Evil @ MindSay

What are you supposed to write in your first entry? I guess that's the beauty of blogging--there are no rules. So here we go :o)

I am sitting here panting like a dog at the moment. I just ran up 12 flights of stairs and delivered a healthy dose of insulin. I am a Type 1 Diabetic of 13 years and still struggling to keep this disease in line. It quite often disobeys me, which is why I am sitting here with high blood sugar and a dry mouth waiting for my exercise and insulin to kick in.

Illnesses my friends, are the devil, and they shred us up and burn us if we let them. I recently let my diabetes devour me. After a sexual assault and depression, I neglected to perform every single basic principle of diabetes care. I prepared for the worst when I stepped into the doctor's office....Call me blessed or lucky, but I managed to successfully wreak havoc on my body without experiencing any permanent or debilitating damage.

I'm learning from my "evil" illness. It's teaching me to value myself. And valuing includes putting time and energy into yourself and your health. I WANT to live. So I stopped killing myself. A slow suicide is no way to go.

I'm not quite unbreakable yet. I have a few cracks that have yet to be sealed. I get weak and careless from time to time...but at least now I know how to bounce back.

I could blame the asshole who assaulted me for my downfall, but he doesn't put food in my mouth or syringes in my thighs. I'm learning. This is my path...I did a U-turn and now I'm going full force down the beaten path of life.

“The Problem of Evil and Le-way”

As an American I am most familiar with Christianity than any other belief system. At the same time, I was not raised in a Christian household like many of my peers. Instead my parents left it up to my brother and I to determine our own beliefs and encouraged us to think for ourselves. As a result I was given the opportunity to be true to myself by thinking outside the box and considering as many angles

as possible.

 

One of the concepts I have long accepted but now choose to do away with is the idea that God is omnipotent. It’s not that I doubt that good will ultimately prevail over evil but rather that the reason for this is that there is more good and a greater desire (or need) for good to overcome what isn’t. The nature of evil is to destroy itself while good seeks to further itself.

 

The hard reality is that there are two forces in the universe, like night and day, male and female, yin and yang, there is good and evil. Understanding this has lead me to solving The Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil suggests that God can not exist to allow so much pain and suffering in the world.

 

I have previously proposed that the devil was a great angel given the responsibility of guarding over the knowledge of good and evil who was seduced by what it had to offer. This may very well still be the case and in fact may be the very thing that gave the devil his power.

 

God allowed Adam and Eve and the angels under His command to decide for themselves if the knowledge of good and evil was something they wanted. He did this because He is fair. The difficulty is that free-will (which comes from the knowledge of good and evil) is incapable of producing results that are just as fair. This brings us to The Problem of Evil which must be discussed if God is worth believing in.

 

The solution is a war that has lasted for millions of years and may last many more to come. It’s not a question of who will win but only a matter of how long it will take. Good will ultimately prevail over evil for the reasons I spoke of before. It’s not that God did not create the Universe and everything in it. The problem is that God made the mistake of trusting Satan with the knowledge of good and evil which the devil used inappropriately to make war with God and put His kingdom in jeopardy.

 

Ultimately, there are 2 principles at work here. The first being that God is fair which is why He allowed all this to take place. The other is called dualism but not in the most literal sense. True dualism would not allow for justice to be served in its proper context and would therefore produce undesirable results. It may not be that God is omnipotent in the sense that He can do away with evil as He pleases but, maybe, in the sense that evil will be done away with when all is finished.

Seventeen years ago onMay 5th is the day my husband, Dan and I, promised in front of a congregation, in the presence of GOD, that we would forsake all others and keep ourselves to each other until we were parted only by death. Apparently Dan, had memory problems exacerbated by a relapse of his alcoholism and the presence of my (former) best friend, Donna Townsend.

Donna was in treatment for a small lump in her breast. She had a lumpectomy and chemo. We met in the chemo treatment room of my oncologist. She was fun, she was an Episcopalian (or so she said) and we became friends and shared female type confidences. I felt outrage when her boyfriend moved out on her. And when she was 'unjustly' fired, she moved in with us.

BIG MISTAKE.... sort of a no good deed shall go unpunished.

She moved in and took over.

I, on the other hand had a pervasive breast cancer, Pagetts which kills 97.4% within 18 months of diagnosis. I also had a MRSA in the mastectomy site and subsequent prophylactic mastectomy of the other breast (well, at least I could walk down a hall without drifting to the right because I as so unbalanced). Only later did I find I was a Stage IVB... the write your will stage. But nine years later, I’m still hear. Not sure that’s a ‘good thing’.

I am also asthmatic, so Donna eventually stopped smoking outside and smoked inside and persuaded Dan to do the same. According to her, it was his house too and he had the right to smoke inside if he wanted to. She did this so I would have to be forced to stay in another room while they did things together... not just smoking.

Dan’s dog, Barney, (that will be another blog about just him) hated Donna. He’d pee on anything Donna set on the floor including the sofa bed she slept on... well, ostensibly slept on. I should not have scolded him for that. He was just trying to tell me how bad Donna was.

The chemo also ratcheted up my arthritis (from years of dancing, competitive skating, competitive ballroom dancing) and I had to have my knees replaced. When I got home, I got in my car and the radio was tuned to HER favorite station of course, her car was not working.

The kids and I finally gave her an ultimatum to get out. Well, she persuaded Dan to set her and him up in an apartment. I only found out when I went to pay the electric bill and they said that it had been changed to a different address. I tracked him there. He finally walked out the day after Christmas.... and that Christmas night Donna actually accused Dan of molesting his granddaughter.... with all of us present! Wonder what that was about... because at that moment we all were on her case... the next day Dan moves in with her?

More to come as I work this through. I HAVE to forgive them as this is eating me but maybe at least warning others about evil women and sharing the pain that self-centered women like Donna Townsend wreck on innocent people will make it worth is.

Man has but the simple task of balance.  Balance is not the same as moderation.  That balance entails the unique and tumultuous duty of acting in a way that brings neither extreme or fanaticism nor subjugation.  We act in ways that fulfill consumption.  This may be food, sex, alcohol, reading, etc..  Consumption fuels the inner desire we have for something.  Eckhart Tolle discusses the idea of the ego as being the barrier to enlightenment and stillness.  Hannah Arendt would refer to conditioning, but it becomes a quandary of sorts in understanding the function of conditioning (separate from that of influence).  Man produces conditions, yet he is subject to being a product of conditions.  It seems an inescapable dialectic of life.  To what degree, if any, can we escape conditioning without providing conditions by which to escape previous conditions?  Since we cannot seem to escape conditions and conditioning we must work within them to understand their influence and determinism in imbalance.  Balance is our continuous struggle and reward in life.  We maintain an understanding of our consumption as being appropriated in moderation in order to implement balance that is neither starvation nor gluttony.  This process of balance does not only occur within ourselves but also with ourselves and nature, individually and collectively.  There is not centerfold which holds higher regard than the other because in the cosmic illumination that extends beyond our understanding we are but workers.  What are we working towards?  This remains a question of life and a collective question for humanity.  Man has been given the unfortunate ability of emotion, love and hate, which predicates most of his feelings and willfulness to act.  The balance is to not fall into the extremist disillusionment of fanatical love or hate.  A man who has all the love for the world one day can awake with the bitter taste of hate on his lips the next morning.  Man fails to understand balance and partake in healthy emotional consumption.  When man fails to moderate such consumptions he becomes consumed by it and no longer assumes the role as consumer but product.  He becomes a product with extremism and narrowness of thought.  His balance has shifted from one terminal point to another.  If becomes consumed then he may become confused and unable to discern balance fearing that one movement will shift from one terminal point to another.  Perhaps this manic imbalance is why people struggle with life.  They have been conditioned to allow consumption to consume them and thus are no longer masters of their consumption but products of it.  They are oppressed by the ego as they try to fulfill it but it is an unhappy bitch.  It takes what it wants and destroys, sometimes, violently what it discards.  Man's responsibility is to understand that neither peace nor war can ever sustain man.  It is utopian to believe in sustained peace and abominable to believe in sustained war.  Man will always feud.  His feud will primarily be with himself.  He projects his internal conflict outwardly and thus begins the cycle of providing a condition under which others are conditioned.  It is with moderation, compromise, mediation that we can come to an understanding of balance within ourselves and humanity.  As we look for answers to the world’s problems and degradation of humanity, we must look at the consumption of one and the ill conceived product of being consumed.  When you can balance yourself you can project a balance proposition for conditioning and thus retract the ill fated cycle of extremism and teetering form one terminal point to another.

Antonio Garcia

Indiana University

But the wicked are like the tossing sea, For it cannot be quiet, And its waters toss up refuse and mud.   "There is no peace," says my God, "for the wicked."