Presented by the Machine

In my preceding post about the Machine, I ventured just “to take a stab at a description.”  I will try to enlarge on each point.

The emerging creature (newly-born or newly-evolved) responds to urges.  This would describe Adam in his first apprehension of the company of God, and it describes as well the experience of the newborn.  Jesus says that we must become as little children, and he says that we must be born a second time (or born “from above”) in a manner analogous to the genesis of the (incomprehensible) wind.  That is to say, we are to cultivate the bursting and un-cursed urges of the newborn, experiencing the wonder of existence before understanding (or, rather, attempting to understand) that existence.  God provides the means of our earthly arrival—the Machine of Creation—which renders superfluous (and perhaps detrimental) all notions of parentage or extraction.  We are the non-contributing products of the machine, and we can no more understand the process of our derivation than we can understand why anything should exist in the first place.

This first element—the instant of the primal urge—cannot be overemphasized.  Creation was pronounced “good.”  Creation was subsequently cursed.  There is no logical warrant to distinguish between competing conceptualizations of the curse.  Either humanity is evil from conception (and the “conception” that matters is the conception of the person in the mind of God) or humanity is evil from the moment the self-centered yet all-accepting urge to actualization of the newborn is replaced by that which is outright selfish.

This is not a small question.  A certain neatness and apparent humility reside in the notion that all humanity is cursed from conception, yet that mode of analysis is rightfully revolting to the conscience.  We might wonder if that is how God might act, and that is not all.  God pronounced Creation “good.”  The notion that such a pronouncement could be entirely obliterated through the finite though horrid behaviors of persons seems untenable.

The competing notion is the contention that persons embrace evil as they embrace all other things that tend toward the actualization (or attempted actualization) of themselves.  This is the notion that Jesus ratifies.  We must become like little children, and we must remember that God is a loving father if only by our recalling that we (rightly called “evil”) cannot exist without benign tendencies of our own.

We are in such manner presented to the world by the Machine.