"Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
I think myself; yet I would rather be
My miserable self than He, than He
Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace.
The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou
From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred
Malignant and implacable! I vow
That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
For all the temples to Thy glory built,
Would I assume the ignominious guilt
Of having made such men in such a world.
As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign,
At once so wicked, foolish and insane,
As to produce men when He might refrain!
The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
While air of Space and Time's full river flow
The mill must blindly whirl unresting so:
It may be wearing out, but who can know?
Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;
That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,
That it is quite indifferent to him.
Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith?
It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,
Then grinds him back into eternal death."
James Thomson (B.V.) - "The City of Dreadful Night"
Though an atheist, I appreciate the parallels between Thomson's writing here and the Gnostic mode of thought, in particular Christian (arguably the "true"/first Christians until wiped out around the 2nd Century AD through sectarian struggle for dominance, ultimately culminating through its consolidation of power in what would come to be Christian orthodoxy), which considered the material world we find ourselves in at best fundamentally flawed, and at worst inherently evil. The product of a false God - often associated with the God of the Old Testament, a "demiurge", Ialdabaoth, who in ignorance of anything greater than himself created the cosmos, blindly replicating in corrupted form the higher, transcendent reality - in essence, the realm of the true God, who can be spoken of only through and in terms of Apophatic, or "negative", theology.
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