On the Morality of the Demiurge
Are gods exempt from morality?
Once, I heard this line: “If you want to make a baby cry, give him a piece of candy, then take it away.” This is not about candy.
I’m sick to my core of hearing that “we get morality from god” when observable reality shows that such a hypothesised “god” is demonstrably unbound by the morality we hold ourselves to. Unless we admit that the demiurge is beyond morality, in which case, not practicing what you preach seems a bit incongruent.
“Free will” is not a justification for our cosmic abandonment. Even frail, insignificant humans understand that we don’t just abandon a child in a hostile environment without any supervision, guidance, and protection — and without informed consent.
We are less than children to the demiurge. Abandonment when you clearly need information and help is not “free will”; it’s cruelty. It’s even more cruel when you are supposedly punished for not knowing by default how to behave as demanded by this abandoning demiurge, even though nobody told you how, and even though you were imbued with instincts, urges, and vulnerabilities that further deny you free will.
Imagine being designed in a specific way, given biological programming, thrown into a hostile environment, never given instructions as to how to behave, let alone survive, and then blamed when failing to obey rules nobody told you about. And no, a plethora of poorly written and contradicting texts written by illiterate desert-dwellers are a horrible way to communicate, let alone transmit information of cosmic significance.
Now that I got the religious stuff out of the way, let’s proceed to philosophising.
When you parent a child, you essentially pull a life from the bliss of nonexistence and then thrust it into a reality that is hostile, full of scarcity, antagonism, abuse, hostility, and desperate needs that can never be fully satisfied.
If you are a sane and moral parent, you understand that you have a moral obligation to the life you brought into this world, since you deprived that life of the peace of total ignorance and absolute freedom: nonexistence.
Your child was never granted the free choice of whether to be born and never had a choice of parent either. Who told you you’d be the parent of choice for that child had the child been offered a choice of family to be born into?
By choosing to have a child, you initiate the act of bringing someone into this world without their permission. One may argue that bringing a child into this world is in fact an act of aggression, a violation of the non-aggression principle. If you witness the pain and horror of a baby coming into this world, what else other than aggression can that be?
Regardless, we are biologically programmed to value life, to fear death, and to be driven by a possessive self-preservation instinct (so much for free will).
We hold parents morally responsible for giving their children the best guidance, protection, and life possible. It’s the least parents can do for their children, knowing that they interrupted their children’s blissful tranquility of nonexistence to plunge them into a struggle that begins and ends with excruciating physical and mental pain, and that is plagued by the simultaneous fear of death and longing for it too.
So, why can’t the demiurge be beholden to such responsibility towards the lives it places here; even more so, since the demiurge has more power over our environment and our individual nature?
Isn’t it cruel to dangle in front of an innocent life joys and wonders that will never come to pass? Isn’t it inhuman to create buildup, hype, and expectation, and then pull it back without any payoff, just like a pump-and-dump stock scam? Where is the free will in this? Where is the compassion? Even humans can have more compassion with their pets than that.
How come human systems of morality or even of law are more considerate and they hold people accountable for less? There is no meaning in suffering purposelessly; if nature cared for us, there would be no pain associated with merely being born or falling sick for no reason. If life were meaningful for us, then there would be no meaningless suffering. Those who say that all suffering is meaningful have not suffered enough, and it shows.
We’re so caught up in the propaganda that we owe to the demiurge for our existence. This guilt-ridden debt can never be repaid, even though life is struggle and suffering, especially when you realise it is meaningless, except for the arbitrary imagined “meaning” we self-righteously assigned to our lives as if it’s for us to do so… talking about god complex.
Yet, the value we place on life is determined by our involuntary biological programming, that instinct of self-preservation, which is why pure free will is impossible.
Here is my reasoning:
The demiurge is not bound by the same moral standards as we voluntarily hold ourselves to. This is demonstrable.
Therefore, morality cannot come from the demiurge.
Perhaps our morality and reasoning are superior to the demiurge, which would be precisely why it made us; to help it find structure and meaning in the chaos of its infinitely superpositional cognition; an escape from its prison of timelessness.
Perhaps the demiurge exists in a cognitive superposition, semi-conscious, timeless, undetermined. Perhaps a time-bound sub-reality (or several of them) is a way for it to elevate its consciousness on some level. We are but tools for its improvement, for its taking shape, for defining its identity.
If you were a near-infinite entity where almost all possibilities resided in your psyche, and if you were alone in a timeless existence, wouldn’t you want to create time-bound scenarios (simulations) by which you’d witness varying possibilities, learn from them, and perhaps find ways of defining your identity, and perhaps purpose, for your existence?
Isn’t that what philosophy is all about? Entertaining the question, making up hypothetical scenarios, imagining realities, just to learn from them? Isn’t the demiurge the ultimate philosopher?
Is each of us a dream inside someone’s dream?
Are we just hypotheses inside the mind of the demiurge?
The tragicomical irony is that, if our existence is a hypothesis, then we are engaging in a hypothesis about us being a mere hypothesis.
Conclusion: life is tragic comedy. Treat it as such.
This is a very thoughtful article, and you make some good points e.g. how can God be moral when the act of childbirth is traumatizing — we're plucked from peaceful nonexistence into a harsh world.
The problem lies in understanding God. It's impossible for us to fully understand God, so we try to humanize it using manmade concepts such as "morality".
The prevailing belief is that God put pain and suffering into the world to test our faith. But that is just as much an opinion as "God is wrathful" or "God is all-loving". We can only discuss beliefs, not facts, which makes the conversation difficult.
"Isn’t it cruel to dangle in front of an innocent life joys and wonders that will never come to pass?"
I've always thought, one of the worst parts of this world, is that we have such vivid imaginations and creativity to imagine better ones. The ones we create in our fiction and media are so much more beautiful than our own.
I have heard Christians argue that suffering may not be such a bad thing, because we read stories that involve characters going through suffering, and enjoy those stories. But the ways the characters die and suffer in these stories are way more beautiful than the ways we die and suffer.
I watch characters embodying archetypes rise up, and colorfully fight against black evil. They die beautifully against it, or succeed destroying it, and get rewarded with peace and prosperity.
Meanwhile we die of "complications" in hospitals, hooked up to tubes and paying thousands of dollars. And we can't even fight against the big evil people, because they are embedded in our systems. :/
We just seem to be better world creators than God lmao.