From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!cmcl2!philabs!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn
Newsgroups: net.philosophy,net.religion
Title: A Rationale for Solipsism
Article-I.D.: sdchema.443
Posted: Thu Mar 10 01:37:43 1983
Received: Fri Mar 11 23:04:10 1983

	"NOTHING exists; all is a dream.  God -- man -- the world, --
the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars:  a dream, all a dream, they
have no existence.  NOTHING EXISTS SAVE EMPTY SPACE -- AND YOU! ...

	"Strange! that you should not have suspected, years ago,
centuries, ages, aeons ago! for you have existed, companionless,
through all the eternities.  Strange, indeed, that you should not have
suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams,
visions, fictions!  Strange, because they are so frankly and
hysterically insane -- like all dreams: a God who could make good
children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could
have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one;
who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who
gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other
children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his
other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who
mouths justice, and invented hell -- mouths mercy, and invented hell --
mouths Golden Rules, and foregiveness multiplied by seventy times
seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has
none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created
man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for
man's acts on man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs,
upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites
this poor abused slave to worship him! ...

	"You perceive, NOW, that these things are all impossible,
except in a dream.  You perceive that they are pure and puerile
insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not
conscious of its freaks -- in a word, that they are a dream, and you
the maker of it.  The dream-marks are all present -- you should have
recognized them earlier...

	"It is true, that which I have revealed to you:  there is no
God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell.
It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.  Nothing exists but
You.  And You are but a THOUGHT -- a vagrant Thought, a useless
Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty
eternities!"

	He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized,
that all he had said was true.

				THE END


-- Excerpt from 44's (Satan's) speech to August from Chapter 34 of
	Mark Twain's NO. 44, THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER (1908); used
	without permission.

Donn Seeley  UCSD Chemistry Dept. RRCF  ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn