Religious thoughts (tinfoil hat)
So, one of the interesting variants of the religious thoughts that go through my mind is the possibility that certain aspects of Christianity are right and they explain the wrongness of all the rest of the religion.
Here’s the setup – one of the things that they do say is that hell is the absence of God. What if what this actually means is hell is the absence of the *memetics* of God – that is to say, we remove all the best ideas. So, no polyamoury? Strongly pushing pair bonds even though humans are wired to fall in love more than once? Pushing the idea that you’re fatally flawed and someone had to die because you’re so broken? All in fact not the best truth, but because we’re not in Heaven (i.e. in the zone of good memetics and good information) we’re assured by the priests, who are among the most confused of all, that we don’t deserve good memetics and we should be punished for being what we are. Get closer to the zone of not-insane-memetics and you’ll find some of the nuttiness fades – i.e. no more worshipping paper dollars over real value, no more telling people sexual hunger is wicked or they should only want to pet their One True Person, no more the republican party is pushing authoritarianism – basically the idea here is that you can steer for the world that you want to live in by coloring your beliefs and if you see the above sorts of nuttiness you’re aimed in the wrong direction.
Which gets tricky. What is it that I’m not believing that’s excluding me from utopia? I mean, lately I expect humans to hurt each other, to spend their technological energy on tools for hurting each other, to hurt each other over stupid reasons, to lie, to start wars, to try to punish people for having sex, to try and claim that babies belong to indiviudals rather than to all of us and that individuals should have to suffer because they chose to have them even though evolution has wired all of us to be real stupid about reproduction.
I’m sure you’ve all see me go on about all these topics elsewhere in the blog, but I am starting to wonder if part of my problem is I can’t stop believing the worst about us. I need to believe that we are better than this, can be better than this, and will be better than this. It’s obvious there’s no moral deities here.
It’s also obvious that everyone could easily be experiencing a custom variant of reality, and that there’s very few guarantees about how those realities even overlap. I just can’t believe that people can’t come up with a better future than what the GOP is currently pushing – while in the meantime I like the future the Democrats talk about but they seem like they don’t want to actually implement anything – they’ll even let the GOP cheat (Refusing to nominate judges for example) – I can’t decide if the problem is they all want slightly different things, can’t triage, and each think their one hobbyhorse is the most important, or they’re actually a bunch of scammers who really just want to donation farm and collect money from the electorate and they have to be very careful never to actually get anything done because they’d have less issues to use to push people’s emotional buttons with.
Anyway, I guess the thought that I was playing with the most here is that Earth’s religions are all so obviously wrong *because* we’re far away from the utopic axis. My sense that things are getting progressively worse is either just that all humans feel that way about all change or that I’ve been steadily sliding down that axis as my beliefs decay.