Of late I have been given cause multiple times over to think about deterministic universes, and how I seem to personally experience all the guilt and dread of living in one without seeing any evidence whatsoever of any sort of extrinsic judgment of human actions to reward virtue and punish evil--much less any universal definition of virtue and evil--beyond the feeble machines of human institutions, which are often subverted to support systemic cowardice and arrogance and greed for the material and psychic benefit of their subverters. And yet, acknowledging the material and psychic benefits of evil (e.g., believing my country has a God-given right to invade another country and take its shit), I will not allow myself to be evil, whether out of dread of a deterministic universe or out freely willing to generate what good I can so that what reality we enjoy might be less dreadful and painful, all the while suspecting that my perceptions of minimizing my own contributions to a general suffering and contributing in good faith to a general good have been subverted by my own cowardice and arrogance and greed.
I thus seem to have the worst of both worlds.
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