It has been said that in a universe which simultaneously contains obscene levels of seemingly meaningless misery, and creatures endowed with the capacity to know it is meaninglessly miserable, that only two explanations face all facts: the Christian position, which suggests this is a good world conferred by a benevolent being who has man's best interests at heart, but which has-for one reason or another-gone terribly, terribly wrong; and that of dualism, which proposes that there exists two equal and independent powers (one good, the other bad) pushing everything, and that this universe is the battlefield over which these opposing forces wage an endless war. Both theses are conspicuously incomplete, the first moreso than the second. This world was never good, never peaceful, never without suffering, pain and anxiety. There was never an armistice between all living and not-so living things, nor can evidence be found to suggest there ever was-or still is-a loosely balanced war tumbling across Creation with the advantage swinging between the forces of light and happiness, and those of darkness and misery. Fire has always burned flesh, water has always drowned babies, and Creation has only ever exhibited but one impulse, one motive, one direction: towards increasing complexity, where complexity-across all systems, animate and inanimate-corresponds precisely to the degree and depth of potential suffering available to those contingent things whose participation in Creation was never solicited. Clearly, both theses are deeply and deliriously deficient, and yet at the same time both are, however, also stained with enough half-truth to at the very least indicate a third, more consistent, more durable, demonstrable, enormously distasteful, but ultimately unavoidable alternative: that this world was brought into existence by a perfectly wicked, malevolent Creator; a maximally powerful being whose nutritional, emotional and entertainment needs are satisfied best by the suffering which pervades all of Creation, and whose single-minded objective is to amplify His pleasure-taking over time. Some have named a lesser species of this being the Devil, others The Deceiver, Ahriman, Abaddon, Mara, Baphomet, Apollyon, Iblis, Beast, Angra Mainyu, Yama, Moloch, The Father of Lies, The Author of Sin, Druj, Samnu, Mammon, and The Great Spoiler, yet these characters of human literature and tradition do not begin to approach the nature and scope of this entity who may be identified as simply, The Owner of All Infernal Names: a being who does not share His creation with any other comparable spirit, does not seek to be known to or worshipped by that which He has created (or has allowed to be created), and whose greatest proof of existence is that there is no conspicuous proof of His existence-just teleological birthmarks that can be isolated and examined as testimony-for He understands that the trinkets of His greatest amusement, arousal, and nutritional satisfaction must be blind to the nature of the world they inhabit so they may act freely, and suffer genuinely.