Cyrenaicism

My Facebook profile lists my religion as Cyrenaicism. The Cyrenaics were an ultra-hedonist school of philosophy founded in the 4th century BCE, by Aristippus of Cyrene. They held that pleasure was the supreme good, especially immediate gratifications. The school was replaced within a century by the more moderate doctrine of Epicureanism, who held beliefs that longer-term pleasures were more valuable than instant gratification.

Epicureanism is cool, too. They have the Riddle of Epicurus which seeks to prove that a supreme deity either doesn't exist, or (if It does) isn't anything special. The riddle follows:

1. God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot,
2. can but does not want to,
3. neither wishes to nor can,
4. both wants to and can.

If It wants to and cannot (1), then It is weak - and this does not apply to god. If It can but does not want to (2), then It is spiteful - which is equally foreign to god's nature. If It neither wants to nor can (3), It is both weak and spiteful, and so not a god. If It wants to and can (4), which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them?

This leads me to ponder whether "God" is nothing more than a technologically advanced society in some far off section of the galaxy who built a huge spaceship to that could fly to Earth and then seed life here. I know we have demonstrated life could have began spontaneously in the oceans as single-celled organisms, but I don't completely buy that this is how life started a billion years ago.

Anyway, one of the points of this post was to say that the listing in my Facebook profile is just kind of a joke. I don't really believe in the pursuit of pure pleasure being the tantamount purpose of life.