Reality 'A' - the 'real' world type reality, is defined and known by me as:
- consensus-defined
- consensus = sufficient proof to create more consensus
- proof requires that preferably more than a few persons unknown to each other can see/hear/experience something--and then describe it with at least the most basic points present similarly enough. (Everyone but the colourblind agrees apples are red, sky is blue, etc. but we all seem to agree that soft things are squeezable or squishable, and hard things can't be squeezed into smaller form, then return to original shapes when "unsquozen".)
Jeepers. That must have been the worst metaphoric example my fingers ever typed. Let's try another.
- when you get whacked across the face, it hurts. EVERYONE not on lethal doses of numbing drugs agrees, EVEN sadomasochists who get off on that kind of thing. THEY GET OFF ON PAIN, so the fact that it hurts is GOOD to them, while BAD to the rest of us. Those are Opinions. The pain is a Reality A Fact.
- proof can be expounded in more scientific form, and thus, make a better case for what it is proving, yet in doing so, also cause the understanding of those who aren't elbow-deep in its jargon, and good at math, to elude all but those exceptions, and they get fewer all the time,
- intuition, instinct, visionary experience, and suchlike are devalued, but tolerated; science does examine some phenomena that involve them if enough reports of 'mass hallucination' arise.
Reality 'B' is non-consensus based, determined by individual senses, mind and their interaction. "If I can see it, feel it, know it, it is real. Doesn't matter if anyone else can. Except it usually does make it feel realer, for most persons, when/if others DO agree."
- religion is a 'B' thing, but so prominent, it may be more like a mass hallucination after two millennia of generational acceptance, which at some points in this history, belief in Yahweh, or just "God" (who was assumed to be Yahweh by gullible inquisitors, which is why SOME witches survived, praise the Lords!) was deemed by law necessary to remain viable, or 'go on staying alive'.
- Just because you can see God, the Devil, or a better God no-one else has ever seen, does not mean it necessarily will ever be shown to have existence, in the Reality A way. But just because others can agree with the basics of a religion does not necessarily mean it exists, either, since the 'consensus' that religions ALL stand upon do not have proof or even possible proveability at their base. They are 'faith-based'. Believe it, even if evidence lacks, and you TRULY must want to believe it, so maybe priests and popes caught on to this and started editing out all 'proof-basedness' from Judeochristian textuality. A few generations later, people no longer ever cared about proof, since it had no reward but dismemberment and paranoia.
- were Yahweh - or Allah, being they're both clone-copies of the same God to me, just wearing different clothes ( so I named him/it/them "Yahwallah") - to decide one day to make His/Their names appear in the sky so that the Earth folks could easily read them, by performance of a 'provable miracle' - such as doing this with superstrong meta-gold found nowhere else before as constructors for the letters, and these were to have been made to be miles-long text that illuminates on the nightside of Earth without any fuel, and the metal letters are weighing tons, but are not in Space, but instead float around in Earth atmosphere yet without responding to gravity...without fishing line attached, yes, I was getting to that! Now, THAT level of proof would bring God closer to 'A' reality, and after science finished studying it, if no proveable hoax emerged, it very likely WOULD firmly begin to belong to that consensus based, proof-needing idea of what is real and what ain't...thus, changing us forever...or as long as the Proven God let us live after that finally happened.
- this, though, hasn't happened any time in the past many centuries, though. It would seem the Judeochristian deity does not WANT to prove His existence, or else, cannot do so, having none of the qualities He supposedly has, owing to either non-existence, or falsified existence (this God exists, but is not omnipotent, so can't change physics - or in religionspeak, perform a miracle.
- in biblical times, people knew not the words/meanings of 'neurotransmitter', 'meteor', or 'psychoactive drug chemical', and that's for starters. So they simply believed what worked, given what data they had, which compared to now, was not a lot.
- everything holy was skyward, the opposite downward, likely (but unprovably) owing to gravity making dead things fall, but living ones could beat it, and prove this in the act of lifting themselves up from the ground to stand up. THAT could be proven. The existence of galaxies, a circumsolar system where Earth was one of nine planets*, the Sun being a star, and so on...Not Known, Unproven, Unthought of, probably.
*(I'm not ever letting go of Pluto, and for good reason - if Pluto lost planet status after a slew of other micro-planets - Pluto's insulting new classification - was discovered, doesn't that mean when science finds more planets around, would that by the same token change the status of EARTH, so that even IT wouldn't be a planet? The whole business is dumb. I was taught astronomy at age 4 by reading The Nine Planets. Plus, everyone knows why I have a thing about NINES that is more important - to me - than all of this fuzzy misclassificationeering anyway. Pluto is a small yet well-known, weirdly orbiting, rather cold PLANET, and as for the other micros that are supposed to be just like it, none of THEM have Greek Gods 'living' in, around or through them, so they're all just named with numbers and will probably just be mined for ore 100 years from now before even getting any names. But Pluto has had a name for a long time. Planet. OK, digression over.)
- they didn't know what gravity was, either, nor where and why it existed. We still don't. However, a LOT of the rest of what Jesus' first fan clubs didn't know anything about IS now explained - and proven by consensus.
The point of that all was the following.
Reality 'A' and Reality 'B' can coexist, even though they shouldn't be able to, logically. In these times, however, despite former times ALSO having too many holy wars, the nuclear bomb means that just having any of the coexistence happen at all may be more important than whether it has perfect logic or not.
I believe in God Yahweh, but having read His Book three times, cover to cover, in my life, I do not accept his doctrines. I have no issues, however, with those of Jesus. I have "daddy issues", you might say, and if Jesus were sane, he'd have them too. (He did, according to Gospel; "Father, why have you forsaken me?" was his final living word to the God he'd placed his faith in. Though he did say "Eloi", which, if you're in Jesus times, not H.G. Wells Morlock-infested future where 'eloi' were people who had all the sweet and none of the survival instincts Morlocks expect in a good screaming dish of food...meant something other than the usual way Aramaic put "singular, monad, Capital Letter Using God - and some scholars think it was used to mean something like a god that could either be "a god" or "Divinity's Origin" of what?
(Many, many Gods, that's my solid platinum GUESS, even though well, I do get my religious news from a direct line, if you catchest my drifteth...)
Jesus was a human sacrifice. For what, I'm unclear. The ubiquitously bumperstickered John 3:16 said, paraphrased, that the price of "everlasting life" was merely belief in him. This oddly seems to suggest a factory test for the ability of humans to belief in Reality B as much as--or often implied elsewhere, MORE than Reality A.
but to who or whom or what? Why not just save us, make us better, purge us of evil while creating us, if all God had to do was think/speak us into existing?
Yes, I want my God, to whom my eternal soul is to be bequeathed, to at least be somewhat logical, which is why I discovered a new one - or 'another old one, but one ignored, since The LORD's way of enforcing Commandment 1 has always been genocide.
Canaan had as much right to exist as the USA, and for all we know, more right, since they didn't have the Bomb, then. God (Yahweh) had people announce that certain cities and their denizens within the Land of Milk and Honey were being extirpated because of something to do with offspring of humans who'd made love with the wrong angels, but very sketchily was this annunciated. More likely, reality A determined that the 12 Israelite tribes would do better economically without people around who worshiped different gods.
Economics were far slower then. Caravans came a few times a year, you visited agoras, not malls, and as for food, two or three years with no rain led to mass starvation. Yahweh's priests were likely chosen for their foresight in such matters. In their tracts, which they had no idea would someday be assembled into a Holy Book taken at literal word by half or more of its billions of readers, simply translated the unpleasant reality of Life Equation (eaters live, starvers die, and dead don't reproduce) into more exciting, dreamlike, religious language, which made the problems seem more like matters that were out of the ken of humanity, thus unavoidable.
Ergo, fewer complainers, thus fewer beheadings necessary. Result: more Jewish (who were also the ancestors of Christians) ate, since the first wave led by Joseph ran in and did the Shock and Awe dance that made sure Canaan would not be for Canaanites, every one of which would eat food an Israelite mouth might instead eat.
The same thing goes on today. Wars get claimed 'holy', but look behind the priests, popes, mullahs, and prophets and you see the same stuff: oil that could be used by Americans instead of a bunch of bearded and terrorist-prone, life-unvaluing (that's kind of understandable, given the shit the Iraqis have been through just in our lifetimes - but this shit goes back more than 3000 years. Did they EVER have a decade without war and destruction being as common as cars and trees?) They are, nevertheless, just foreign, other-alphabet-using, Allah-believing persons we have no real connection to, who seem to our ways 'dirty' ( there's not enough WATER there to use it for wiping one's face, it's to DRINK!) and who are indeed primitive in some ways even the most tolerant liberal couldn't tolerate. One word: sharia.
But it was when Jesus' crucifixion was made into the worldwide symbol of everlasting life, a terrible world-wide cognitive dissonance was birthed. Over most church pulpits a man, in the act of being horribly tortured - hangs - a graven image, sometimes, even - of horrible, pointless, terrible pain. Some churches, tastefully enough, remove that image and replace it with a sygnium of a cross instead. That's a small yet important step, but too little too late.
Jesus, though called 'son of Man' in most Bible lines, is taught to us to have been fathered by something unhuman: the God of Abraham, who we must recall was also called upon to see if he had enough trust in God to sacrifice his son Isaac - who was replaced, at last minute, by a suddenly available male sheep. Isaac was supposed to have voluntarily given himself up to Abraham's horrid order, but does he get any credit, no, history called Yahweh first the God of Moses, then the God of Abraham, then a bunch of shit happened with nation-states and kings and judges, the Temple of Solomon was built but the God of Solomon Yahweh could apparently not abide being called since Solomon recognized the presence, worth and value of THE OTHER ONES, without which a first Commandment wouldn't have had to be put there by jealous Yahweh in the first place. So jealous he couldn't even thank Solomon properly for what's presented as the holiest temple to him EVER. Why is Yahweh such a continuous asshole? Where does he show all that love anyway?
He doesn't. Does promise. Never shows. Even in bloody Reality B, his prophets were full of cataclysm and revenge and war, not love. Would have been Baal, were children sacrificed to him, but he settled for everyone's livestock since burning it smelled great to him. Oh, and his 33 year old stepson.
Stepson. Jesus' real dad had to have real balls, a dick, and sperm. He had to exist in the world of the flesh, which apparently he found an abomination most of the time. (That much I often understand.) So it was probably Joseph having a nocturnal emission, Joseph deciding they were Married in God's Eyes already, convincing Mary, and having proper sex with her...or it could've been, as a certain jocose xenodimensional friend likes to put it, that Mary fell for the charms of a Roman soldier who captured her pre-Joseph (or perhaps while they had a fight for a week one hot summer) and after a bit of Stockholm Syndrome set in, let him have his way. We can at least hope the Stockholm bit happened, not the usual Roman quick-fuck efficiency.
In any event, Jesus had a daddy, on Earth, or he would be half-God - which was why Yahweh flooded out everyone but Noah, his family, and all the animals on Earth, even the ones no one knew about, assuming it flat, thus without about half its extant species anyway. Things were so much simpler then. No worrying about how American animals managed to not drown. (They stuck themselves to the upside-down part of the Flat Earth with bubblegum and waited for a hawk to bring a mouse carcass crawling with maggots, then unstuck themselves and crawled back on the table. Of course!)
But when Jesus led his people he was all about the poor, what we today would call a troublesome hippie with no respect for authority. He claimed the 10 Commandments could be shortened to:
LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR, as yourself. ( i.e. fellow humanity, not just the guy in the apartment to your right.)
LOVE YOUR GOD with all your heart and mind. His words were "love the Lord thy God'. Not "love Yahweh, my dad, and my God, who will also be yours or else..." He told people, in effect, LOVE YOUR OWN VERSION OF THE DIVINE and follow THAT LAW first. Not the "jealous God" crap that is in the first commandment. Now THAT would have pissed off the authorities enough to stick nails in his veins.
We have no way, though, of knowing much about Jesus, Reality 'A' wise. Scholars find books claiming to be by persons associated with him, especially in the Nag Hammadi Codex. Churches everywhere declaim it, stamp it heretical, and ignored it forever after...
If you want to know why, go read the stories for yourself. If you truly believe in Jesus Christ, and his Daddy that let him be tortured and killed so that He Himself didn't have to explain evil to his created people running around Terrarium Earth...you owe it to yourself AND maybe Christ - who knows? - to read them and make up YOUR mind.
It's what he told us to do, apparently.
So - though it was for my own reasons, not Christ's edict - that's exactly what I did.
My God is 50 percent real and the other half I claim mythos, since I have zero proof, and only a handful of fellow believers, all of whom have vastly different notions of this God's nature, what he/she/it is around for, etc. My religion is megapolytheist, since one look at this world should tell anyone - sane or insane - that this was no single entity's creation.
It has every mark of a committee project.
Even if you don't believe in God 2.0 (his actual name is redacted for now) try to see a way to allow your own religious beliefs in the loving Yahweh - torture and all - to not furtherly split humanity by attacking it as 'evil' if it doesn't follow that God's precepts.
Let Yahweh strike me down if He thinks my heresies are evil. I invite this, but ONLY if HE HIMSELF, not a stand-in who's human - does the striking.
God 2.0 tells me I can bring nothing to the table of Earth if I don't balance my lifetime disdain for monotheism with some appreciation for what it HAS done for us. However much Leviticus disgusts me, it's plain to see Moses and his 'bush' that burned and likely, it is assumed, MAY have poured forth smoke of one sort or another that Moses MAY have breathed...the guy figured out - or was informed of - the basics of hygiene, and just went a mite too far in enforcing them, at first.
Eating dead animal carcasses can make someone sick, and a sick person can make a whole camp sick...so the law said, they must leave the camp for a week when 'unclean'. The same was said of women having natural menses, though...Neither germs nor menstruation being known enough about, he did what he could with what he had.
But why didn't Yahweh give him the whole story, then?
Guess the bush stopped burning too soon...
