Not rambly at all! I am on board 100% with the idea that the Supreme Being being too big to understand. But, if that being must fragment itself to interact with us I'd have to think about. "Present different aspects of Itself" might be a similar idea. I have 2 other thoughts. 1, just that a teacher can have many different students, say the same thing to the whole class, & everyone picks up on different parts of it or finds different points of emphasis. When meeting 1-on-1, the teacher will say different things to each, interact the way people interact, not robotically but reacting in kind to the manner of the interaction in the moment. Thus God as Saint Theresa of Lisieux interacts is different than pretty much anyone else.

The other thought is I guess it comes down to how useful or accurate is that kind of distant monad gnosticism.,Aand: how did we get where we are, how did those who stand between us & the monad get their, what is their game in all this? I wasted a lot of life on those Qs. It was very intellectual even though we're told it's supposed to be about a kind of knowing at our core. There are so many texts & text fragments, whose contexts we know very little about. So many schools of thought creating them. Some had no sense that they were talking of anything real but just creating fiction to teach a point, or using it to tweak the noses of the religions around them. Variations of the "Sophia" fall and ill-fated offspring idea say matter is flawed and not the monad's intention. OK, then what? There’s so many ways to go after that conceptually but none resolve the dilemma we're in. But they hinge on the idea that matter is the problem. That's what makes that group different than "pagan" or naturalistic mythologies. It's polar opposite of what the German or Baltic tribes or Gauls or ancient Irish thought. I think Catholicism threads that needle: not crashing into the needle of gnosticism, not missing the eye of the needle and just being like "nature's great just don't leave the kids with Pan".

I like the idea we’re to be lights in the world that God can be partially shine through. It's an idea that came to the forefront of my thinking in the last couple of weeks. I'm surprised by how many saints have been inspired & converted by, not reading the Bible or wandering in to a church (or by as one priest I knew experienced, walking by a church & seeing a statue of Mary out front, being pulled in by her, & never let go of again), but by reading biographies of saints. Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) was a philosophy student well on her way to a professorship when she was handed the Autobiography of St. Teresa Of Avila. She concluded "this must be true", proceeded to convert, & become a Carmelite nun. So, I think we can be ways we can interact with God-- some less perfectly than others. I would take that to be the marching orders given by Christianity & hopefully other religions.

I think your idea is basically the generic pantheism idea, no? Not the reductionist version saying Cu Cuhlainn is Achilles or Heracles (I've heard the latter but I'd lean towards the former if I had to be reductionist), but the general idea that all religious traditions point to some kind of "Aeon" or spirit which is part of some bigger thing. I think that idea is very modern (whereas the reductionist version existed before pantheism & was written of by polytheist Roman writers when talking about the Germanic tribes if not also the Gauls). But I am not sure where we draw the line between these ancient traditions dealing with supernatural entities and when they are dealing with natural forces.

A translator of Norse myths I like translates the names into their meaning. The start of one of the Eddas she has as "in the beginning was the big wave". What is interesting about that is that it could mean as simple as the massive tsunami that wiped out Doggerland, or it could mean energy of some kind (dare I say "light"? I dare not say "big bang" because the suppositions behind that idea are not as strong as we all just accepted them to be. The CMB might actually just be the oceans effecting every single time they tried to measure it. The redshift thing has anomolies that just can't be explained and ignored. Even the measurement of bent light around the sun can be explained classically. Robitaille, Arp, Dowdye). Many of the words we're given as names from those myths correlate to natural phenomena. Thor's clothing seems to have everything to with conducting electricity in her telling. It's all just so much more tangible than say God in Christianity after say Genesis where I think we can not really get what the setting for the Garden of Eden is or what it meant that we were clothed in animal skins as we were given the boot from there. Similarly we're told to accept suffering gladly even unto death. Try finding Cu Chulainn doing that. He went it to fighting tooth and nail and furiously. But then, he did everything furiously. (The women all bearing their breasts to calm him down from one of his rages had my head spinning when I first read it.) Even Ailill who is mature and calm and sort of an anchor for Mebd ends up putting an arrow into her because he could only tolerate so much. True the God of the OT is given to anger and chastisments, but it's not anthropomorphized as it is in nearly every other culture including the ones directly around and influential on it. It's also not Zeus sticking it to every woman he fancies.

As for those being then being ordered or chaotic, I don't know if we could tell the difference. I think we have to choose one and our choice will bias us to see the difference we choose. But I'm only making that up now. I don't know anyone who toyed with "magic" who didn't really regret, except for those who were so poor and suffering to being with that you'd never know if they got screwed over by bad entities or pissed off entities. In any event, if there is a team out there that "loves us" we have define love. I go with the Thomistic "to will the good of the other without regard to one's self" definition. This puts bad things that happen to us as God's permissive will and not His active will. Very different than the rules of the road I've seen in people working with spirits. I know people who have not worked with any spirits and who dabble in that world and play around with it, and they have pretty boring lives. It's almost like a fashion statement. But people I've known who really did try to change things in their lives that way, even knowing the idea that the only thing you can change is yourself, end up suffering some major loss. That does not sound chaotic to me, but ordered. But, I am biased to see it that way.

I agree that we do not seem to be able to change our sexual desires, but I also don't know if I ever thought I could learn to like eating healthy. It doesn't help that the mental health professions tell is we can change just about everything other than that. It didn't help that I just took for granted that me assuming that me wanting to chase every piece of tail that passed by me was normal. I saw only my own goals and my own purpose, and had no reason to see anything else. Like I said previously though, I can not really compare that with a same-sex attraction. But I think the big issue is that my inclination gets too much of a good-old-boys-club soft admonishment but until recently yours got so much more than just "far worse". I agree about pleasure, and we're not told to not pursue that. I'm just not even reading up on that or anything because I'm sort of trying to retrain myself towards better inclinations along all the "7 deadlies". When I feel like I made progress and all that I'll rethink where I'm at. I'm not like wrestling with all 7 or anything, just the ones I fall into I feel like I've done that got the tee shirt and it really is just ill fitting and not very stylish.

I agree we're really drawn to that nihilist pole. (well stated by your partner. Please give him my hat tip) But this was prophesied in surprising detail by a number of the "lights" I spoke of above. There are just certain aspects of the world we live in that are so pervasive that we can't really imagine what it was like long ago. I can well imagine a world were seeking a woman's ankle would turn a guy into Pepe LePew. In boot camp guys joked about the woman checking us in because she wasn't hot. Maybe it was just for conversation or a way of checking to see if we're all on the same page. 8 weeks later she was the hottest thing on earth. She wasn’t the one who had a make over. On a more serious note JP Sousa testified to congress against recorded music saying we’d ruin our ability to sing. it would ruin our "voice" in every sense of the world. Paraphrasing him today we'd say: politically socially psychologically & musically. We can't know what the world was like back then, or really what we were like back then. Native Americans could repeat the words of treaties as read to them word for word. Their minds were formed differently without the "advantage" of reading/writing. We can't imagine what that's like. Now, a generation that can't imagine not having hundreds of "friends" & what it's like to not offend ALL OF THEM if they don't post in lock step with them, flies against psychologists saying we can only have a specific & small number of people in our lives. Elsee we get overwhelmed by the number of, I guess it would be, the unique dynamics between each pairing or within each group.

We’ve come full circle to the drift towards nihilism or debauchery or the errors of nominalism, subjectivism & liberalism. I think creating a literal hell on earth is inevitable going down those paths. But I think the error before that is not taking seriously the Thy will be done thing.