Sergio De La Pava - Personae

The severe pain, the horrific ambient sights, the utter hopelessness of his position; he does just that.

Now a perfectly accurate transcription of the ensuing conversation would show that in the beginning he couched his every submission with a preamble like my-wife-would-say (omitted here) but that as the dialogue grew and deepened this affectation disappeared. The reason for this was not only the pursuit of brevity by a man who, after all, was speaking through significant suffering but also a result of that man’s special personality. For this man was reactive in nature. If surrounded by great believers, as normally he was, he tended toward doubt. If nihilistic rebellion suffused the air, he found faith. This was not an intentional process, just an observation about one of the two minds involved. He closed his eyes and began:

—¿ Why it rains? ¿Do I look like a child?

—¿Forget rain, why a physical world at all, and why this one of all things? But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. ¿Why do you think the men you pursue were allowed to do what they did?

—¿ Allowed ? What a word to use. ¿Who was there to stop it? ¿A church full of soft people? If I’d been there they’d all be dead.

— Probably.

— Nobody allowed anything. They exercised superior strength and the inferior were left to choose between obeisance and extinction. Surely you’re familiar with the process by now.

— True but let’s go back further to the creation of this world. ¿Did it have to be one where people can do things like that?

— You say «creation of this world». ¿By who? You must be assuming some sentient force as Creator otherwise the question is meaningless. If the world arose, so to speak, out of nothing then, yes, it had to be this way. ¿What would prevent it? If there’s nothing beyond what we see or touch and Man has the ability to walk, hold metal, squeeze a trigger, then this is precisely the world we had to get. Therefore, just as the unbelievers suspect, the fact that we live in precisely such a world strongly suggests the absence we’re talking around.

— Only if a markedly different one is viable but let’s put that aside for the moment as I see great pain etched on your face. ¿Does that vision hold great intuitive appeal for you? ¿Everything arising out of nothing spurred on by something that did the same? ¿Or something, an energy for example, that always existed but is not itself at least an aspect of God? Because whatever you ultimately reduce to can become godlike and is certainly more difficult to argue out of existence than your bearded old man in a robe. I swear you people do my best work for me sometimes. ¿Is that what you think?

— No.

— So that leaves a decision-making entity that we’ll call God though I intend to demonstrate to you how little solace that should create. So I repeat. ¿Why this world?

—¿Which one do you prefer?

— Most would start with one where those men couldn’t do that.

—¿Couldn’t? ¿Physically? ¿Can they, we , do anything physical? ¿Are there no bodies in this world?

— They couldn’t choose to do it although physically capable.

— I’m all for it for them, as long as I can still choose. I’m no one’s machine.

— Okay so we need choice but He, I’m going to use imbecilic pronouns in the interests of speed, could interfere when things threaten to get too extreme.

—¡Yes!

— No. Understand that He never has and never will.

—¿Never has? That’ll be news to many.

— Ah that. Oh it’s a silly little book of course, telling us plenty about the time’s people and precious little of what hovers above them. ¿Man created in God’s image? That’s laughable. The creation imagery flows the other way I think. You apes would look at anything even mildly mysterious and cry God. Better yet all your venality and power-mongering would find its way into your gods or God, fine the singular form represented evolutionary progress from what came before, just as the Greek and Roman gods did to a lesser extent, but any concern I may have felt in this area dissipated immediately at first glimpse of the unrepentant jerk you’d chosen to worship. See even your most pious talk and behavior can’t fully mask the fact that it’s nakedly selfish aggression above all that you secretly wish to worship.

— That’s old news. May as well lampoon human science because it believes the sun orbits the earth. ¿You say Zeus and Yahweh hearten you? Can’t say I blame you, but curious that you don’t bring up Jesus Christ.

At this mention the immense Figure visibly recoils and for the first time its prey feels these might not be his last moments. Not sure what would be best he decides to continue:

— Because I don’t believe in anything, including him, but I love that son of a bitch almost despite myself.

The Figure rises to move closer and the man feels the futility of all that’s come before and, worse, how that realization can hollow a person out. The giant speaks through now-visible teeth:

— That’s man for you, impressed by the solution to a problem that didn’t need to exist in the first place. ¿Tell me Manuel, do you feel immortal?

— No. But I concede I have trouble effectively conceiving of my death.

— Granted, but I was pointing Time’s arrow the other way. ¿Do you feel you’ve always existed, meaning even before your birth?

— Of course not.

— Right. — becalmed, it sits back down—. So you may think a man or Man continues to exist after what appears on Earth to be death but no one thinks either existed before birth. Yet when it comes to God everyone rightly believes the same thing: immortality in all directions. Now talking about Time as it relates to God is always tricky since God somehow manages to exist outside of Time despite the fact that Time is itself an aspect of God, but that God once existed in the absence of man seems obvious. So man isn’t here solely because God created him. He’s here because prior to that God made a decision to create him. Let’s examine that decision. Make no mistake but that the desire to create stems from dissatisfaction. That means that God, to whom perfection is often ascribed almost tautologically, essentially felt loneliness. ¿Is there any other possible interpretation? Because there’s no logical system under which God needed man. He just wanted him. So he decided to create him. And he didn’t just make that decision in isolation either because here’s the critical part: he knew what the results of that decision would be. Soak that in a bit. He knew that a ten-year-old girl would be tortured and killed. ¿Which girl you say? ¡An infinite number! Every gruesome event, every indefensible act, known to him not as risk but as certainty yet forward he forged. Think about that. ¿Was it not a bad decision as soon as one girl was so treated, let alone the scores of dead? ¿Are we not talking about the height of selfishness here? I want company and I don’t care how much you have to suffer for it. ¿It’s the contingency of Life that offends isn’t it? ¿You say Life needs to be a certain way, fine, but Life itself didn’t need be did it? Existence was externally imposed on you. ¿Why? ¿Because God was bored? Man wasn’t consulted. ¿Know why? Because in all things it’s God’s whims, not his will, that controls. You’re a toy, a plaything, allowed to perform for his amusement then discarded when tastes change.

— These actions you find so offensive, presumably because of your high moral standing, are acts of Man not of God. Existence made them possible, true, but that fact can’t be used to poison existence, which in itself is neither good nor bad but rather what we make of it. If cruelty leads to suffering the solution is to eliminate cruelty not to bemoan the existence that serves as backdrop. If you want to see the swift elimination of cruelty follow me when this rain stops because I’m going to violently remove from this world some of its most bounteous sources.