...continued from the BLOG post yesterday.

Then I grew up full of wonder and awe about everything but didn’t give much thought to how the universe came into being, how creation happens, or for that matter, how I happened. Now well past the middle of my life, and a few years past retirement from the world of work, I have time to ponder the questions that philosophers and theologians are paid to explore because it is a professional, work-related task for them. Now I explore those questions just for the fun of it… That’s what some of the BLOG writing will be about during the next year... Toward a Personal Theology.

Asi es la vida…“Life is like that.”  It’s a response… a comment… an implied question within a declarative sentence.  What life is and how it happens is the question of the ages.  Christians have answers… so do Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Baha’is, Jains, Athiests, and even irreligious.  The answers vary from one group to the other, and within each of the religious and non-religious communities a dizzying variety of subgroups offer doctrinal theses attempting to explain what life is and how it came into being.  The most consistent theme running through many doctrinal statements posits the existence of a supreme power or supreme being that/who sometime in the distant past made everything that exists in the Cosmos… got it going according to some sort of intelligent, carefully developed plan. In most religions the dogmas developed to describe the overall design for everything that exists, including all life forms, insist that the plan is orderly and perfect. Imperfections and disorder must be explained. Dualism, denoting co-eternal binary opposition, has been the easiest way out of the dilemma.  Binary opposition is a philosophical language/thought system which segregates everything into two theoretical opposite positions.  For purposes of this writing, think in terms of mutually exclusive terms.  Evil cannot be good and good cannot be evil.  What is benevolent cannot be considered to be malignant. Order and disorder are mutually exclusive concepts. The obvious problem in  a theory that requires all order and all goodness to have been designed and created by a supreme power is that disorder and badness exist without explanation… unless a supreme malevolent spoiler is included in the theory.  The theory doesn’t work.  A supreme being cannot logically be considered to have supreme power if a malevolent spoiler must be included in the equation.