The Owner of All Infernal Names

From the book, The Owner of All Infernal Names: An Introductory Treatise on the Existence, Nature & Government of our Omnimalevoent Creator

It has been said that in a universe which simultaneously contains obscene levels of seemingly meaningless misery, and creatures endowed with the capacity to know it is meaninglessly miserable, that only two explanations face all facts[1]: the Christian position, which suggests this is a good world conferred by a benevolent being who has man’s best interests at heart, but which has—for one reason or another—gone terribly, terribly wrong; and that of dualism, which proposes that there exists two equal and independent powers (one good, the other bad) pushing everything, and that this universe is the battlefield over which these opposing forces wage an endless war.

Both suppositions are conspicuously incomplete, the first moreso than the second. Birthed in a riotous sea of heat and violence, this world was never good, never peaceful, never without suffering, pain and anxiety. There was never an armistice between all living and not-so living things, nor can evidence be found to suggest there ever was—or still is—a loosely balanced war tumbling across Creation with the advantage swinging between the forces of light and happiness, and those of darkness and misery. Fire has always burned flesh, water has always drowned babies, and Creation has only ever exhibited but one impulse, one motive, one direction: towards increasing complexity, where complexity—across all systems, animate and inanimate—corresponds precisely to the degree and depth of potential suffering available to those contingent things whose participation in Creation was never solicited.

From heat and protons, to hearts, central nervous systems, minds and cluster bombs, this is Creation’s single compulsion, its one and only passion; a relentless, arguably reckless passage from a state of ancestral simplicity to contemporary complexity, where multiplicity—and the specialisation it affords—parents a wretched and forever diversifying family of more devoted fears and faithful anxieties, more pervasive ailments and skilful parasites, more virulent toxins, more capable diseases, and more affectionate expressions of pain, ruin, psychosis and loss. In the simplest possible statement: Creation is a vast entanglement apparatus—a complexity machine[2]—whose single-minded mindless state of employment is geared entirely towards a greater potency and efficiency in the delivery and experience of misery and confusion, not harmony and peaceful accord.

If this were not the case, if Creation’s stubborn obsession was in fact towards the production of less suffering and anxiety and pain over time, even if only in those ages when the theorised forces of good held the high ground, then observers of every kind would have already seen, collected and assembled immense libraries of hard observational data detailing impressive, unambiguous and irresistible movements towards less complexity over time, not more. Such paradigmatic shifts would be exampled in a multitude of different flavours and pedigrees, including perhaps innovations like green chlorophyll-laced skin, rather than sharper, stronger, longer talons designed for one purpose, and one purpose alone: to more competently steal from another’s living flesh the proteins required to sustain the complex life which has no choice but to evolve and grow more complicated with every passing generation. In the earthly theatre the observer would witness nature favouring adaptations that promoted good will and kinship through simplicity, not the heaping on of rewards to those organisms that developed more devious weapons, cleverer poisons, or massive and prohibitively expensive brains capable of envisioning discrete parcels of manufactured destruction that could be thrown anonymously over horizons.

Clearly, both theses are deeply and deliriously deficient. The Christian position, with its forever expanding treasury of inventive theodicies, and that of dualism, cannot satisfactorily or convincingly explain the world around us; the world that is, has been, and will be. At the same time, both are, however, also stained with enough half-truth to at the very least indicate a third, more consistent, more durable, demonstrable, enormously distasteful, but ultimately unavoidable alternative: that this world was brought into existence by a perfectly wicked, malevolent Creator; a maximally powerful being whose nutritional, emotional and entertainment needs are satisfied best by the suffering which pervades all of Creation, and whose single-minded objective is to amplify His pleasure-taking over time.

Some have named a lesser species of this being the Devil, others The Deceiver, Ahriman, Abaddon, Mara, Baphomet, Apollyon, Iblis, Beast, Angra Mainyu, Yama, Moloch, The Father of Lies, The Author of Sin, Druj, Samnu, Mammon, and The Great Spoiler, yet these characters of human literature and tradition do not begin to approach the nature and scope of this entity who may be identified as simply, The Owner of All Infernal Names: a being who does not share His creation with any other comparable spirit, does not seek to be known to or worshipped by that which He has created (or has allowed to be created), and whose greatest proof of existence is that there is no conspicuous proof of His existence—just teleological birthmarks that can be isolated and examined as testimony—for He understands that the trinkets of His greatest amusement, arousal and nutritional satisfaction must be blind to the nature of the world they inhabit so they may act freely, and suffer genuinely.

 

References

[1] Lewis, C. S., 1952, Mere Christianity, New York: Macmillan, pp 313

[2] Smith, Kelly C., 2014, ‘Manifest complexity: A foundational ethic for astrobiology?,’ Science Direct, Volume 30, Issue 4, November, pp. 209—214