Natural Evil

[Angrboda]

@ChadWooters:

I'm sorry you if you felt that I was trying to insult you. I was simply expressing my suspicion that further dialog would not be sufficiently profitable for me to continue. As noted, I suspect your knowledge of hermeneutics and the philosophy of literary analysis is not particularly advanced, both from your approach here and our encounter in another thread. I could be wrong. Either way, I find your notion that having your ignorance or lack of skill pointed out on some matter to be an insult to be rather silly. I recently discussed the Occupy movement with some hot head during which he called me ignorant and nasty. In hindsight, I think that was accurate, as I know little about the Occupy movement, and I was heartlessly cruel in lampooning his arguments[1]. Granted, he meant this derogatorily, but being ignorant of some subject requiring skill and erudition is not an insult. I am ignorant on most things, and having flunked out of college, am not well schooled on even the subjects I have studied. I was simply pointing out what I felt was a very practical obstacle to profitable dialogue — a differential level of understanding of the sciences involved in textual interpretation. That you misinterpreted this as an insult only makes me more inclined to believe that you lack either the learning or skills necessary to have this debate. Seeing that your final barb about my remarks being unworthy of someone like me was probably the ostensible result of a simple misunderstanding, I will charitably ignore it.

Anyway, for your benefit, I will enlighten you more fully on the reasoning behind my choice. I, in general, do not find serious discussions on internet forums satisfying and fulfilling. I have basically decided not to participate in internet forums at all. However recently, I experienced an acute episode of mental illness and I needed something mindless to occupy my time until that episode passed. This forum has served that purpose, but now the need has passed, and I intend to reduce my participation down to zero. In that context, our dialog has become a casualty of greater strategic goals and my general avoidance of such discussions. Perhaps I was impolitick in the manner in which I announced my desire to disengage, and given my suspicions about your abilities in properly interpreting texts, I should probably have phrased it more diplomatically. I didn't, and perhaps that's on me. I tend to be rather blunt and intensely single minded, as well as socially somewhat poorly skilled. I apologize if I have judged you unfairly or negligently. It was not my intent.

[1] "Heartlessly cruel" is probably an exaggeration. I simply tend to be uncompromising when presented with careless, negligent, or just generally bad thinking.

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A question occurred to me. Does it make any sense for God to be relatively clear in communicating his message through a book and a people (ignoring the unreliability of both), yet be so thoroughly inscrutable in communicating his message through nature and creation? Especially since, being omniscient, he knows that most humans will live under cultural systems that isolate them and alienate them from any biblically informed culture?