Ari Diaries: Articulating a Philosophy

[kiya]

Principles and laws are not intrinsic to the world of nature; they are creations, projections of the mind, attempts to grapple with the unpredictability of when the storm comes and when the wind goes. There is order within nature: life feeds on life; death comes to all things and feeds the living, even if only the tiny; those who live in communities arrange to share their territories and tasks in some fashion; any life depends on the presence and interrelationship of lives not of its kind. A bee is devoted to order (of the heirarchy of the hive; of the patterns of its constructions within the hive); the wasp that infiltrates does not care. Each has its own nature, which is its own beauty.

A god would appear to be a powerful being that seeks to embody a set of principles and draw the balance of the world more into alignment with those principles. This is ... the product of a mind, produced by the nature of things that think, and not in and of itself counter to the natural balance (though it should be considered carefully), though some such sets of principles are inimical to nature: monoculture and undeath are prime and obvious examples.

(Undeath is a direct assault upon the cycles of life and death; it deprives the worms and prevents the cycles of incarnation and discarnation. Trivially wrong.)

Monoculture is unnaturally fragile; nature's correction for this imbalance is plague. It is a disease imposed primarily by the excessive zeal of minds applying their principles in a manner contrary to natural order, whether by slaughter or control; the richness of natural systems in their fluidity and flexibility is constrained to an unnatural simplicity. It will shatter when struck like a crystal fault line and be replaced with something with enough bend to survive.

Altruism and cruelty are not facets of nature itself; they may be matters of interpretation, of choice of principle by conscious minds, of influence from particular flavors of magic. Good and evil have their particular inclinations towards shaping the balance of nature; like all things they need to be prevented from instituting a monoculture and thereby rendering the natural fabric fragile.