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[MetalSlimeHunt]

Well, it wouldn't have much trouble staying in power. It'd just have to smite everyone.

[Shade-o]

Necoho the Doubter is one of the renegade Chaos Gods. Necoho's warp-spawned existence owes itself to a paradox which should, by mortal logic, make his very subsistence impossible. He is a deity who represents the struggle against the entire notion of gods and religion. Needless to say, this means that his following is extremely small, even for an obscure renegade Chaos God. This is doubtlessly the way Necoho likes it. In the rare event he makes some sort of appearance to mortals, he often appears in the form of a short, slightly plump old human man, with a permanent expression of ironic amusement etched upon his face.
Necoho has no known symbol, and has no temples or holy days, considering every day equally non-holy. He offers nothing to his followers, and asks nothing of them.
Necoho is generally opposed to all other cults of all kinds. The only exception is when helping one cult or hindering another would undermine the cult's credibility among its followers.

Best God Ever.

[BigJake]

...a permanent expression of ironic amusement etched upon his face.

Yup, that sounds about right.

[ChairmanPoo]

I'd like for someone to ellaborate what "anagoge" means.

From wiktionary:

The spiritual or mystical interpretation of a word or passage beyond the literal, allegorical or moral sense

But this is a negative definition (for the most part it tells me what it isnt: literal, allegorical or moral), and as such not too clear

Wikipedia says the same, only with longer phrases:

Anagoge is a Greek word suggesting a "climb" or "ascent" upwards. The anagogical is a method of spiritual interpretation of literal statements or events, especially the Scriptures.

It does provide an inkling in this statement, though:

Hugh of St. Victor, in De scripturis et scriptoribus sacris, distinguished anagoge from allegory. The latter is when a visible fact is signified by another visible fact. Anagoge, on the other hand, is ‘leading above,’ when by a visible fact an invisible is declared.

So anagoge would be sort of like an allegory only referring to some religious abstract concept?

[BigJake]

Medieval Christian exegesis of the Bible (see typology) reinterpreted many episodes of Hebrew scripture according to four levels of meaning: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical. Of these, the anagogical sense was seen as the highest, relating to the ultimate destiny of humanity according to the Christian scheme of universal history, whereas the allegorical and moral senses refer respectively to the Church and to the individual soul. Anagogy or anagoge is thus a specialized form of allegorical interpretation, which reads texts in terms of eschatology.

What it is is about as far from a cogent, concrete thought as you can possibly get short of psychosis.

[Ampersand]

Basically a made up word to deal specifically with the parts of the bible that don't make sense.

[Starver]

With the 40K god as a close analogy, I've long speculated about the existence of a God Of Logic who, unlike most Gods, doesn't value worship.

It might turn out that He actually did create the world 7000 years ago, or so, but when He did so he made it "complete and correct"[1] as if non-divinely made.  And He didn't leave any clues to its divine origin, either.  That wasn't the point.

When one dies, in said world, the St Peter equivalent gatekeeper to heaven checks to see if you've been rational about the world.  Belief in a deity (indeed, even in a Deity Of Logic) is a black mark.  You get credit for treating the world at face value and dealing with it as it is without reference to any unsupportable and fallacious arguments.

Which is not to say that the GOL has not allowed religious explanations to be the 'correct' answer at one level of knowledge.  He wouldn't penalise you for having been being indoctrinated by others and kept ignorant of the counter-proofs.  But as soon as any individual has been exposed to the information about (frexample) the geological deep history that He planted it's no longer allowable for them to continue to believe in the Young Earth Creationism.  Going against Occam and espousing the rationale that the newly contrary evidence was divinely planted would be a No-No in His book, even if that's what happened.

And being All-Powerful and All-Knowing, you better believe that a GOL could create a (faked) self-consistent universe and keep track of it all, and every individual's beliefs.

I'm in two minds whether speculating about a GOL would even be a good thing, in GOL's universe, so I may be dooming myself to eternal chaos by espousing (or, if he's picky about thought, merely thinking) these views.  OTOH, such a deitic construct would be able spot this not as a true belief, merely a hypothesis.  And I'm fairly sure that speculation such as this is allowed.



(I reality, I tend to think of the universe as fully Deterministic in all ways, even my own conscious and sub-conscious thoughts are products of the all that happened before me, as dictated by the initial Prime Mover and the fundamental laws of the universe.  It might well be that 'I' am merely an illusion, an artefact amongst many in the fabric of the universe, and thus ultimately of no more consequence than any other lump of similarly-sized matter (if 'matter' is the true identity of the waveform that appears to exhibit a form of self-organisation to become my corporeal being) and being just one cog in the vast, ticking clock of the universe.  And I'm merely performing my duties exactly as any other copy in any other exact re-run of the universe would do, in influencing other elements of the universe as prompted to do so by the way 'I', in turn have already been influenced by that which surrounds me.  Along the way I may apparently experience states of enjoyment and pain, and love, and stuff like that, but that's just a 'state' applied to myself as part of the process of computing the inputs and generating the outputs from this ill-defined region of universe, as a multiply-meta-levelled abstraction over the underlying mechanics of the universe.  But then it's inevitable that I would think that, isn't it, because the Universe prompted me to do so through the whole cause-and-effect trains that rumbled into my 'now' station...


[1] Which also leads onto Next Tuesdayism.  I'm sure I've explained that already, in this thread, so I won't repeat it.  It would only be around 300 pages back...


edited for (noticed) typos...  thinkos left intact...

[MaximumZero]

I personally prefer to think that, if the universe is logical, and follows logical constructs, then it's probably not 7,000 years old. It's probably much, much moreso.

What I'd be interested in knowing is, what would the motivation be for creating an entire universe that already looks billions of years old? Why not create a universe and watch it grow? Why bother fooling people?

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

I personally prefer to think that, if the universe is logical, and follows logical constructs, then it's probably not 7,000 years old. It's probably much, much moreso.

What I'd be interested in knowing is, what would the motivation be for creating an entire universe that already looks billions of years old? Why not create a universe and watch it grow? Why bother fooling people?

If you're a bit of a baddie.

[Starver]

I personally prefer to think that, if the universe is logical, and follows logical constructs, then it's probably not 7,000 years old. It's probably much, much moreso.

Indeed, it does not look 7k years old.  In fact, there are things (if you care to look, and trust your senses, your equipment or, at the very least, sequential archives of information) that shout out "I'm way older than 7000 years old!!!".

What I'd be interested in knowing is, what would the motivation be for creating an entire universe that already looks billions of years old? Why not create a universe and watch it grow? Why bother fooling people?

If I was a fire-and-forget deity, I'd set it up and watch it unfold.  (Although, if I was that good, I might already know how it ends up.

But a deity who wants to skip to the 'interesting bit', He could work out all the mechanisms, the history needed to get it to that state and create it all by a snap of His fingers.  And for a deity who wants His creations to look at Creation itself and use their reason (rather than look at the big sign saying "I made this - God") it's quite obvious that He'd go to that trouble.

Anyway, the GOL may well have gone the whole hog and been a fire-and-forget guy, I'm just saying that Supreme Beings in a hurry could have pre-aged everything perfectly[1].  Especially if the whole idea is to give everyone a fair chance of 'logically' working out that it all happened much longer ago.


[1] Even setting loads of photons in adrift in space, some as if having left a long-defunct quasar millennia/billenia ago and passed through unknown numbers of gas clouds, in just the right numbers and with the right characteristics so that when each happens across a planet and plunge into an astronomical instrument built a few thousand years later they'd 'reveal' their rich, if falsified, history and build up a picture of the death of an early galactic structure that stimulates intellectual study and leads us towards a logical extrapolation.  Which is not to say that tomorrow night there won't suddenly be a plethora of carefully-placed and -timed photons displaying, by day and by night, a huge galactic-disc sized count-down timer for the End Of The World, but I don't see that being part of GOL's grand plan...  It's isn't a logical enough finale.

[Andir]

The more people worship it, the weaker it gets.

I don't know why, but that sounds hilarious.

Forgive my obvious ignorance in this, but isn't that technically how "The Force" works?  The more Jedi you have, the weaker their individual influences.  The fewer Sith (being the reason they usually only have 2) the more powerful their control over the dark side.

(That's now I always understood it)

[Starver]

That's not the analogy you're looking for.

Move along...

[MetalSlimeHunt]

These aren't the analogies we're looking for.

Move along!

[MaximumZero]

See, the thing about that is, the GOL or whatever would already know the outcome of any universe made. To that end, why bother making it?

[Starver]

See, the thing about that is, the GOL or whatever would already know the outcome of any universe made. To that end, why bother making it?

That answer's above my paygrade.  Like I said, I'm a more likely a Determinism guy, and Determinism from a mundane startup[1], at that.

It could be that the fire-and-forget God, despite being able to work out what would happen if He thought about it (as every deity worth His or Her pillar-of-salt should be able to do), hasn't cared to do so.

Alternately, the deity only gets to know what the Universe about to be started will end up like by thinking it through just before.  And (similar to Next Tuesdayism) we aren't the real Universe, but God's own internal thought processes working out the end-result of the Universe To Be.  This is also compatible with the footnoted "infinite kitchen table" analogy, as every single possibility is being looked at along the way of finding the particularly fine-tuned big-bang precursor that will end up making the intended result.


Basically, this shows several of the problems of assuming an Omni-everything deity fits into any logical premise, there's just not enough 'equivalence' between our everyday concerns, abilities and motives and anything that said deity would have to work within the confines of.

You might get some sort of idea if you can ask (if you can find them, and work out a way to communicate with them) the pixelated inhabitants of a Conway's Game Of Life universe what they think you do in your spare time (apart from manage a nigh-on infinite Game Of Life universe), and see if they've got any inkling of backups.  Although admittedly that depicts a universe which the creator (you) may have an infinite ability to inspect (omniscience) and even to change (omnipotence), but wouldn't be able to understand beyond "ooh, it looks like that megahumungous pattern is interacting with that other megahumungous pattern".  That is perhaps another answer.  Our hypothetical 'next level up' God's playing around with Game Of Life[2] could be similarly as unknowing of the chaotic future results of the simple starting conditions.

Also, don't forget that Conway-creatures can't know anything of backup and restore and run-redoing (after editing the field of play), and neither could we.  They can't test for such things (unless their universe is running on a specifically buggy program version, or the Creator uses the cut'n'paste buffer too much), and neither could we.


Another Occam-worthy act of disregarding, really.




[1] Perhaps as one in any number of slightly different universes in a multiverse.  Another one of my long-time analogies is that a hypothetical God's kitchen table has an infinite number of jam-jars on it, each having a different 'mix' of universe, some are spluttering and shaking and threatening to spill their contents, others are quietly changing colour, some are just sitting inert.  So, if there is a God, it's a question as to whether we're sputtering along or just sitting around like gunk, and which one of these are more likely to be taken off the table and chucked down the sink, rather than let sit there, or perhaps given the occasional stir...

[2] Having primarily talked about a God Of Logic, I can't reduce Game Of Life down to GOL, like I'd want to.

edit: misformed close italics tag corrected