Warning!

This blog contains effusive rhetoric and profligate diatribes. Read at your own risk.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

God's Impossible Choice - In Memory of Bill Hicks

Let's assume* for a moment that the Christian God exists and is more or less as he is generally believed to be - all-knowing, all-seeing, all-wise, all-powerful, and all-benevolent. In fact, let's pretend you are those things. Let's say you're God, and you can do anything you want, but you don't want to do anything that harms your human children, because you love them with all your infinite compassion and it would totally undo your very reason for existing if you ever did them harm.

Consider, for a moment, that two of your children include Sammy the Spy and Harry the Hacker. Sammy is a corporate espionage agent who has spent his whole life learning how to gather information; this is his only saleable skill set. He makes his living by finding out what corporations are doing and then selling that information to other companies. Harry, meanwhile, is an anarchist who steals cable and takes out fake credit cards in the names of politicians whose platform he disagrees with; he's facing both financial ruin and jail time if he's ever caught, while Sammy will be lucky if he gets off with only a lawsuit when and if the corporations learn what information he's stolen from them.

Leaving aside all issues of ethics, morals or laws for the moment (because God loves all his children, even when they misbehave), God still faces a dilemma with these two. Because Harry believes in the "hacker ethic", which states "Information deserves to be free" (naturally the hacker's current location and real name is exempted from this policy, as the hackers couldn't survive very long if they applied their policy to themselves and thereby allowed their enemies to find them, but we'll regard this as being common sense rather than hypocrisy, as the line is often fine between those things). Whereas Sammy's entire career revolves around the idea that knowledge is a tradeable commodity.

So, you're God, and you know everything - but while Harry wants you to tell everything you know to everyone who could possibly want to know it, Sammy doesn't. And Sammy wants you to restrict the flow of information even more, so that there are more secrets for him to spy out and sell; that would go against Harry's interests. So no matter what you do, you're doomed to reduce the livelihood of one of these two individuals.

If God is real, then he faces thousands of choices like this a day. He can't possibly give everyone what they want, and there are no easy answers about what's best. Granted, it's hard to believe that there's nothing he could do which would be a net improvement to the world and humanity as a whole - certainly dialing back on the earthquakes and storms would be all-upside as far as everything that we currently consider "alive" is concerned. So we can hardly say that "God doesn't answer prayers because it's impossible to please everyone", but that certainly does seem as though it might be part of the reason. We don't know whether God does or does not exist, but we certainly know he'd have difficulty making decisions like this if he did - and as we gain more and more power over our world, we must begin to think like God and figure out how to make such decisions ourselves, absent our short-sighted, selfish, and emotionally unstable biases.

This post is dedicated to Bill Hicks, and in his honor I include a phrase not included in the thought I'm discussing above, but is similarly a reflection on his mostly-enlightened-except-when-he-was-really-pissed-off-usually-for-a-damn-good-reason philosophy on life, which I have found is in the process of becoming an Internet meme and richly deserves to be one:

FUCK YOUR NATIONALISM, WE ARE ALL EARTHLINGS.