Quote:Cosmology
The universe as revealed to Lestat by the Devil follows the following cosmology:

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God is a powerful and immortal being worshiped by angels, His first creation, since before the existence of matter and time. The Earth was his creation. Because of this, angels spent much time admiring His handiwork and singing His praises. However, God does not appear to be omniscient or even entirely omnibenevolent. Despite assurances, Memnoch, an archangel, claims to have changed God's opinion on the importance and supernatural quality of humanity.

Through evolution, creatures on the Earth developed into the image of God and angels and a "flame" of life which allowed pain and death. Eventually, humans developed their own souls, invisible and incorporeal spiritual essences similar to God and the angels. This shocks and horrifies many of the angels. These souls collect in confusion around the world in an airy realm that the angels describe as "Sheol" or the Gloom, attempting to come to terms with their existence. Some dissipate into nothing, some do not realize or do not accept they are dead. Some take comfort and strength from their living descendants, becoming patron ancestors. Such interventions cause the tales of spirits, reincarnation and the first vampires.

The book also mentions the addle-brained spirits, mentioned in The Queen of the Damned and The Witching Hour. Memnoch explains these as being of two origins. The first is angels that fell in love with certain parts of nature and became the spirits of the rocks, mountains and trees (and therefore did not return to Heaven) and the "invisible ones", incorporeal human souls who never interacted with the angels. The latter forget they were ever human and become demons, spirits or lesser gods that the living worship.

Memnoch becomes impatient with God's constant assurances that all is well, despite the pain and suffering of life and death. Memnoch vehemently criticizes God's plan, accusing God of lacking vision and benevolence. Memnoch decides to collect evidence to persuade God that humanity is outside of nature by creating physical form. When, as part of this, he experiences sex, God bans Memnoch from heaven; Memnoch spends the next three months imparting his vast knowledge of science to humanity, thus inadvertently founding civilization, during which time Memnoch realizes that the characteristic that sets humans apart is their ability to love and feel passionate.

When God invites Memnoch to Heaven to explain his disturbance of the natural order of creation, Memnoch persuades God to allow him to find souls who are suitable for Heaven. After thousands of years wandering Sheol, Memnoch discovers an especially powerful group of souls who have forgiven God for his indifference and absence and appreciate the grandness of all creation. God accepts these souls into Heaven, permanently changing it forever.

God is highly pleased with the new composition of Heaven, but Memnoch continues to accuse God of not showing concern for the other souls of Sheol. Memnoch finally loses trust in God and demands that He should take human form to understand passion and, in fury, God banishes Memnoch from Heaven.

While Memnoch is in exile, God takes on a human form, Jesus. God believes that by appearing in human form, performing miracles, suffering and dying, he will create a religion that will allow more humans to attain the love of God by suffering and sacrifice. This is in sharp contrast to Memnoch's approach of attaining purity through love and experience of the wonders of creation. The two confront each other in the desert. God continuously argues that Man is a creature of Nature and ruled by its laws; only through suffering and death can man evolve and eventually be worthy of Heaven. Memnoch continuously argues that suffering and death has no value, and Man needlessly suffers in Life and in Sheol while already worthy of God's light yet deprived of knowing Him.

Memnoch is awed and shocked by God's sacrifice. Nevertheless, he argues that God did not put himself through enough. Unlike a regular human, when God died on the cross, he knew that he would survive and thus could never have known the true suffering of Man: the fear of death. Man does not know his immortal soul will survive for all eternity, and thus suffers from fear of the unknown. God knew he would survive death and could not truly know what it was to be a human. For God, this complaint is the last straw, he declares Memnoch as his adversary and commands him to rule Sheol and Earth in a devilish form, preparing souls for Heaven in his own fashion.

As human history progresses, God's religion only exacerbates the suffering of Man instead of alleviating it; all kinds of acts of hate (war, persecution, genocide) are carried out in His name. Working in Sheol, Memnoch creates a form of Hell, a place where people who have been bad in life, will be punished until their souls are able to forgive all (themselves, each other, God) for the suffering and ignorance they endured in order to understand the joy of creation and the light of God enough to be ready for Heaven.

Memnoch doesn't like this work and is constantly asking God to appoint someone else to the job (as David Talbot witnesses in the previous Vampire Chronicles novel).

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(May 17, 2017 at 11:15 am)Whateverist Wrote: Guess it's just been too long.  I read that too but don't remember that part.

(May 17, 2017 at 11:35 am)Khemikal Wrote: Not useful to believers.  If god don't "own it" what justifies him doing "whatever he wants" with it.......like all of the stuff that believers innately recognize to be evil, and thus require theodicy?

(May 17, 2017 at 11:35 am)Khemikal Wrote: This question is alot like the "can there be christianity without vicarious redemption" question.  No, absolutely not, there could not be such a thing, because theistic faith does not allow for it.  Even deistic faith requires the meddling hand.  The meddling hand is what makes a god a god in the first place.

(May 17, 2017 at 11:43 am)Whateverist Wrote: That's the beauty of my new theory.  He has no need to do anything with anything because to Him the world is at one with its inherent coolitude.  

Quote:Great.     Then there is no way around being diddled by God?  GODDAMMIT!!!

(May 17, 2017 at 10:56 am)Whateverist Wrote: Recently some theist -Steve maybe?- suggested that god's knowing what will be didn't mean he'd been to the future and had witnessed how it turns out.  Rather, He just knows everyone so well that all their choices are transparent for him.  I probably am butchering this so please correct me if you recall better than I how this worked.

So it occurred to me that the natural world wasn't made to be the way it is by God.  Maybe He just looked around, saw that it was good to go and understood how it would all turn out.  He didn't decide to set physical laws a certain way, He just knew how they'd work out.  Create life?  Pfft.  Homo sapiens, please.  He just grokked the inorganic/organic threshold and saw it how it would go down.  He didn't stir any pots, He just watched them.

So God might be a whole lot more passive than sometimes imagined.  Maybe He wasn't so much a cosmic watchmaker as He was a cosmic voyeur?