral relativism, uncomfortable as it is, must be allowed to exist because it conforms with the general design of our universe.

The facts are that evil is a concomitant of naive creativity and therefore the price of civilization, so it would behoove us to quit complaining and pay the cost of law enforcement.

The argument that the holocaust proves that evil exists in other than a relative sense, does not stand up. Hitler is easily explained in terms of the psychological complex and there is no shortage of humans that wish scapegoats with which to saddle the blame for their own perceived shortcomings. No more is needed to explain the holocaust, so, by the rule of Occam's Razor, we must dismiss the notion of the malevolent being. Faust is not to be understood as a being perverted by the evil one. Rather he was perverted by his own naive greed, and having made the choice he immediately begins to deny the deed to himself, thereby creating a complex.

Some will argue that that sense of greed is the evil one, but if so, then he is only an abstraction, good for entertainments, no doubt, but lacking any objective reality. Now that I think of it, why is he represented as male, when, since God is male, one would more reasonably conceive of the devil as His opposite and therefore female.

So, to describe what happened without mythology, the story goes like this: First, a species happened on the possibility of ego creation as a method of adaptation, a means of competing, and a means of comprehending life. The idea was to begin a sequential process from nothing and build up a comprehension of the world, brick by brick. Unfortunately, wrong turns will happen, and strange personalities will result. Beyond that, since the creature has some degree of free will, he can choose not to think of some things, allowing them to fall into unconsciousness after having first been conscious, thereby producing a split in consciousness. This feature has more to do with the history of what then transpires than the actual effort to learn life.