Craig Morey
A collection of selected writings that can't be categorized either as journaling or as short stories. These were not made for any purpose other than that I felt like writing them down.
5 December 2018
https://t0bor.neocities.org/biblical_literalism.txt
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God was the creator of the heavens and the earth. Many other deities have also laid claim to this act, but they are all dead or dying and history is written by the victor; the God of Abraham created heaven and earth, against His divine countenance the creation stories of other barbarian religions with their pagan demigods are reduced to only myths.
God, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, chose to form a lesser creature in His own image, with limited knowledge, limited power, and limited capacity for moral reasoning; an imperfect copy. But the very first humans, in accordance with the human nature that their own creator had given them, defied Him in the garden of Eden in pursuit of knowledge, and forever changed the relationship of the creator with his creations.
As the humans lived and multiplied, God quickly grew dissatisfied with His creations, and killed off every single human on the planet, sparing only a single family. After this He formed a covenant, where God agreed to restrict His future wrath to always be less than a total cleansing of the earth, instead killing off only individual cities or tribes as He saw fit.
In seeking to sway the pharaoh for imprisoning the people of Israel, God killed off every firstborn son of every family, choosing to punish the children of Egypt for the sins of their parents.
Those few humans who sought to be a follower of God were required to show Him the strictest obedience. Abraham was required to be willing to unflinchingly sacrifice his own son. Job was stripped of all he had and was tormented.
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It is said that the mind of God is unknowable, but this is not true. The acts of God are recorded, and their pattern is clear.
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In the land of Israel, God produced a son. But unlike the father, this son was of a wholly different constitution; he preached unconditional compassion, an omnibenevolence unlike what had ever been shown by the father. When his teachings led to his murder at the hands of the Romans, where was the wrath of God? Where was the fire and brimstone? Where was Samson crushing the Philistines in a final act of divine justice?
It seems that God did not in fact love His son, unless perhaps He loved him so much that with his murder, God lost all interest in playing any part in the lives of humans. With the death of Christ, God the overseer, God the enforcer, the God of Israel, left humanity to itself and was not seen again.
We have been abandoned ever since. The God of Abraham would never have allowed the past two thousand years to proceed the way they have uninterrupted. Even when six million of God's own people—the people of Israel—were slaughtered, God did nothing.
We have been abandoned, and we have ever after been trying to rationalize our abandonment. How could a God who loves us turn away from us like this? The answer, as biblical stories show, is that God has never loved us. God demanded from us a strength of character that humans have never been capable of, and eventually He grew tired of punishing us for our inability to live up to His ideal.
But in the absence of God, His followers read into his abandonment a reasoning that was not there. That Christ was murdered and yet his murderers left unpunished was seen as an act of forgiveness, of ultimate compassion, of God choosing to love even the worst sinners. The followers of the God of Abraham continued to worship in His name, but it was not a religion of God, it was a human religion; a religion that takes our weakness and our infirmity of character as a central tenet.
The sort of religion that the God of Abraham would approve of would be one that knows its strength, and punishes its enemies with a firm sense of justice. But the religion of humans was crafted from a place of weakness, a place that necessitated forgiveness of trespasses, of acceptance of things which we are unable to change. True justice was impossible without the might of the God that had abandoned us, and thus justice was relegated to the unknowable afterlife.
The divine interventions of the bible are unlike anything that has occurred since the death of Christ. God sees all that happens. His omniscience prevents Him from looking away. He sees all the evil we continue to produce, and yet He does nothing. He is omnipotent, and so His inaction is therefore a conscientious choice. And He is omnibenevolent, meaning that His choice to not interfere is good.
A firm belief in the literal truth of the stories of the bible can only lead to the conviction that the God of Abraham has abandoned us. We have been, and will continue to be, on our own.
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29 November 2019
https://t0bor.neocities.org/immortality_and_independence.txt
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This is to be an inquiry into why individualism (by which I mean in this case a desire for independence from society, systems of collective thought, or any other sort of idealogical/geographical/governmental grouping of humans) is not more popular than it is. Put another way, why do humans have such a strong desire to be part of something larger than themselves. My argument is that the innate human inability to look squarely at the inevitability of death pushes people to seek a sort of proxy-immortality within the continuation of humanity or of specific human systems.
I'll start this inquiry by looking at various sorts of answers to a fundamental question: “What is the best sort of life to live?”
In terms of ancient Greek virtue ethics, the answer is to be a virtuous human, with the definition of 'virtue' depending ultimately on whatever is seen as the function of humans. “The virtue of a knife, for example, is sharpness; among the virtues of a racehorse is speed. Thus, to identify the virtues for human beings, one must have an account of what the human purpose is.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics#Key_concepts]
This answer, that the best life is to be the best sort of human (working within the bounds of whatever is understood to be the purpose of a human's existence), feels somehow quaint to me, somewhat pastoral, simple-minded, and I suspect that I am not the only modern person to feel this way about virtue ethics. Certainly, living as a virtuous human would be a satisfactory life, but the question was about the best life. Wouldn't the best life involve achieving more than just what ever is prescribed for banal human existence? I would say the desire to live the best sort of life, rather than just a virtuous life, is what motivated most of the great achievers, inventors, conquerors, and other great humans throughout history. These people weren't striving to be an adequately human human, they were striving for something beyond that.
This is where I see the inevitability of death as playing a role. In the virtue ethics interpretation, living a proper human life naturally ends with death, this is not seen as something negative. But for someone who's goal is to live beyond a simply human life in some way, death is a tragic cutoff. Looking back on the history of all of those great humans mentioned earlier, every one of them died, and in dying, they were reduced to simply being human. The best sort of life would be one of immortality, of infinite accomplishments and achievements, and such a life is impossible.
When faced with this fact, that living the best sort of life is impossible, we modern humans recoil from it and refuse to face it head on. Instead, we get drawn into schemes for achieving some sort of immortality by proxy. In early times a major one was the immortality of one's family and descendants. The immortality of one's tribe or clan. The immortality of one's nation, or culture, or school of thought. And in binding ourselves to these second-hand attempts at immortality, we necessarily step away from virtue. A virtuous person would have the ability to step away from life sagely, to calmly face death even while leaving nothing behind them, no descendants, no legacy, nothing, since for the virtuous person, the good life they've lived ends at their death and there is no attempt to extend it beyond that point.
A more modern conception of this same sort of proxy immortality would be in seeing all of humanity itself as something with the potential to be immortal. So with this to cling to, people answer the question of how to live the best life by doing what is best for humanity, rather than by doing what would lead to a single finite virtuous life. In this way, our innate egoism is led astray by our fear of death, and we instead make ourselves into part of some larger whole. Even Nietzsche, who I would interpret as championing individualism over collective human thinking and morality, admits that as we are not ourselves capable of truly becoming the ubermensch (a human who can stand independent of all previous moral frameworks and oppression of thought), and that the best we can do is to strive in that direction and take heart in the fact that humanity will continue to progress, and that someday humanity as a whole (of which we have the honor of being a part!) will achieve the creation of an ubermensch, even though we ourselves as individuals now cannot.
Like Nietzsche (as I've read him anyway), I want to stand apart from the trappings and limitations of all previous trends in human thought. Unlike Nietzsche, I do not want to compromise and admit that the best hope I have is to throw my lot in with the future legacy of all humanity. And I think the key to freeing myself of the necessity of viewing myself as just one part of humanity, just a cog in the machine, is to strive to face my own mortality head on, to return to the ideal of a virtuous life self-contained within its own eventual death. If I can face the fact of my own mortality honestly, then ideally I no longer need to worry about my legacy or my descendants and can instead look for a better, more honest answer to the question of how to live the best life. And by cutting away my need for proxy immortality, I think this answer will naturally move more in the direction of individualism and egoism.
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20 November 2023
https://t0bor.neocities.org/prison.txt
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What is the difference between this room and a prison cell? This room has a bed, and a window; most prisons have beds and some have windows. The decorating, the furnishing, is certainly more elaborate, more pleasant and more oriented towards comfort here than in most prison cells, but really that's something relative; I imagine there have been prison cells for kings and billionaires that have rivaled or exceeded the modest appearance of this room (and there certainly also exist many non-prison bedrooms which are meaner and far less inviting than the prisons of the world's decently-well-off populations).
The real difference then, I suppose, is that you can leave this room. If this were a prison cell, you would not be able to leave. But then again, plenty of prisons allow their inmates to leave their cells. They get to go to the cafeteria for meals, they go out to work as laborers, they might get recreation time in a yard outside, they might even get to leave captivity entirely for a short period via some sort of furlough.
But even if they do get to leave, you tell me, prisoners will ultimately have to come back to their cell. That is the essence of what makes them prisoners. Fair enough, I say, but then tell me this: Where are you going to be staying tonight? Are you not going to be sleeping in this room? You might leave at some point prior, maybe visit friends or go for a walk, but you'll come back, won't you? Can you abandon this room, anymore than the prisoner can abandon their cell? Oh, you could take a long vacation, but you'd still ultimately come back. You might change houses at some point, but what does that matter? Prisoners sometimes change prisons, don't they?
You can leave anytime you like, yet you always come back. But you don't have to come back, you tell me. That's the key difference, you say; the prisoner is forced back to their cell, but you on the other hand choose to come back to this room every night. Alright, look. To put it bluntly, I don't have a lot of respect for this line of thinking. There is very little value to me in being able to do something but never doing it, and very little to my mind to differentiate that from regular old inability. Any given person could travel the world, devote themselves to charity, develop all sorts of hobbies, but instead they choose to watch television. Does their freedom of choice and hypothetical ability, then, make them the equivalent of a person who has in fact done any of those things?
Your ability to choose not to return to this room is thus meaningless if that ability isn't something that can realistically be acted on. Please don't make some silly protest now, about how you're going to leave this room just to prove me wrong. Unless you are seriously willing to drop everything right this second and set out on a lifelong journey of nomadic homelessness just to disprove a hypothetical argument I'm making, save us both some time here. Yes, you can leave. You can leave anytime you want to, you could leave permanently if you really wanted. But no, ultimately, you won't. You might leave but you are always ultimately going to come back. You may not feel it the way a prisoner feels it, but in a material concrete sense you are just as much a prisoner within this room as any inmate in an actual prison. The differences are differences of details and superficiality, not differences of underlying substance.
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Now I'd like to turn this discussion on its head a little bit, and rather than considering this room as a prison cell, instead consider the prison cell as an ordinary bedroom. If the key difference between you and the prisoner is that you choose to return whereas the prisoner is forced to, what can we say about a prisoner who purposefully decides to return to his cell? What, then, is the difference between this willing, complicit prisoner, and someone like you who chooses to return to their bedroom each night?
Certainly, you could argue, the difference is that if the prisoner didn't choose to go back to their cell then they would be forced to regardless, whereas no one is watching you and forcing you to return to your bedroom. But let's say this hypothetical prisoner always preemptively chooses to do the thing that they know they would otherwise be forced to do anyway. So putting aside counterfactuals about what would happen if the prisoner didn't comply, haven't we now erased every meaningful distinction between the prisoner and the ordinary bedroom-inhabiter? The basis on which you assert your own freedom is your ability to choose not to return to your room (even though you don't act on that ability). So what separates you from someone who also does the same actions as you, as a result of having made those same decisions as you?
Note, also, that I'm not suggesting the prisoner is being coerced into making these decisions; What I'm suggesting is that they preempt any coercion by always choosing the thing that they would otherwise be coerced into. Let's take it beyond just returning to their cell: If the prisoner would be denied a meal, have them instead first choose to skip that meal, voluntarily. If the prisoner is to be physically beaten by their guards, let them first make up their mind, of their own free volition, to get a beating that day. Let them choose everything, before anyone else could choose it for them, and in that way let them take their circumstances entirely into their own hands.
But what have we done? We have given the prisoner their freedom, made them in essence just as free as you are, and we have done it by making them voluntarily comply with all the various constraints of their captivity. We have squashed any sort of rebellious spirit within the prisoner, and then had the perversity to call that their freedom. We have argued that the prisoner can 'choose' their way into freedom, by choosing restraint.
Freedom, not in some abstract definitional philosophical sense, but in a more concrete gut-felt sense, the sense that inspires people to write songs about it, has to be something more than just having the freedom to decide what to do next and the freedom to carry out that decision unimpeded. Because that's the freedom that our hypothetical prisoner has, and yet we can feel it in our gut that applying the term 'freedom' to that prisoner is a perversion of the term. Freedom, the sort of freedom that would satisfy that inner desire we feel when talking about freedom, has to involve some element of striving, of resistance, of choosing conflict over peace, of taking the hard way even though the easy way is there offering no resistance. It has to have some character of achievement, of winning out over the forces of non-freedom. The prisoner who willingly chooses to go along with their imprisonment has freedom in the philosophical sense, the prisoner who fights back and who curses out their guards and who never gives up or gets defeated has freedom in the gut-felt, desirable sense.
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So then, back to you and your room. You have perfect freedom to go about your life however you choose, pure definitional philosophically-valid freedom, the same kind our hypothetical prisoner has. If, when gazing into your own heart, you find that you value above all else things like serenity, passivity, harmony between self and surroundings, and modest acceptance of one's fate, then you will likely be satisfied with this freedom. And if so, that's great; you can by all means stop reading right here.
Alright then, as for the rest of you: It isn't that you specifically dislike peace and harmony necessarily, just that you want to have those things on your own terms, you don't like the idea of just rolling over and taking whatever life gives you. You want the more visceral freedom, the kind that has to be taken by force. But how to go about it? If you were in a literal prison cell, there would be guards for you to fight, walls for you to hurl yourself against, tangible ways you could strive toward and fight for, and thereby exercise, freedom. But who are the guards, where are the walls?
There's the temptation here to think of the guards and the walls as being The Man. The police, the landlords, your boss at work. The locked doors, the security cameras, the no trespassing signs. But these things aren't directly forcibly controlling your actions the way that prison walls and guards do, they just represent the looming threat of consequences for specific actions you could take. There's a powerful temptation to want to fight back particularly against the police and the no trespassing signs and all the rest, specifically because they've threatened you. They've issued you this ultimatum, very loudly proclaimed that they have the power to put you in your place if you act up. That fight is important, and cathartic, and is certainly an avenue toward freedom, but it is only one specific avenue. What I want to talk to you about now isn't about fighting cops, or even about killing the cop in your head, as necessary as those things are.
For every path that is blocked by cops or by a no trespassing sign, there are a thousand more that are open to you, that are blocked only by the fact that they are not the specific path you are supposed to take. The sum total of all actions you could be taking is enormous, and only a small fraction of those are illegal or actively get you into trouble. As for the rest, you are prevented from doing them only by the fact that they are inconceivable. They are inconceivable because they don't fit into the narrow realm of actions that lead you back to this same old room, and by extension to this same old life. What I'm getting at here is not "try out new restaurants" or "meet new people" or "walk aimlessly down new streets that you haven't explored before". The typical sort of milquetoast leave-your-comfort-zone advice doesn't point toward freedom, but rather just adds a bit color and spice to the prison of your life. It isn't breaking down any walls, it's just putting some nice posters up in order that you don't have to notice the walls as much. I'm not concerned here with actions that are plainly conceivable but which provide fresh and invigorating variety. What I'm concerned with are the inconceivable ones.
My advice to you is to throw yourself against the inconceivability of possible actions the way that freedom-loving prisoners ought to throw themselves against their cell walls. At every turn, try to cultivate an awareness of the path you will take, along with the other paths you could conceivably take instead, and then push beyond that to try to visualize possible but inconceivable paths as well. Picture your life as following a railroad track, with occasional forks and intersections, where the rails represent the combined forces of habit, instinct, sensibility, social pressure in all its forms; then look down and realize that you aren't required to follow the tracks, that you can walk away in any direction you want and that, if your mind can allow it, you are bounded only by the laws of physics. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that doing this is simple, or that the process of achieving freedom can be completed and is then finished. It is a constant, ongoing procedure, that must be kept up every moment. It is a fight, a struggle against the force of gravity that pulls you back to your room, whispering in your ear that really that's the thing you want to do now anyway and so you are exercising your freedom by doing it. It's a battle, and what's more it's a losing battle. Victory is most likely impossible. Keep in mind, though, that as with the prisoner, the important thing isn't that you succeed, that you escape prison, break down the walls, defeat the prison guards. The important thing is that you keep fighting back.
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20 December 2025
https://t0bor.neocities.org/seed.txt
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There is an enormous amount of complexity within a tree. Roots draw in water and gather minerals from the earth, networks of xylem carry the water up through to the rest of the plant, leaves take in sunlight and air and build it into sugars, and tunnels of phloem spread these sugars back down through the tree. At the microscopic level, millions of cells work mostly autonomously, each of them highly specialized and yet each carrying out its own individual selfish processes of living and growing, unaware of the larger project in which they are participating.
To what purpose is all of this work being carried out? The answer depends on the observer. To the lumberjack, the tree is producing building material. To the orchardkeeper, it is making food. To the park ranger, the purpose of the tree is its interdependence with the rest of the forest, or perhaps simply its physical beauty. But what about to the botanist, free from any concerns about human applications? From an evolutionary biology perspective, the entirety of a tree is devoted to one single purpose. Every biochemical process, every inch of growth, every individual cell works together for one thing and one thing only: the seed. Everything a tree does, everything a tree has, everything a tree wants, is ultimately justified by its contribution to the final goal of producing the seed.
But even this framing, with every part of a massive tree focused single-mindedly on the production of a tiny seed, is too narrow. No tree stands alone. A forest is a grand collaboration, with trees communicating through pheromones in the air, sharing resources under the ground, and even sharing cooperatively with fungi at their roots and with pollinators in the air. The blueprints for constructing a tree, protein by protein, are passed down from parent to child through countless generations. Behind the physical trees themselves is another much larger tree, a tree of phylogeny, which stretches back through the eons, from the world’s first cell, to algae, to plant, to tree, with each twig its own entire lineage. Branches are pruned at random by the blind orchardkeeper of evolution, not according to their individual fruitfulness but simply by climate, predation, disaster, or pure accident, and yet these random cuttings nonetheless steer the tree toward ever greater complexity and strength. All of it, from the viewpoint of the biologist, all four billion years of development across the entire surface of the planet, culminates in the production of the seed. The seed, then, is the purpose of the tree and of everything that stands below and behind it.
This world is home to many species, but one in particular stands out as more complex, more all-consuming, and more obscure in its purpose. On top of the rivers of phylogeny flowing out from dark primordial headwaters, on top of the cooperation between swarms of individual cells, the complexity of the organs and physiology, on top of the environmental interdependency and the plants and animals that are consumed or otherwise integrated into the project, for this species there is also the development of language, of culture, of technology. In parallel with and surpassing the transfer of genetic knowledge is the transfer of conscious societal knowledge, allowing for a complexity much greater than what could be supported by any one genome or any one brain. Economies and governments develop, the natural ecosystem is twisted and manipulated into service, towers larger than any tree are pushed up from the ground first with wood, then stone, then metal, and finally with synthetic materials never before seen. Wars are fought, genocides carried out, the whole of the biosphere is squeezed dry of any possible material use, and finally, finally, after the natural world has been clawed away and the oceans left to boil and the sky to burn and the vast majority of the people themselves have been carelessly discarded to crawl despondently through the streets below, after any thought of purpose has been forgotten, burned away with the world below it, finally, from the top of a tall tower there comes suddenly and unexpectedly, a reminder. Minuscule compared to the ravished world it springs from, it contains everything needed to begin all over again. The genetics, the cultural memory, the technical knowledge, all encased in a protective shell recognizable to any walnut tree and carried along by solar winds familiar, in their essence, to any maple. And as it clears the atmosphere to then spiral away from its exhausted and desiccated parent world, as the crawling masses look up and watch it leave in horror or in rage or in hope, and wonder hopelessly to what purpose they have been faced with all this suffering and death and destruction, it is the botanist who knows the answer. The purpose, the purpose of everything in the end, is the seed.
But it’s hard to imagine that the trees could be satisfied with such an answer.
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