The World According To Alan

Genesis

In the beginning...there wasn't a beginning. A "beginning" implies there was a "before", and when you're talking about the universe, that's just silly. It just is. It may do some weird cyclic stuff, but if it "started" then where did it come from? What's the point of creating some other mystical metaverse to spawn it, because then you just have to ask where *that* came from. Even more so with the silly notion of "Intelligent Design": if we can't evolve from natural processes, then how did a creator come to be? There's just always been an omniscient being? It makes a lot more sense to believe that stuff just is, and as chaotic processes do their thing, order comes and goes. We're in a certain stage of order now, but things will run down. How the order comes back might be a good question --- it obviously came once, so it's logical to believe that it'll come again.

In the meantime, while it's an interesting discussion, it really has little relevance to how we should live our lives. It's far outside the scope of not only our lives, but our civilization's lives. The point of a doctrine describing how one ought to live one's life is to arrange for that life to be as good as it can be. The Free Church believes that when everyone has the opportunity to decide for themselves what "good" is, then "goodness" is maximized, which seems like an obvious fundamental goal. With that in mind, it's clear that when it comes to the conflicts of interest that naturally arise whenever people interact, the proper approach is to minimize the negative impact each has on the other, while maximizing the positive impact. The followon articles will provide examples...