(urth) What's So Great About Ushas

[Jeff Wilson]

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:
> 
>> That was pretty much the discussion in progress just before you arrived. I'm
>> not convinced that God has no part in a plan involving the White Fountain;
>> as the omnipotent, omniscient creator of the universe, He is responsible for
>> its content and as such He kills everyone and destroys everything that
>> passeth away. How he implements His will and whether the intermediaries are
>> servants, sock puppets, or dupes is what we are sorting out.
> 
> Well, there's a further point here: one can claim that *any* action, by
> *anyone*, is part of God's Plan. To do this is to create moral anarchy
> for humans -- "Yes, I killed six million Jews,  but that was part of God's
> plan, so it's okay." No, I don't think so; the only way to theodicize this is
> by assuming an extreme Calvinist-predestinarian stance.

I don't subscribe to the usual free will/predestiny dichotomy. You can't 
escape God's plan because He's eternal and outside of time and space, 
any more than A. Square can escape the observation and intervention of 
three-dimensional beings hovering over Flatland. Your choices still make 
a difference in how you will fit into His plan, and His delivered wisdom 
  as trickled down to you may influence those choices. Presumably, the 
closer one hews to righteousness, the less suffering all round.

> The only way to say that the Hiero*s don't share the same moral
> burden as humans is to say that they have direct knowledge of
> God's will.

I move that we adopt my term "Yesodis" to mean the current and former 
inhabitants of Yesod during the period of the Book and their non-human 
servants, including the Hierodules, Hierogrammates, and Hieros. It's 
certainly easier to spell and shorter.

> This is the justification for the Israelites' slaughter of the
> natives of Canaan -- "God said so," which trumped "Thou shalt
> not murder."
> 
> So to justify the Hiero*s' actions, to say that their plan that involved
> the slaughter of Urth's billions, was morally OK, means that you have
> to present evidence that they have a direct knowledge of the will
> of the Increate, which I do not see in the text.

I don't see much evidence that the Yesodis are the proximate cause. It's 
possible that they created the the White Fountain, but it seems to be 
Severian who draws it to Urth. They seem to work pretty hard to make 
sure he is there to keep it from striking Urth at the last second, too.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >