(urth) The Will Of God

[David Stockhoff]

Ah, but you said, "That's it." As in, it's that simple. Now you're saying it's not that simple: "either He wills it to occur, or he chooses not to prevent it."

This seems like a huge distinction to me. Creating a big enough space to fit a four-volume novel or three, maybe.

Anyway, we can't ever know which is which, but we can speculate. Especially since the actual topic here is not God's actual will, but a mere novel depicting such events. 

(For the same reason, I'd say "occur" vs "not occur" is pretty well useless in analyzing TbotNS. We have only "Severian said it occurred." 

And even within that category, can something occur and then become something that has not occurred? I'd say so. Maybe not in TBotNS, but certainly in Wolfe and any time you are dealing with alternative timelines. I mean something more than "I thought it occurred, but then I found out it didn't.")
 
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Message: 2
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2008 16:32:45 -0500 (EST)
From: brunians at brunians.org
Subject: Re: (urth) The Will Of God
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <7205.67.142.130.26.1228685565.squirrel at brunians.org>
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Individual entities may or may not know the will of God. This does not
stop them from doing the will of God. Nothing happens save by the will of
God.

God, will, occurred, did not occur: these are terms.

'God' means the (presumed) omniscient, omnipotent ruler of the world. You
may or may not believe that such a thing exists. This is immaterial: that
is the definition of the term.

Will is a deliberate act.

I am going to assume that everyone here knows what it means to say that
something did occurred or that something may have occurred but did not in
fact occur.

Assuming that there is an omniscient, omnipotent ruler of the world,
everything that occurs is in accordance with said ruler's will: either He
wills it to occur, or he chooses not to prevent it.

So once something has occurred, you can look back and say "that was the
Will of God". Before it occurs, you don't know.



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