The thing is, DisGuest, you can make the universe as ugly as you want simply by inventing crosseyed categories to view it from. One way to do this is to decide that forces of good and forces of evil -- in the ordinary human sense -- are actually the cosmic categories of existence itself, or that the planes of reality are people by humanoid tribes with horrendous powers and weird senses of humor. Christians, Norse, Hindi, Egyptian, Greek and paganRoman religions are riddled witht hese bizarre personae. If you then, having placed these entities into positions of power over your universe, run out and glimpse the world as it is people by these malformed characters, it is going to look pretty distorted. There are lots of better ways to divide up the cosmos, but if you want to design your own package instead of buying one of these commercial off-the-shelf character sets, why you have to exercise your powers of insight and imagination and responsibility. Since this is far too much to ask of many people, we end up with a lot of very confused people wondering why the universe seems like such a tricky place, riddled with doom and moral condemnation. It is not. But you get to paint it any color you like.

Just don't forget where you put the brushes, in case you want to change it later...and try not to dump your paint bucket in other peoples' apartments.


A