Chapter 52:

Girls' Side:

　　"If you're omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, why was there evil in the world?" Kagome, Cute-sama's miko, asked Cute-sama seated in her comfy throne in the shrine with a laptop out to type in the divine wisdom of her reply. This was necessary to compose a new Bible that actually consisted of God's word, which could then in turn be taught during theology lessons in school to all the children for the sake of a better moral upbringing. Kagome's role as God's first and final prophet was pretty heavy, all things considered, but it made for a more fulfilling job than just raking leaves on the shrine grounds.

　　"I think that should be broken down into multiple questions." Cute-sama replied, trying to be as helpful as possible. "'Why do bad people do bad things?' is obvious, it's because I gave mankind free will, so that they could express themselves in new and interesting ways, instead of merely being puppets dancing on my strings, which I would have grown bored with almost instantly."

　　"If you can't foresee the future because it isn't determined, yet you're the source of all our powers, how can Yume and Sakura Kinomoto have prophetic dreams?" Kagome sought clarification.

　　"Even in their source works their dreams weren't 100% accurate. Likewise, since I know everything about the present, I can make a reasonably accurate prediction of what's going to happen in the future, so I feed them my best estimate according to what they would have foreseen by their own power in their own stories. If it's wrong I can always blame it on their own faulty abilities." Cute-sama explained.

　　"Free will could still be free to make all sorts of different decisions without, say, the emotional capacity for envy, so why load us up with so much emotional baggage that only weighs us down and leads us astray?" Kagome pursued.

　　"Every feeling, every instinct, is a tool given to you by me at birth as your divine inheritance, a gift to navigate your lives. For every tool there is a proper function, a useful purpose. The mind is meant to choose which tool to wield for each task it comes across as appropriate. I gave you a toolkit varied enough to deal with any situation, so long as the mind chooses the right one for the job.

　　Good people are those who use the proper tool for each task. Evil people are those who fail to do so. There are no evil feelings nor evil instincts. There are only misapplied feelings and instincts to a given situation. Those whose minds fail them have only themselves to blame." Cute-sama answered.

　　"But don't you feel bad for the victims of other people's bad decisions?" Kagome asked.

　　"Those who are the victims of others' failed minds have only those others to blame." Cute absolved herself.

　　"Okay, so never mind people's actions, why was there death, pain, famine, disease and natural disasters?" Kagome asked.

　　"That too needs to be broken down into multiple questions. Pain is necessary as a feedback mechanism, an internal guide, telling you that whatever you're doing is wrong and you should change. It's actually a blessing to my lost sheep, both physically and emotionally." Cute-sama replied.

　　"But what if the pain is completely pointless and there's nothing you can do about it, like say if you have stomach cancer? There's no point being constantly informed of this situation and yet pain does so anyway." Kagome pointed out.

　　"That's why I had various crops evolve with painkilling properties, did I not?" Cute-sama gave Kagome a quizzical look.

　　"Okay, so what about famine, disease and natural disasters?" Kagome broke the question down for Cute-sama's convenience.

　　"Because the alternative is Rat Park." Cute-sama replied firmly.

　　"You mean that experiment where all the rats got everything they ever needed in life, effortlessly, and so they were reproducing willy-nilly, there was no natural selection weeding out the defectives, and eventually the whole population was so defective that even in the ideal circumstances of the Rat Park they still couldn't manage to survive and reproduce anymore, resulting in their total extinction?" Kagome relied on her perfect memory to summon up the old science class knowledge.

　　"Mothers ceased caring for their young, male rats ceased taking any interest in female rats and so there was no breeding to begin with, all relationships and skills broke down and eventually the rats just lay around waiting to die." Cute-sama summed up. "This is what happens to creatures built out of genes, via evolution. If you take the evolutionary pressures off, if you remove all adversity, the negative mutations proliferate and destroy the entire lineage. It's a necessary sacrifice for the weak to perish, for stress testing, so that the healthy, the successful, the fit, the strong, the superior inherit the future."

　　"So why rely on evolution at all? Why not create us as fully finished products with no flaws?" Kagome pursued.

　　"I can't do that without erasing people's free will. Genes are responsible for 80% of human behavior, intelligence and personality. The remaining 20% comes from the souls I provide them with at birth, generally reincarnations of previous generations who I want to give another chance at life, who carry over their personality, likes and dislikes from their past lives. I can't decide what your genome will be ahead of time because that would defy the entire point. I want my creations to rise above my imagination and do something new and interesting, they can't do that if they're just off the shelf commodities, mass manufactured to serve a known purpose. Only the randomness of evolution, of mutation, can bring out the traits that make humanity shine." Cute-sama explained.

　　"So even God is bound by the parameters of Her own goals." Kagome noted.

　　"That's right, omnipotence isn't all it's cracked up to be!" Cute-sama complained heartily. "I suffer from the inability to intervene when problems crop up just like the rest of you!"

　　"What are souls?" Kagome asked, genuinely curious how they fit in to their biological carbon-based life forms.

　　"Souls are a spiritual substance that co-inhabits the body, experiencing everything the body and mind experience, and giving input into decision making processes that respond to said experiences. After death, they retain all the personality and memories of the dead body and mind and return to my domain from whence they originated, where I then judge them as I please.

　　Souls are that 20% of personality that can't be accounted for by genes or gene-environment interactions. They are the free will beyond anything else's control. And they make the crucial decisions that divide the moral from the immoral. If your mind cultivates good thoughts, your soul aspires towards the light, and will save you in moments of darkness. If your mind cultivates bad thoughts, your soul sinks into the darkness, and shuns the light. This is why identical twins can be gay or straight according to their own free will's decision. Nothing of import is decided ahead of time. The soul can always save you, if you let it." Cute-sama imparted.

　　"Plus, remember, if you really were an innocent who received a horrible, unjust fate from the world, it doesn't end there. I'd try to make it up to you in the afterlife. I want good people to be happy and bad people to suffer for their sins, so no matter how rough your life was things eventually work out, in the long run. Just look at Christopher -- if you had stopped measuring his karma at death you would've thought, wow, what a shitty Goddess, she just let that guy suffer and die before he could accomplish anything in life -- but there was life after death and now he's glad he was born!" Cute-sama passionately defended her record.

　　Kagome patted Cute-sama on the head conciliatorily. "No one's blaming you, I'm only asking so that people down the line can know these things. We're just hoping to learn from your perfect example."

　　"Plus if the world wasn't geologically active there would be no source of important metals close enough to the surface for humans to make use of, and then you'd really be in a pickle, right?" Cute asked plaintively.

　　Kagome nodded. "Without volcanoes and earthquakes there's no iron age. Okay, that only leaves death. Let's grant that it's a good thing that the weak perish and the strong inherit the Earth. Why don't we at least all live forever, though, like we do here?"

　　"The human mind is too finite to live forever. That finite mind staying active over an infinite time would just be hell." Cute-sama replied.

　　"Okay, let me rephrase that, why don't we all have eternal youth until we're tired of it and set down the burden of life, like the elves?" Kagome asked again.

　　"I needed more iteration. The planet is only so big, so if you fill it up with the previous generations, no new generations are born. Plus, the culture stagnates as the elderly amass all the power and prevent anything new from challenging them. The answer is already in your own myths, miko. What happens when people live forever? -- Cronos starts devouring his own young to keep them from taking over his divine seat. Then you never get Zeus, Hades, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter or Hestia and then where would you be? I want the world to be interesting and new, with new people doing new things, trying things out in new ways, with new genetic mixtures producing new results. If people just live and live and live it chokes out the world's potential, its chance at a brighter future. At some point people have to exit stage right. The performance, and the performers, need to change, or it's indistinguishable from a repeating decimal." Cute-sama explained.

　　"But what of all the people who died before they could ever express themselves, the people undergoing menopause before they were financially stable enough to start a family? If they'd just had fifty more years wouldn't that have profited you as much as them?" Kagome asked.

　　"It's not my fault! Originally humans were perfectly capable of maintaining themselves and starting families as teenagers. They had all the time in the world to do anything they dreamed of. But then you humans chose to randomly lock yourselves into 'learning institutions,' debt, internships and God knows what and then, lo and behold, suddenly you didn't have enough time. I apportioned any sensible human enough time to do anything they could imaginably need to do, and then you went and mucked it all up by locking away your own potential for the sake of pursuing endlessly more difficult minutiae." Cute-sama complained.

　　"So modernity was unnatural and unsustainable, and never should have been entered?" Kagome asked.

　　"Certainly not the way you managed it." Cute-sama agreed. "You were better off farming your own 1 acre plots of land. If you die of old age before you can land a career or start a family obviously that's a good time to start questioning your social arrangements. Don't blame me! History shows I gave you all the tools you needed to support yourself and start a family -- that's why people got by for thousands of years without a problem. Blame your love of credentials, or I guess overpopulation if you prefer."

　　"Then why us? Why do we get to live as long as we like?" Kagome followed up.

　　"Because I love you guys. I don't want to iterate you away. Is that so wrong?" Cute-sama looked at Kagome plaintively.

　　"No, it isn't wrong. We all love you too, Cute-sama. You have our eternal gratitude." Kagome bowed deeply to the floor, pressing her forehead to the polished wood in deference to the girl she respected most in the world.