Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, of the things that I ponder, ‘what if I’m wrong?’ about, probably the biggest one is religion. However, I was pondering various things that are strong arguments against Christianity – well, in particular, the idea of God.

One very strong argument against a moral intelligent designer is cancer. Cancer would easily be preventable by having our DNA switch between a mode where mutations were possible, for evolutionary purposes, during initial mitosis, and a mode where a CRC is applied to it rather than the simple checksum that currently exists, for runtime purposes. Cancer would be basically impossible.

Now, one can imagine arguments for the experience of earth – a few that have occured to me include that we need something to compare utopia with in order to enjoy it and we sometimes want a challenge, and also the classic ‘this is a configuration screwup’ possibility. It also has occured to me – and I think it’s actually probably pretty likely – that we exist as a side effect of some other process and we’re not actually supposed to exist at all, therefore any system administrators that might exist in the universe have no idea we’re here.

Anyway, it’s also possible we have a incompetent God. But what we clearly *do not* have is a ethical, omnipotent, omnicient God who loves us.

Another good indicator of this is the plethora of religions, many of which encourage awful behavior. Even Christianity apparently failed to stop a number of atrocities of being done in its name, including:

1) The crusades
2) Criminalization of not believing in Christianity – in the middle ages, I would have been put to death for failure to believe. Of course, in the USA, we did something very similar in the 50s with McCarthy
3) Repeated repression of anyone who behaves in “un-christian” ways, including criminalization of things which should not be illegal just because Christians don’t like them

But, beyond this, all these “There can be only one” religions increase the risk of wars – and they’re not likely to all be true. And it would be pretty horrific if they were. Since all the “there can only be one” religions have different tenants, they can’t all be true (well, barring certain multiple reality possibilities).

It is a interesting question, though – God might just believe in freedom of the press. And not care how many people get hurt. but that makes the claim of being omniscient, omnipotent, and loving us again seem unlikely.

So, from where I sit, the left is currently concerned about the right because the right is making decisions that may well lead to the extinction of the human race – no, global warming isn’t going to kill us, but the attitude the right has towards our ecosystem very likely will sooner or later – you can only knock so many steps out of the food chain before something crashes, and beyond that our increasing population and attempt at a increasing economic level of production is going to sooner or later break our ecosystem and leave us dead.

From the right’s perspective, the left is taking away too much money from them. Looking at the actual numbers and more importantly resources consumed, it’s largely the military that’s bankrupting us all, but from the right’s perspective as I understand it it’s largely social security – we should be paying in but not taking money out. (Yes, the right’s media spins it as if we’re spending more money on social services than anything else by pointing to medicare, medicaid, and social security.. something we all pay for, so they’re basically counting money we banked in order to use later as money we paid as taxes. Dishonesty, as I think I’ve mentioned before, is a hallmark of the right. The thing is, it wasn’t always. At one point they were just of the point of view that small government led to the most freedom and the best user experience. And then, things happened.

Anyway, my point is, the left has our continued survival as a primary concern where the right has money. (Well, to be fair, they also sell the idea that we should be deeply afraid of immigrants – something that statistics do not bear out, as immigrants statistically are far more law abiding than citizens. In general, statistics are not the strong suit of the right)

Anyway, is it any wonder that the right must increasingly lie and cheat to even keep people attached to their point of view? Or that those of us on the left increasingly think that adherence to the right with the right in it’s current state – defending white supremacy, destroying key functions of our government like the post office, blatantly flip-flopping on rules like “we shouldn’t appoint judges right before a election” .. “unless the election might cost us seats” in other words displaying no honor at all – causes those of us on the left to at this point think people on the right are, well, basically, not very good people?

I realize that on the right, they *must be* brainwashed. They don’t see that their party is no longer the party of small government, but rather now is the party of blatant evil. And I know they are sold the idea that we are the evil ones – often by actually taking things the right is doing and attributing them to the left. However, given the cost of failure and the inability to reach them, it is more and more difficult to maintain friendship with the people on the right knowing that they support the abuse of immigrants, they support the robbing of the US coffers to help billionaires, they support prioritizing corporations over people, they support prioritizing economic growth over the continued survival of the human race.. I think my point here is clear. Their economic policy doesn’t even make any sense – they demonize socialism while ignoring the fact that automation is making it increasingly difficult to even think about giving everyone a job – and we at the moment have many, many makework jobs in a pathetic attempt to try and duct-tape our old views about economic theory into continuing to function beyond their usefulness. Some form of collectivism is the only sane way forward.

Part of what’s impressive here is how far people will go to defend the brand they’re loyal to. The alternate possibility is that my connection with reality has severed and I’m experiencing local generation of reality with an extremist point of view and a epicly broken political situation. (In which case I’m not sure if we’re looking at me having died and now being in hell or if we’re looking at a extreme configuration screw-up)

One thing that I do worry about, post the previous post, is what absolutely wrong beliefs *my* mind is defending. No real way to know, either.