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We are alone in this life when we die-a time in our lives when we have no control over what happens to us at all. No matter how many people we know and love in between, we all will be alone when we need others the most. And that's pretty freaking scary. So we take comfort in the idea that we will have eternal life, that God is always by our side, that there is nothing to fear. When God says "Believe in me and you will never die," that might seem like a pretty good bargain. All we have to do in return is believe. And obey.

Oh, it makes every kind of sense. And it all adds up to you feeling alone. But Buffy, everybody feels alone. Everybody is, until you die.

How is it possible that God could be all good, all powerful, all knowing and still allow evil to exist in the world?

Religion's main false premise is that God is omniscience, omnipotent and omnipresent. For God to claim omniscience, he must know that there is nothing new for him to learn. Therefore facts, would have to have a finite number. Only a finite universe can have a finite number of facts. He cannot know nor prove, that there is nothing beyond the limits of any finite universe. Therefore omniscience and hence, omnipotence and omnipresence are indeterminable.

• Lucifer, the Fall, and the AntiChrist all walk into a bar...
  
  Once and for all, I'm going to educate a few folks. There is no real "lucifer story." And unless you're going to swallow the watered-down pap of pop christianity, Lucifer and the Big Beast in Revelations aren't the same guy, either. So, for something fascinating (well, at least to us former theologians), here's the best explanation of the "lucifer" situation that I've ever seen. Read on. If you're not inclined to up the linkage, here's a summation: the verse is a taunting poem against the King of Babylon, and "lucifer" is a later (and latin) version of the name "morning star." That is, the planet Venus, which appears on the horizon at evening and dawn, and as the morning star heralds the coming dawn. To make matters worse, Christ is referred to as the Morning Star or Day Star (same thing) somewhere in Revelations.
  
  However, I won't argue the fact that the story of Lucifer, as a story, has evolved over the past two thousand years in the judeo-christian world. And it's only once we got to the King James version that Satan ("the adversary") because equated with Lucifer. Now, of course, the notion is that Lucifer is the same as Satan is the same as Da Devil. Whether or not you want to argue the evolved, handed-down non-textual version is up to you. But I'm just asking folks to be aware of the basis of the story - and its misunderstandings - before anyone decides to post yet again with the insistence that Joss is retelling some sort of Lucifer story. He may be retelling the story of an adversary who comes as a pretty-looking con man, but this isn't the same as the thing or personification mentioned in a single line of Isaiah.
  
  Oh, and about that Venus: The goddess of love and compassion, who's actually a planet where the surface temperature is 900 degrees farenheit and it rains boiling sulfuric aicd. Wow. I don't know that's a god's definition of love and compassion but it sure ain't mine.
  
  Anyway, the idea of Angels, in classic judeo-christian sense, is that they are emanations of the divine. To say an angel has free will is sort of like saying your fingers each has a will of its own. We may have the colloquial expressions about the left hand not knowing what the right is doing, but I challenge you to forget - permanently - any knowledge of what your fingers are doing. Even if you aren't controlling them, and they're acted on brain misfirings, they're still attached to you. They can't get up and walk off in a huff and go find themselves a different body - and they certainly can't jump off you and set up an alternate body on their own. Angels are in the same kind of bind, traditionally, as the eyes and ears and messengers of a God. Satan falls into this category.
  
  From Albert Amao's discourse on The Adversary:
  
  "...Satan is not the adversary of God, but the servant of God and the tester of man. This assertion has a basis on the story of Job in the Old Testament. In the book of Job we observe that Satan use to come in front of God and his role on this story was the tester of Job. In Job 1:6 we read the following: "Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD [Jehovah] and Satan came also among them." Therefore, the Devil was and is at the service of God; he is not the adversary of God as the common Christian theology makes us to believe..."
  
  Satan, in fact, is the adversary of mankind, although acting on behalf of an otherwise (supposedly) benevolent God. Oh, wait, my bad. This Desert God doesn't actually turn nice until the new testament; in the old testament he's still got a chip on his shoulder about various things like pork and witches. Okay. Where were we... right. Bear with me, because this is going somewhere. I'm not sure where, but I'll let you know when we get there.
  
  In the meantime, please make a note that you risk invoking my most outrageous annoyance level if you insist on stating that there's a textual basis or originating story for Satan being a force opposite the Divine and therefore somehow a destructive force equal in power to the creative force. Nope. Maybe Shiva's got that knack, but Satan doesn't. On the upside, Joss pulls in so many Eastern and Indo-European mythologies that it shouldn't be that hard to find a system where a destructive divinity is an equal counter-balance to a creative divinity. My theologian side just gets a bit cranky at the misquotations and misunderstandings, especially when there's a wealth of more appropriate mythologies out there already.
  
  
• Live at the Apollo, Sophia and the Sophettes!
  
  Gnosticism is a belief system wherein one's experience and knowledge leads directly to the divine, without interference from church or priest. One's knowledge - gnosis - forms the basis of one's redemption, salvation, chance at the Sky Pie, etc. While the Judeo-Christian systems have argued for centuries over the importance of faith and works in achievement of grace, Gnosticism holds that one's grace is achieved more through intuition. You just, like, grok it, and there you are. (Also, Manichaeism is not an originating element of Gnosticism - by the time Manichaeism was on the upward swing, Gnosticism was already in decline. So there, now you're cut off at the pass if you were about to add that snack to the grocery list.) So as I was saying before I interrupted myself, Gnostics grok but not entirely, although close enough for government work. The second element of Gnosticism is a complete separation between the spiritual, pure realms and the corporeal, impure realms.
  
  There's also a whole backstory to the Gnostic system, however, that is very Jossian in the way it turns the original Judeo-christian stories on their collective heads. But to really get this, first you need to read The Wizard of Oz. Or, at least, watch the movie. (I watched the movie, myself. Reading is hard.) Then, go and read Wicked - read Strangeword's review if you're unfamiliar. It's a biography of Elphaba, who was later immortalized as the Wicked Witch of the West. But was she really wicked? What if the Wizard was a conman, tricking Dorothy into taking out his political enemy, the Witch? How does this completely change things?
  
  Once you get that kind of flip, then you know you'll be able to handle the Gnostic Flip, where good is bad and bad is good and be careful which one you trust. Valentinus' History for Gnostic Dweebs is the most commonly known and accepted, even back in the day, but please don't get the impression that Gnosticism was even remotely monolithic. Thanks to the notion that one can just "get" the Divine, every distinct cell o' gnostics may have - and probably did have - their own brand of things in a range from strongly pro-flip to anti-flip and everywhere in between.
  
  Anyway, the cliffnotes version goes something like this: Sophia, or Wisdom, is either the youngest of twenty-eight Aeons or the counterpart of the First Father or 'Unknown God'. Sophia, either way, was a definite feminine divine force, but longed for the power of the Unknown Father and wished to emulate his ability to produce offspring on his own, ie, without a partner. The celestial beings that emanated from the First Father were all produced in pairs, and for some Gnostic traditions the real crime was that Sophia acted on her own, without input, so to speak, from her masculine counterpart. But in all the versions, Sophia managed to get preggers somehow, delivered the baby on her own, and was ashamed of it as soon as she realized she'd usurped power beyond her control. Or something like that. In alternate versions, Sophia wants to know the First Father but is prevented from merging with him because of the Boundary that existed between the Unknown God and the Knowable Gods; the demon Authades tricked her by sending her a ray of light that she thought was an emanation from the First Father, with the result being Sophia got a bun in the oven.
  
  The end result is that she was ashamed of this unexpected and unwanted creation, and threw it out of heaven (and in some versions, getting thrown out of heaven herself). The baby-god was known as the Demiurge, and its position as the first piece of impure matter was a direct result of Sophia's imperfect attempts to mimic the First Father's issuance. Meanwhile, at the Demiurge ranch, the baby inherited some of his mother's skills, and thinks this is due to his own powers independent of anyone else. Quite happily the Demiurge then goes about destroying the pure spiritual world by imbuing it with the impure matter of his own existence, creating the world and in the process, humanity and the rest of the critters.
  
  The problem is that the Demiurge, according to the Gnostics, is a jealous divinity. He doesn't like competition, because any competition might reveal that he's nothing more than the bastard son beget of some twit's one-night stand with herself. (I never did get how "wisdom" could be so moronic, that is, from a Gnostic standpoint, but whatever.) Hence the Christian god's insistence that he's the only big guy, and that allowing anyone else is a crime punishable by fire, brimstone, and Love Boat reruns. If we ask too many questions - we being the impure, matter-infected human creations of the Demiurge - we might realize we are but a speck of the divine matter that exists on a purer plane. And then, horrors, god forbid (so to speak), we might even come up with a way to bypass the evil overlord and become one with Sophia and the twenty-eight Aeons, or even to grasp the existence, if not the entirety, of the Unknown God or First Father. And that the Demiurge couldn't allow, because he knows, on some level, he can't hold a candle to the real divine. This religion, according to the Gnostics, is the Demiurge's wool pulled over your eyes that blinds you to the truth; we are slaves to an megalomaniac who isn't even close to the Real Thing.
  
  Of course there are Gnostic writings that say there's the Divine, and there's you, and that's it - no history of Sophia and her late night horizontal actions. Others have the whole shebang, in various versions roughly akin to what's listed above, while others vary in significant details and still others try to mix this story with completely contradictory stories to create a working hybrid (which, IMNSHO, doesn't work, but we'll continue regardless). And some schools of historical Gnosticism held that there was no messiah, while others say there was a historical Jesus but he was just a man, albeit a man who achieved true gnosis with the Divine. Sort of like a middle eastern Buddha, I suppose. (Some of the Gnostics claimed that Jesus had taught them stuff, as fellow Gnostics, that he'd refrained from teaching anyone else - I bet you can guess how well that went over with the church.) For the most part, in case you're wondering, more Gnostic schools than not don't hold truck with no messiah figure. A few do, but they're in the minority, hence no mention of the Demiurge sending down a piece of himself in flesh - besides, the Demiurge was already a matter-based being, so there's no real need to get further mattered-up, if you think about it.
  
  
  
  Potty break!
  
  
  
  Alright, everyone back? Moving right along...
  
  
• The Bride Wore Brimstone...
  
  Blake's poem of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a gnostic-flavored inversion of the prevailing paradigm, which is why I had to explain Gnosticism before I could get into some of the misunderstandings about Blake. So he was a bit of an eccentric, I'll admit, but he was seriously intent on codifying his own understanding of spirituality and his belief system. This would be an early version of "you are your own authority." Or, as Blake put it, "I must invent my own system or be enslaved by other men's."
  
  In effect, Blake was extremely devout but saw no reason for an intermediary church or priest-caste. There's no real way to consolidate Blake's perspective on things, but it's more than just inverting the dominant paradigm. One of Blake's positions is that what the rest of the world calls good is evil, and what's evil is good. Evil is energy, motion, action, movement; evil is also acting against one's purpose. A shark eating fish is good; a shark eating grass would be evil. Blake treats humans as any other animal, where actions resulting from one's instincts and breeding are categorically good. Most of the time Blake mentions evil, in fact, he's actually refuting the usual definition of evil, rather than classifying actions as evil or good. Furthermore, Good, as defined by the church, was knowing your place. To Blake, knowing your place - and staying in it - was a form of hell. "Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained." Energy, the evil think-for-yourself, move your own ass towards the Divine (a la Gnosticism) was condemned by the church and encouraged by Blake.
  
  "Active Evil," Blake wrote, "is better than Passive Good." In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake considers his version, his inverted world of spirituality.
  
  

  Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human Existence.
  
  From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.
  
  Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.
  
  THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL
  
  All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors.
  

  • That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
    
  • That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
    
  • That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

  
  But the following Contraries to these are True
  
  

  • Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age
    
  • Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
    
  • Energy is Eternal Delight

  Note the use of pairs - Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, etc - and its reflection back to the Gnostic and Aristotlian dualistic systems, but Blake isn't as divisive as they, and so may be more of a little-g gnostic. Where Sophia, in some versions, is cast out because she acted independently of her balancing counterpart, so Blake posits that the balancing pairs are parts of the whole, and one can't exist/act/be without the other. We could even go so far as to say that we'd no longer be human, according to Blake, if we were to set aside any of the natural and necessary 'contraries'. An automaton, following any religion's decree without active motion, is just as much a non-human as someone who moves entirely based on repulsion and energy without reason.
  
  And to think, that's just a mere snippet of Blake. Whole libraries have been written on this dude.
  
  
• Historical fact, or historical fiction? News at eleven.
  
  There have been several arguments about Joss' secret theistic leanings, since, hey, he's using so many mythologies that are deist, he must be a believer. Woah, Monkeys flashback.
  
  Whew.
  
  That was close.
  
  In one of the most egregious arguments yet, I noticed a debate that went along the lines of: because Religion A is historical fact, the use of its patterns and themes in other myths or religions merely reflects and reinforces its veracity as historical fact.
  
  Well, now.
  
  First of all, let me just say right up that I have a problem with anyone who will take what's written as a history, such as the Judeo-Christian books, and try to turn it into a philosophizing set of rules about How One Should Live. So in that sense, I agree, if you're a believer of a religion based on a set of historical stories, that classifying them as "historical fact" rather than "moralistic fables" is preferable. However, not being a believer, I take exception to any pseudo-logic that claims preceeding mythologies could somehow reinforce the truth of a latecomer religion's historical "fact."
  
  I'm sure everyone's heard by now about Iostre and Easter, the eggs and bunnies, the christmas tree, blah blah blah. But wait, there's more. The Cult of the Virgin Mary has its power, and has, for two thousand years, thanks to Isis - the Virgin Mary just displaced/replaced Isis' popularity. Isis had been worshipped for at least two thousand years prior to Christianity; many of the Virgin's titles are direct lifts from Isis: Queen of Heaven (a title also shared with Inanna/Ishtar), Mother of God, Star of the Sea, All-Goddess, etc, etc. They didn't call her the Lady of Ten Thousand Names for nothing. Oh, and we can't forget about Mithras. (No, not the Bond bad guy.) He was the main character in a dying/reborn god cycle, whose feast day was - guess! - just after the winter solstice, which would be somewhere around december 25. The Zoroastrian Mithras, to which he bears only a passing resemblance, predates Christianity by roughly a thousand years. The Roman Mithras slightly predates Christianity by a couple hundred years but lasted into the Christian era thanks to a tenacious cult among the Roman soldiers. There's also a possibility that Mithras is linked with the Indian deity Mitra, which may be from the Zoroastrians that became the Parsi and later the Persians, and remain one of the few geographical areas where Zoroastrianism has survived to any extent.
  
  But again, the point isn't to overload anyone with details but to point out that mythologies hold a fascination for us that turn on themselves and echo previous stories. It's like hearing someone tell a Brer Rabbit story; it may be new to me but there's something in there that feels just right, feels like home. I find myself thinking, I know I've heard this before, even when I haven't. The Jossian mythos is based in that same kind of universal story, in a grand mystical earth-bending way, above and beyond the classic tale of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets killed in teeth of combine engine.
  
  Although now that I think about it, this shouldn't be a shock to a group of folks who worship weekly at the altar of Campbell. I guess there were a few who slipped through, but I am the gatekeeper. I have no problem reminding people that a current prevalent religion was not always the prevalent religion, and that it isn't necessarily therefore the source of myths tapped by the god we call Joss - nor do those existing myths reinforce any religion but the ones they were created to reinforce.
  
  
• And just for the record:
  
  J.R.R. Tolkein was not a deist. One of his closest friends, C.S. Lewis, was, and was a well-known theologian to boot. Yes, C.S. Lewis purposefully created his fiction series to reflect and reinforce his belief system, with every character, plot device and theme specifically a part of a retelling fable focused on Christianity. This is not news. Apparently it may be news to some, though, that Tolkein liked his friend but didn't share beliefs with him. Tolkein disputed to his dying day reviewers' interpretations that Gandalf was a dying/reborn god metaphor or messiah figure, or that Sauron/Sarumon was the devil in literary disguise. (As a matter of fact, there's only one remotely religious possibly deity-focused act in all of Tolkein's Middle Earth series.) And I'm willing to accept that a hugely powerful mythological treatise/story can be written with little interest in the prevailing religious paradigm, whether that paradigm be Japanese Buddhism, California Protestantism, or Haitian Santeria.
  
  Yes, Virginia, it's possible to tap into the universal stories and not have a divine driving the action.
  
  
• First Tomato, Second Tomato, Third Tomato, Orr.
  
  Masquerade is not just a First Evil, she's beyond Joss' representation of the First Evil. See, the real First Evil - the one I code for, deal with, and badger in my own secondish way - doesn't just show up wearing the faces of dead people. No. That's too mundane. Too pedestrian. So last century. No, our true First Evil shows up wearing the faces of dead philosophers, which tells you just how beyond she is. For that matter, Masq is even worse than you realized, being even beyond good and evil. She's even beyond being and nothingness, let alone being and time.
  
  Take that, all Evils-in-Training (TM). You can't begin to comprehend the true extent of my philosophical site boss. Hell, you can't even compete with me, Malum Secondus, though I'm way digging the fear and loathing. Why not? The drugs are good and the scenery's improved since I ditched the wannabe on the Harley.
  
  
• The Dancing Heebie Jeebies
  
  Final question of the essay, gold star to the first person who gets it right: what character best fits the story of the Demiurge? It'd take some minor tweakings, but you can justify just about any version of the Gnostic creation story if you quote the right Nag Hammadi text or whatnot. Let's see:
  
  
  • Created by an act where one parent sought to know or comprehend something otherwise uncomprehendable, or
    Created by an act where one parent was raped, seduced, or tricked.
    
  • Prior to birth, considered an abomination, an impossibility that shouldn't be allowed to live.
    
  • Receives power from parent, takes this power as being his own rather than a loaner
    
  • A shadow of the originating elements; ie, not completely like the parent but an impure mix
    
  • Jealous, refusing to acknowledge precedence of parental figure
    
  • Driven by wish/need to shut out competing parental figure
    
  • Immediately seeks to create a replacement 'world' to make up for the one lost
  
  
  
  
  So if you had a demiurge mythos, and the demiurge had a baby, what would it be?