Now what about what about God? Where is God in all this? Why doesn't God prevent evil?  Why did he create in other words psychopaths and narcissists? I want to read a few quotes Anisius Manlius Severinus Also known as Boethius was a Roman philosopher in the sixth fifth and sixth century He was also a statesman and he wrote a wonderful book called the consolation of philosophy So it's a great pity. We don't read old books only new ones if at all And he wrote there is nothing that in an omnipotent God could not could not do Well, it's like a dialogue. Yes, so one one person says there's nothing that an omnipotent God could not do and the other one says no then Can God do evil and the other person says well actually no So The devil is nothing So that is what he cannot do who can do anything in other words if God can do anything But he cannot do evil then evil is nothing which of course the contradiction and Then there's Quentin Smith in the in the book the anthropic coincidences evil and disconfirmation of phase and he wrote an implication of intelligent design may be That the designer is benevolent and as such the constants and structures of the universe are life-friendly However, such intelligent design may conceivably be malevolent It is reasonable to conclude that God does not exist since God is omnipotent Omniscient and perfectly good and thereby would not permit any gratuitous natural evil But since since gratuitous natural evils are precisely what we would expect if a malevolent spirit created the universe if any spirit created the universe it is malevolent not the level and and not benevolent and cannot be gone and so God is a complex character The Old Testament God is a malignant narcissist There's no question about it from the clinical from point of view of clinical psychology He's entitled. He's vindictive. He's disembathic He is defiant.   We can't perhaps even grasp these minds But mind is a kind of metaphor Whatever these minds or mind like or whatever are They're mentally ill and if they had created us in their own image. We are mentally ill by definition Mental illness therefore is not an aberration It's the normal state. It's the baseline and we spend our lives struggling against our innate mental illness Evil is an attribute of God Satan is God in the same way that Dr. Jekyll is Mr. Hyde Satan is an aspect of God a dimension of God an Attribute of God evil Is a trait of God? It's like God has multiple personality several self states Very much like a borderline God has borderline personalities over the nostics realizes and they suggested to God Demiurge which was essentially a malevolent entity responsible for creation and The monotheistic God we are used to If God is everywhere and if it includes everything then evil must also be a part of you as Spinoza alluded Benedict Spinoza So what are the scriptures? the scriptures are chronicles of God's struggles with his own imperfections and character flaws With his evil side via the agency of the flawed creation So God is God is in a constant struggle inner struggle He realizes that he's imperfect that he's flawed and very often malicious Evil and he's fighting this and he's fighting this Via his creation he actually made creation as an aid As a tool as an instrument to fight his evil side by granting us The ability to tell right from wrong actually not granting we took it from the from the tree of knowledge But okay by endowing us with the ability with the potential to tell right from wrong and then with the With the choice with the free will He actually made us the agents of his inner struggle with evil He gave us the tools to help him to win this war against evil humans are products of God's own dissociation carriers of his broken memories repositories of his dissociative states They are figments of his mental illness and they Only they Can act against evil as his agents This is why God endowed humans with intelligence sentience consciousness.   You heal a little God heals a little It's not that you have to heal so that you can walk with God It's that God has to heal so that he can walk with you and When he walks with you that is redemption that is enlightenment that is healing Richard Dawkins the famous evolutionary biologist and atheists Traces the roots of evil to organize religion and to faith itself The belief in a God has spawned all manner of wickedness. He says Malice throughout history he claims But I Disagree with Dawkins on multiple Levels first of all, I think atheism is a religion by itself And second thing I disagree with him that organized religion is the source of all ills Religion is a merely private case of a much larger phenomenal men's quest for meaning The search for an organizing exegetic hermeneutic overriding all-encompassing or pervasive principle The yearning for sense for justice among apparent randomness meaninglessness and chaos That is religion It's a botched attempt. I agree with him on that. It's a totally botched attempt because it's a botched attempt because people made God in their own image I Mean humanity mankind is not made in God's image. God is made in humanity's image grandiose Massesistic entitled defined psychopathic chaotic antisocial mentally ill That's a mistake of religion not divorcing God from humanity Bringing him down to us and then crucify killing him as Humans are want to do and God accepting it. No problem. He says go ahead. Kill me.  I don't know how many lives he has and he has died for our sins And he has died for our mental illness and he's getting more and more broken less and less healed We are we have betrayed our cabalistic destiny to heal God and This is this is the foundation and the source of the chaos We are in of our inner discomfort of our overwhelming depression and and death slow death Because we have chosen evil and death of a God in life God is a metaphor. Of course. Yes, I don't believe that there's supreme being or entity of these primitive renditions of God but Among these two principles we've chosen the wrong one we've chosen Matt we've chosen matter Matter is death We live in a death cult called materialism Indeed secular religions known as ideologies have proven to be even more lethal and pernicious than the epiphanous variety what Nazism Nazism is is Much worse in terms of human the cost in human life lives than I don't know Christianity Communism is worse than Islam in this sense fascism. They've wrecked more mayhem and death than any divinely inspired counterpart so did nationalism so did liberal democracy and its mercantilism and colonialism and This still lives the perplexing question of evil and its convoluted relationships with all manner and modalities of faith whether you're an atheist an agnostic or a fervent believer the Questions of why evil exists what purpose it serves how are evil injustice intertwined these questions torment all of us on a daily basis Start with the logical problem of evil God is supposed to be omniscient or knowing supposed to be omnipotent supposed to be good We don't discuss here more limited versions of divine designer divide creator or malevolent God as in some religions forget all this The classic God the father in the sky with a white beard this boat supposed to be good Why if he's good, why doesn't he eliminate evil? If he cannot eliminate evil, then he is not all powerful or annoying if he refuses to eliminate evil then surely is not good It be cures is said to have been the first to offer this simplistic formulation of the logical a priority a priority deductive problem of evil and It was later expounded on the David Hume in his dialogues concerning natural religion published in 1779 Evil is a value judgment a plainly human culture bound period specific construct same Thomas Aquinas called evil and Svatsionis the subjective perception of a relationship or relationships between objects and persons or persons and persons some religions like Hinduism Christian science They don't they don't accept it. They don't recognize it. They shrug it off as an illusion the outcome of our Intellectual limitations our mortality. We can't grasp the mind of God my Attitude is different. I think evil exists because it is good. It is a part of good. It's a manifestation and emanation of good It's God's Presence among us exactly as good evil Everything is God But as St. Augustine explains in his seminal the city of God the 5th century AD What to us appears heinous and atrocious May merely be an integral part of a long-term divine plan whose aim is to preponder it good St. Augustine says well You are small you're limited Your intelligence is not a billionth of a billionth of a billion path of God How can you expect you're like an ant and a human being how can the ant? Expect to understand the human being live needs Light needs postulated in his theodicy in 1710 that evil moral evil physical metaphysical is an inevitable part of the best logically possible world a cosmos of plenitude and the greatest possible number of compatible perfections but No offense to any of these great minds this sheer absolute and mitigated nonsense What about acts such as murder or rape in peacetime? What about horrendous evil? The phrase coined by Marilyn Adams to refer to unspeakable horrors like the Holocaust There is no belief system that condones them can explain them incorporate them or justify them These are universally considered to be evil under any conceivable system in principle It is hard to come up with a moral calculus that would justify these acts no matter how broad The temporal and spatial frame of reference and how many degrees of freedom we allow An infinite mind could not justify a finite rape a finite murder let alone the Holocaust The Augustinian etiology of evil that it is the outcome of bad choices by creatures endowed with a free will Doesn't help It fails to explain why Would a being endowed with intelligence endowed with awareness sent in sappy and being Why would we fully aware of the consequences of our actions? Fully aware of the adverse impacts on us others. Why do we often choose even? When misdeeds are aligned with the furtherings of one's self-interest Evil narrowly considered appears to be a rational choice But as William Rao observed Many gratuitously wicked acts are self-defeating self-destructive irrational but also less We saw we sometimes even it our own detriment This evil wicked acts don't give rise to any good to the perpetrator or to the victim Nor do they prevent a greater evil. They just increase the sum of misery in the world As Alvin Plantinger suggested in 1974 and 1977 and as Baldesanis and Thomas Aquinas centuries before me Evil may be an inevitable and tolerated by-product of free will God has made himself upset from a human volition that is free Non-deterministic and undetermined God told us listen guys. I'm giving you a free will. I'm out of here. I'm busy. Don't bother me You have the free will this all you need use it choose good Interesting perception of God's presence Ubiquitous or pervasive presence in the world how we upset himself when it's comfortable This divine withdrawal is a process known as self-limitation or as the Kabbalah calls it simtsum minimization Where there is no God the door to evil is wide open God therefore can be perceived as having absconded Having let evil in so as to facilitate man's ability to make truly free choices It can even be argued that God inflicts pain and ignores if not leverages evil In order to engender growth personal growth learning maturation. It is true evil That we become good Evil is the inevitable pathway to the road to to heaven is paved with good intentions the road to heaven I'm sorry. He's paid with good intentions. It is a God Not of indifference as proposed by theologians and philosophers from Lactaceous to poor Draper. It's not an indifferent God, but it's a tough love God.   I make peace and I create evil So, you know what let's examine the issue of free will The ability to choose between options is the hallmark of intelligence that part is true the entire edifice of human civilization rests on the assumption that people's decisions and Erringly express and reflect their unique set of preferences needs priorities and wishes Our individuality is inextricably intermeshed with our ability not to act predictably Not to succumb to peer pressure not to succumb to group dynamics the capacity to choose evil is exactly what makes us human Robots will be unable to choose evil according to Asimov's three laws of robotics But this is a very very restricted view of evil Things are different with natural evil. What about natural disasters? What about diseases and pandemics? What about premature death? These have very little to do with human agency human choices Unless we accept Richard Swinburne's anthropocentric or should I say anthropic believe that they are meant to foster Virtuous behaviors teach survival skills and enhance positive human traits Including the propensity for a spiritual bond with God and soul making Swinburne said everything that happens with nature has only one purpose To educate humanity to make you to help humanity grow to help humanity mature It's a belief shared by the Mutazili school of Islam and by theologians from Irinius of light of Leon and St. Basil to John Hick. I don't subscribe to this. I Don't subscribe to this grandiose Perception that nature is our slave nature is our tutor I don't subscribe to Genesis one and Genesis two and three where the entirety of nature Was created for the crown of creation the human. I think we should dispense also dispense with such self-centered grandiose perceptions Natural calamities are not the results of free will end of story Why would that benevolent God allow natural disasters and pandemics to happen? Well, one possible answer is that nature sports its own version of free will in determinacy Live needs and Malbanj noted that the laws of nature are pretty simple But the permutations and combinations of these laws are infinite. They are unforeseeable There's emergent complexity and it characterizes myriad Beneficial natural phenomena that make them possible the degrees of freedom inherent in all all Advantages natural processes comes with a price tag Catastrophes I can buy so like if you want nature To to have the possibility to combine to permute to change you must accept Natural disasters and calamities a little like bugs in the software or glitches in a computer genetic mutations Drive biological evolution evolution for example, but they also give rise to cancer viruses are evolutionary engines But they also kill you may have noticed lately Late tectonics yield our continents and biodiversity, but they often lead to fatal earth earthquakes in tsunamis Physical evil is a price we are paying for a smoothly functioning and fine-tuned universe There's also an evidential problem of evil Some philosophers for instance William Rowan all Draper Suggested that the preponderance of specific horrific gratuitous types of evil does not necessarily render God logically impossible In other words, the problem of evil is not a logical problem They say the very zeal in the world doesn't prove that God is impossible It's just proved that God is highly unlikely and this is known as the evidential or probabilistic aposteria or aposteriori or inductive problem of evil As opposed to the logical version of a problem of evil The evidential problem relies on our fallible and limited judgment It goes like this upon deep reflection We human beings cannot find a good reason for God to tolerate and to not act against intrinsic evil Gratuitous evil that can be prevented without either venturing without vanishing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse If there were a God, it would have prevented evil It would have prevented any evil that doesn't prevent greater evil and it would have prevented any evil that doesn't serve some purpose or greater good skeptic skeptic face counter and They derive they mock such thinkers. How can we With our finite intellect ever hope to grasp God's motives and plan his reasons for action in action To attempt to explicate and to justify God something practice known as theodicy Is not only blasphemous It is also presumptuous. It's futile and in all likelihood wrong leading to fallacies leading to falsities Yet, even if our intelligence were perfect, let's assume That we are omniscient we know everything it would not necessarily have been identical to or co-extensive with God's In other words, even if we had become God tomorrow We are we will not necessarily be the same God We may develop a kind of intelligence kind of overview kind of synoptic view that is not similar to God's No one guarantees that all gods are the same God like or deities or divinities of the same actually Before monotheism, it was widely accepted that divinity is an essence it's a permeating materia and that Many many entities could acquire even human beings could acquire divinity Many Roman emperors were declared gods or divinities so human beings could become divinities Divinities could copulate with human beings and so you could have demigods like Hercules And there and numerous entities could be gods and none of them had the same mind That you have an infinite intellect infinite infinite horizon of time doesn't make make you Identical to another entity with infinite and intellect and infinite horizon of time as we well know from experience Multiple intelligences with the same attributes often obtain completely different behaviors trace results and conclusions Two omniscient intellects can reach diametrically opposed conclusions even given the same set set of data We can turn this we can turn the evidential argument from evil on its head and following Swinburne paraphrase Rome If there is an omnipotent and omniscient being call it God Then there are specific cases of such a beings intentionally allowing evil occurrences that have wrong-making properties Such as there are right-making characteristics that it is reasonable to believe exists Or unreasonable to believe do not exist and that both apply to cases in question And are sufficiently serious to counterbalance the relevant wrong-making characteristics. Wow, that was long. Let's break it First of all, we assume there's an omnipotent and omniscient being God We also assume that there are specific cases Where this kind of being God intentionally allows evil occurrences and these evil occurrences have wrong-making properties Okay, we accept this But he allows these evil and wicked events Because there are right-making characteristics That it's reasonable to believe exists or unreasonable to believe do not exist and that The cases of wrong-making Include these right-making characteristics. So every event in the world every behavior every development everything Has evil aspect wrong-making aspect and good aspect right-making aspect and both of them apply to the same case And the right-making Counterbalances the wrong-making or overpowered In other words Perhaps God Constructed creation in a way That evil is ineluctable inevitable Kind of the price you pay for good Very same very similar to the argument that you can't discern the existence of light without darkness Maybe evil is what puts in sharp relief The existence of good And therefore it is likely that and here comes the inductively from the odyssey to defense It's likely that if there is an omnipotent and omniscient being Then there is the case of such a being intentionally allowed Pacific or even all evil occurrences He knows that these even occurrences have wrong-making properties But Each of these events and occurrences and traits and behaviors and everything each of these evil things Has right-making characteristics And it's reasonable to to believe in them It's reasonable to believe in them And It's reasonable to believe that these right-making good characteristics exist. It's unreasonable to believe they don't exist And it doesn't matter if we are aware of these right-making characteristics or not in in everything Both wrong-making and right-making both evil and right Both evil and and bad and good They all apply to the cases of question And they are sufficiently serious to counterbalance the wrong-making characteristics. There's no evil without good That's the argument the counter-argument There's no evil without good The very existence of evil guarantees That it comes with some good It reminds me that there are people who are saying that the state of Israel would not have existed without the holograms Silver lining clouds we know Okay, back to reality Given our limitations Some of us are intelligent, but none of us is as intelligent as God except maybe Jordan Peterson Given our limitations What to us May appear evil and gratuitous God may regard as necessary and even beneficial This argument was made by Olston, Rikstra, Plantinga and others even worse We cannot fathom God's mind. We cannot understand it grasp it because we cannot fathom any mind Other than our own Can you found your wife's mind?  Can you fathom your your children's mind? Can you fathom your boss's mind? We can't we don't have access to other people's minds We don't and if we don't access to other people might we don't have access to other people's minds How can we have access to God's mind? This doubly applies to God whose mind is infinite and omniscient His mind is not like our mind We may be the image of God. I don't know As far as our body we may be a spark of God. We may be a poor imitation of God. We may be a Partial element of God, but but we're definitely not God If God does exist his mind is alien Inaccessible to us. There's no possible intersubjectivity between God and ourselves. We cannot empathize with God We cannot empathize with God. It's a crucial sentence And this raises the terrifying possibility That God cannot empathize with us Which is perhaps exactly why he needed the likes of Jesus and Muhammad and others Because God cannot empathize with us directly. He needed to empathize with us via agents agents like the prophets God of man and men have no common ground no language It is not Hicks epistemic distance which can be bridged by learning to love go and worship him It is an unbridgeable cousin No amount of worship or faith or idol practice Like in in Judaism. You have to follow the commandments. You have to practice Unthinkingly you don't question. There's no reason for the commandments.  It's lethal. Ask Kierkegaard This leap of faith cost him his life and this inaccessibility may cut both ways Open face Harking back to the Sossinians in the 17th century. They say that God cannot predict our rules Because he's so divorced from us so far from us There's no way he can understand us empathize with us. And if you can't understand someone and empathize with him You cannot predict what he's going to do The deists say that God cannot care. It doesn't care to predict us or interact with us Having created the universe God has moved on leaving the world and his inhabitants to their own devices Perhaps God doesn't care about us Perhaps he doesn't care about us because he cannot possibly know what it is to be human He doesn't have this experience like a him He doesn't feel our pain is incapable of empathizing with us But this view of an indifferent God negates his imputed benevolence is imputed omnipotence. No And this raises two questions If God's mind is inaccessible to us, how could we positively know anything about God? The answer is that maybe we don't know anything about Maybe our knowledge about God of God actually pertains to someone else. Maybe we've got it wrong The Gnostic said that we are praying to the wrong divinity The entity that had created the universe is the demure Not God. We got it wrong And if our minds are inaccessible to God, how does God make himself known to us? And again, the answer may well be That God does not make himself known to us That all our so-called knowledge is sheer Confabulation and this would explain the fact that what we think we know about God doesn't sit well with the plenitude of wickedness around us With nature's brutality with evil Be that as it may we seem to have come back full circle to the issue of free will God cannot foresee our choices decisions and behaviors because because God has made us Libertarian free moral agents gave us personal autonomy And the minute he did this We are out of his control and determination. And so we are out of his comprehension The question is are we also out of his compassion? We can choose evil and there's very little he can do about it, but does he care that we choose evil? Is he, I don't know, angry, empathic, understanding, smiling somewhere up there? You know Waiting for us to grow up Traces the issue of a safety and evil Both formulations of the problem of evil assume Soto Voce that God maintains An intimate relationship with his creation or that or even that the essence of God would have been different without the world Without the universe God would have been different Medieval folk people in the Middle Ages believed narcissistically that demons and angels Were waging a battle over their precious immortal souls And it carried all the way through to the 18th century with Faust This implied and micromanaged intimacy with the divine Runs contra to the godly attributes of attribute of a say a safety A safety means that God is self-sufficient Does not depend for his existence for his attributes for his functioning on anything Any one any entity outside himself God is self-contained and self-sufficient good therefore by definition Cannot be concerned with the cosmos or with any of the cosmos inhabitants He doesn't care a fig about the characteristics of the cosmos including the manifestations of good and evil Moreover the principle of a safety taken to its logical conclusion implies that God does not interact with the world Does not change it This means that God cannot or will not either prevent evil or bring evil about Either way he's out of it. It's none of his business I am not a proponent of the principle of a safety I think we are part of creation and creation is a part of God and therefore we must have a goal We must have meaning and I adhere to the Kabbalistic perception That we are agents of healing. We are the frontal in the front line. We are the nurses. We are the doctors We are the support staff. God is in hospital With severe case of COVID We need to intubate him Wake him up make him live again Of course, this raises the possibility that God is a malicious being if we don't know anything about him Maybe it's a psychopath A universe that gives rise to gratuitous evil May indicate the existence of an omnipotent omniscient but also supremely malevolent psychopathic creator Again turning on its head the familiar consequentialist attempt to refute the evidential argument from evil We get quoting from the Stanford encyclopedia philosophy article about the problem of evil We get the following An action is by definition morally right if and only if It is among the actions that one could have performed an action that produces at least as much value as every alternative action An action is morally wrong if and only if it is not morally right If one is an omnipotent and omniscient being like God Then for any action whatsoever There is always some alternative action that produces greater value in other words The actions of an omnipotent and omniscient entity the actions of God Are always by definition morally wrong Because he could have always done better He could have always done greater good His actions are never morally right To choose the lesser good Is evil This is because among the actions that such a being could have performed Instead of the action that he did before there is an infinity of alternatives that produce greater good greater value moreover and Omni benevolent merciful and just God is hardly likely to have instituted an infinite hell for non-believers This is more in tune with the wicked vicious divinity To suggest the hell is the sinner's personal choice not to be with God To sin to renounce his grace to say that hell is inside It's not something outside there.  Why didn't he protect us from the terrifying outcomes of our Nations our ignorance our imperfection. What kind of choice is it anyway?  Wow Sounds like Adolf Hitler, not like God.  A morally perfect God and even a morally imperfect God Would surely wish to minimize certain horrendous types of gratuitous evil Or be it without sacrificing the greater good and while forstalling even greater evil How can God achieve these admirable and egocintonic goals without micromanaging the world? Without reading the world of the twin gifts of free will and indeterminacy In other words, if God wants the world to be only good He needs to make us zombies He needs to take us back to paradise Before we ate from the fruit from the tree from the fruit of the tree of knowledge He needs to Bring us back there before the original sin and get rid of the snake If there is a God, he may have placed us on this earth to function as moral policemen It may be our role to fight evil and to do our best to eradicate it This is the view of the Kabbalah to some extent Hegel We are God's right making agents We are God's long arm his extension His employees Gradually mankind acquires abilities hitherto regarded as the exclusive domain of God We can now cure diseases almost all of them. We can eliminate pain. We can overcome poverty We can extend life we can fight crime we can do justice In the not too distant future We are likely to be able to retard aging ameliorate natural catastrophes eradicate delinquency Remember the film clockwork orange? Imagine a future world in which due to human ingenuity in efforts evil is no more Will free will vanish with even will it become a relic of a long forgotten past? If evil is not an option And you have free choice free will it's a choice between what? It's a free will to choose what? If you have only one option and that is to be good It seems that if you get rid of evil you get rid of free will Will we lose our incentive and capacity to learn to improve to develop to grow Will we perish of too much good? As in hg wealth dystopia the time machine Why is it that God tolerates evil and we seek to dispose of it? Why do we have this? contradictory In trying to resist evil trying to limit evil are we Not acting against the divine plan. Are we sure? Are we sure that when we fight when we are fighting evil we're in compliance with the divine plan? Maybe we are gods enemies Are we risking his wrath every time we temper with nature and encounter our propensity for wickedness? Or is this precisely what he has in store for us why he made us we don't know We are gambling we are speculating We are in the air We hope for the best We hope we aimed at God's mind. We hope we hope we we're in accordance and concordance with his master plan But we may well be undermining it sabotaging it maybe Like no us flawed You know the big flood Maybe it's gonna Get tired of us Maybe by fighting evil we are evil Many of these questions resolve as if by magic once we hold God to be a merely psychologically construct, of course cultural artifact and invention The new science of neuro religion traces faith to specific genes specific neurons Indeed God strikes some scholars as a glorified psychological defense mechanism Intended to fend off intimations of a universe that is random meaningless and heaps of facto profoundly unjust by human criteria By limiting God's omnipotence Since he is not capable of evil thoughts and deeds Even as we trumpet Our omnipotence in the libertarian view of free will We have rendered his creation less threatening in the world more habitable and welcoming what we're saying is God is not all path is not omnipotent here. He cannot fight evil. He cannot be evil He cannot think evil. He cannot do evil. We are more than God We can do evil. We can choose evil The fact that we can do and choose evil Makes us omnipotent not God And so now creation is not threatening the world is welcoming We are in control if he's up there. He may be smiling upon our accomplishments against all odds And so this is This is the issue with God question of sin has undergone numerous transformation The latest one Sin has been medicalized wrongdoing is medicalized with Freud and his disciples Started the medicalization of what was either to known as sin or wrongdoing or evil As the vocabulary of public discourse shifted from religious terms to scientific terms Offensive behaviors that constituted transgressions against the divine against social order These behaviors have been relabeled Self-centered, disempathic, egocentric, well, you're a narcissist, pathological narcissism Criminal, antisocial, defined, contumacious, well, you're a psychopath Your behavior, though still described as antisocial, is the almost deterministic outcome of a deprived childhood A genetic predisposition, a brain malfunction, biochemistry, gun or eye So it casts in doubt the very existence of free will and free choice There's no choice between good and evil the contemporary science quote-unquote of clinical psychology Psychopathology amounts to a godless variant of Calvinism Kind of predestination by nature, by nature, usually by both I will finish by discussing an Italian film It's called, it's titled The Place It was released in 2017, I think In this film, a man sits at the back of a cheap resto bar And he receives a seemingly endless stream of visitors His interlocutors come to ask him, ask this man To grant them their wishes They're willing to do anything to realize their hidden most fantasies Rape a young woman, if that's what he wants Assassinate a toddler, place a bomb in a busy disco This, this is the price he demands for fulfilling their wishes For these are the horrible tasks assigned to them by the mysterious figure in the restaurant In return for the guaranteed fulfillment of their fantasies Many of these people who come to him, including a nun, by the way They have a difficult relationship with God, afforded relationship They don't fully assimilate or sit well with good, evil, family, parents, children In short, they're all typical human beings From the very beginning of this cinematic masterpiece Things don't mesh The stranger appears to be empathic actually, compassionate Worn out by the stories that he hears His lying face is a mask of pain, mask of absolution He ages in front of our eyes, he never judges Never judges, always understands, always accepts the frailties of his applicants He has a voluminous black bound leather notebook He meticulously records the inner dynamics, the quirks, the torturous pathways and the emotions of his clients These are the only times that he perks up as a scholar of the human mind, soul and heart I sympathize with him Everyone thinks that he is the devil Everyone castigates him for being the devil But this visitor to the restaurant bar, he keeps insisting that he is not the decision maker That he is working for a higher instance, a higher power And that he is concerned only with the details Of course, it brings to mind the saying the devil is in the details Indeed, gradually it becomes evident that he is exactly as he says, a mere messenger, a courier, a salesperson You know what, at most a mid-level manager But who is his boss? Who is in charge? It's not easy to ascertain for two reasons The visitor often allocates tasks to people, to his applicants So that one of these people obstructs the other So he kind of gives tasks to people And the tasks intertwine, get entangled And then one of his suppliers, supplicants obstructs the other Prevents the hideous events from actually transpiring And the outcomes of his assignments are invariably good actually, beneficial, even therapeutic The bars Basti made Angela praises him for listening to people And conjectures that he is actually a psychotherapist I love that Angela falls in love with this enigmatic benefactor of humanity She tries to bring light and life to his dreary confinement At the very last moment of the film It becomes clear that Angela, Angela, is an emissary of God That her love can redeem this man Set him free from his purgatory And she signs the last entry in his book And whoever his superior may be, Angela prevails The film is wonderful It's a daring exposition of all the problems we have discussed, of the odyssey It challenges, it rebuffs our traditional views on good and evil God and Satan, it hints very clearly that God is saying That evil is a godly attribute These concepts are fluid and they seamlessly intermesh to form unities, says the hotel Our self-righteous distinctions are too crass To truly capture the finer, grained intricacies, nuances and subtleties of life We judge others because we are limited entities Because we are grandiose narcissists Because we think we know everything We don't know everything We don't know anything Things may be preordained But only if and when we settle on certain choices The enigmatic man keeps telling his besetures You can cancel the contract You can forgo your wish I cannot change what's written in the black book But you can walk away It is a rebuke of Calvinist predetermination It's the predetermination, the belief that there's nothing you can do About your life and about your choices It's a pernicious abrogation of responsibility It's sick The film is a celebration of the freedom and existential angst That are the human condition And how each folk in the road gives us a chance And the power to defy even the devil To defy even God himself As we mold ourselves and our personal histories With our two, all two mortal hands This is God's hope God's hope is that we should choose the right way for us Because as we heal individually and collectively So does he