We live in a world where it is perfectly normal for a person to walk in to a shop buy a bottle of Coke, drink it then throw the bottle on the ground, while it's on the ground, a small creature looking for food may, as they very often do put it's head insude the bootle and be unable to then remove it, then suffocate or die of thirst, or be eaten.
Then it will get blown about, maybe ending up in a ditch, maybe blocking a drain, or ending up in a river, then to sea where it will be a hazard to fish and sea birds where unless it is removed it will stay for many years until it disintigrates into smaller and smaller pieces that will be ingested by fish, that are eaten by other seacreatures and land animals including humans, slowly poisoning them.
The production of the bottle and it's contents caused it's share of pollution, the contents of the bottle is remarkably damaging to the person who drinks it, rotting their teeth, making them fatter, then after a brief period of elation it weaken
28.09.21
I have always thought that if I were to go to prison for a long time I might be able to escape in a way by creating a world inside my head and live there instead.
I used to be able to close my eyes and walk in to a lucid half dream, but my mind would always create all sorts of unmanagble terrible beings which I don't think did me any good.
Now carrying a far larger burden of lifes traumas there must now exist such terrible monsters inside my subconcious that if I was to venture into it in such a way again, I don't know if I would ever come back, I assume that is also the case for everyone else.
But maybe I could instead of creating a world I could embed in my mind a 3d model of atleast bits of the real world and be very careful not to allow too much of myself in to it.
There are places I must have been thousands of times but I can only faintly viualise and enter, but if I can remember a certain strain of thought or feeling that I had at a certain moment I can recreate what I was seeing and feeling at the time.
I can remember music or interesting topics on car radios and recall the exact spot and moment, there was a cd I used to listen too on a specific journey and there was a part off that journey where there was usually a traffic jam.
Now I can listen to that cd, or replay the tracks in my head and if I concentrate I can be back in that traffic jam, and I can control my car but I am in a hundred different traffic jams at the same place all at once there are endless cars occupying the same spot, I an travelling both north and south but if I concentrate I can inhabit one fragment of memory.
I must add that some songs I assiciate with specific places even if I have not experienced them there and other songs I have heard frequently in a specific place but only have weak associations.
The first step I would take to build a proper mental landscape would be to thouroughly learn the geography of the area in the same way cab drivers learn the knowledge, so I have a completely accurate mental map embedded in my mind and the ability to place myself on it.
To retain consistency I would need a way to regulate the time and weather either keeping it the same, having distinct images of the same place in different conditions or by creating an internal time and becoming able to generate my own weather.
I can close my eyes and see a ghostly vision of places I know but I travell through them at about sixty miles an hour, maybe with practice I could slow down and travel at wslking pace and fill in the details.
I could travel up and down places I want to imagine listening to different carefully selected songs at specific times of day and time of year at specific stretches of journeys, then be able to put them in a playlist to aide my memory.
But music is too much of a distraction, like the australian aborgines I could create chants specifically tailored to specific pieces of land.
I could record myself walking so when I can't be in a place I can still see it, I could overlay the video with a soundtrack, music, poetry, descriptions and anything else I wanted.
I would just imagine the land people would manifest on their own I think.
I would not use an accurate mental map I would stich together diffetent places, so I could walk down one path and come out somewhere else twenty miles away.
If I was going to spend the rest of my life in solitary confinement and I had managed to engrave the details of places I want to be in my memory, then it would be interesting to see how well I could think myself there.
That's not all... being mentally constrained to the place you happen to be even if you do have freedom you can only go places if you have the imagination to want to be there, and the more vivid your imagination the better you can appreciate your options of where you can be and what you can do and see there.
Let's say other people also have developed the same mental landscape, it would be easy to develop a very strong closeness over such shared consciousness.
18.09.21
It is easy to forget how little we truely know.
For example a great deal of common medical treatments (paracetamol for one) are used because they have been proven to work, but how they work is a mystery.
Quantum theory and the theory of general relativity have not been made to align, quantum mechanics in general, the building blocks of the universe are still not well understood.
Dark matter is thought to make up 85% of the universe what it is remains unknown.
Just research in any detail any subject and you'll start to find gaps in humanities knowledge and the deeper you get, the greater you'll realise our ignorance is, and those are the things we know we don't know, the things we don't know we don't know, we can't begin to quantify.
And there are things we think we know but that are wrong, it has famously been found that most published scientific research is unreplicatable.
There is a body scientific research that suggests it is much more likely we are living in some form of simulation or hallucination than not.
The point I am trying to make is the universe is a very mysterious place and the sum of all scientific knowledge counts for little in the great scheme of things, it often operates much more on probabilities of accuracy then certainty.
So what is the probabiblity that God exists?
An all powerful creator could reasonably be assumed to create universes ordered enough to produce human intelligence at frequencies orders of magnitude faster than random pieces of energy and matter would, therefore it is surely orders of magnitude more likely that the universe was created by some form of intelligent design than not.
Like if you found two packs of cards both arranged in exactly the same order you would assume they were delibrately ordered that way.
But is that intelligent designer the same God that billions of people belive in?
If he exists it's clear he does so mostly outside of humans everyday frame of reference.
What exists outside the universe as we understand it, we by definition do not know.
Bertrand Russell once compared the probability of a Christian God existing to the probability of a teapot being in orbit around the sun between earth and mars, both ridiculous but both unprovable.
But our solar system is well within our frame of reference and we know that the probability of a series of events causing a teapot to go in to orbit around the sun between earth and mars can be quantified as very low, the probability of a teapot existing outside time and space is different, what do we know is outside time and space? absolutely nothing, So if there's anything there it could just as easily be a teapot as anything else.
So due to the lack of information the probablity of the Abrahamic God existing on the face of it is 50/50.
There are many things people point out religion cannot explain or justify.
But does this reduce the probability of Gods existence?
No, there are many things in the adult world that cannot be adequately be explained to a young child, because they lack the knowledge and facilities to understand, so obviously the same dynamic would occur between God and humanity.
The fact a religion cannot justify and explain the state of the universe does not invalidate it, in fact if a religion could it would be an indication that it was entirely man made.
What other evidence is there?
Someone claiming to have spoken with God is evidence, not proof but a possible indication.
Ok, they could be lying, dreaming or hallucinating but they could be telling the truth, so it increases the odds of his existence, maybe not by much let's say 0.000001%, that shifts the balance very slightly in favour of his existence, and the more convincing the testimony and the more of it, the higher the probability becomes.
Prophecies coming true would be another indication, certain prophecies are deemed by some to have failed, but mostly ones concerning events that happened during or not long after the lives of the prophets, so the argument that stripping text of it's historical and cultral context, leaving it open to thousands of years of potential couruption then translating it, in to a completely different language might lead to misinterpriration even stronger, as no scribe in their right mind would write down blatantly failed prophesies, and no one would accept them.
There are people determined to find them true, and people determined to find them false, very little out there that's objective, I think they hold up pretty well, better than I would expect if they came from nowhere.
Then there are miracles, they are reported to be happening all the time, of course anecdotal evidence of that kind is not strong, but there are other miracles harder to explain.
There are 69 cases of people diagnosed with incurable afflictions, that have recovered while visiting Lourdes in France and been thoroughly and scientifically examined and declared to be cases inexplicable by modern medicine, and many thousands more similar cases of people being healed but not being able to prove a miracle beyond all doubt.
There are no others that I know of verified in such a way, it could be aliens or, very well organised fraud or something else entirely, but it's evidence.
A lot of people have stories about praying for things that then happen and other things like visions, random chance? maybe, maybe not it's still evidence.
The fact that billions of people have felt the existence of God through some sort of internal vision or feeling adds much more weight to the hypothesis.
"what are the chances that you have the right God out of all the thosands there are?" is a common question.
Most gods are entirely different sorts of beings that monotheistic deities are, similar in capacity to spirits, demons, angels, saints etc... and the powerful creator Gods could be and are argued to be different interpretations of the same being.
So to summarise the probability of God existing is definitely well over 50%
But that's not proof of course, I belive in God because my senses tell me God exists, maybe not my external senses as such, but why should external senses be the only ones to count? It is possible to see, hear, feel, taste and smell things that aren't there, all the senses could be part of some sort of dream or simulation like I said previously.
The only reason that they are important is because they stay mostly consistent unlike passing sensations and they verify themselves by matching up to each other.
However my sense that God exists has remained consistent, is not an indication of undiagnosed mental illness like other convictions may be, and as I have shown it is a belief that the external world somewhat passively suggests to be accurate.