www.andrewmarkmusic.com The Parable of The Fallen Leaf...<br /><br /> "Life begins on the other side of despair." Sartre...<br /><br />The problem of evil in a Godless universe shouldn't be as difficult as it turned out to be. I offer pragmatic solutions that don't entail a violent revolution in my Four Pillars of A New Earth Commons and explore ways to mitigate human to human evil in my Winter Solstice Golden Rule Series. Funnily enough, some of my socio-economic ideas are similar to those held by Bertrand Russell--go figure...I'd also add (and agree) from that wonderfully imaginative work of religious fiction--The Urantia Book, that natural/nature suffering can be mitigated to almost no consequence by honest intelligent cultures.  <br /><br />In the meantime, humanity hasn't been able to solve the issue of psychopathy and sociopaths rise to most of the positions of power within civilization--this is no small group as it's estimated that this demographic exceeds 10% and rises to as high as 20% of the population. Concomitant with this issue is humanity still hasn't figured out how to test for who is telling the truth and who is lying and this combined with political systems whose foundations are modeled on this very thorny aspect of human existence. ! It's no wonder we are in the predicaments we're in. I've covered ground on this point, also, and have suggested one 7-year term limit for all politicians. That's it and you're out of public life after that. This would end the lifelong bureaucratic pig trough and all the nepotism and lobbying that comes with it. Not that the casino-loving billionaire oligarchs are ever going to allow anything to happen that would change the very systems which allowed them to become so enormously (and unmeritedly) wealthy. So our future lies with toxic billionaires who will implement a technocracy of TOTAL CONTROL...Unless they can be stopped! But how to stop them using non-violence and when they now control all the algorithms of who gets heard and who gets silenced?<br /><br />Of course, the problem of evil may not, in the end, be entirely material. I'll cover Vedic and Buddhist territory on this topic as I continue with this series and I'll finish up with the Christian Gnostic view of the problem of evil: that the God of this earth (Yahweh) is evil...<br /><br />Shookum offered up The Parable of The Fallen Leaf and as a Gnostic, I don't think this can be reduced to the human ego. I think it's our very bodies (and minds) that are the property of the Archons who created us (or manipulated us/or both), and one would have to watch HBO's Westworld to get a sense of what I mean by this. This goes to Holographic and Simulation theories about our existence and our place within it--which is ultimately deceptive from the Gnostic worldview.<br />...<br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2RG5RXtilA" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2RG5RXtilA</a>