Religion Unpacked

The reason we don't find ourselves surrounded by perfection is because we exist in time, serving as part of how God makes the world better.

This is important. It's worth saying twice. One common trick is to compare imperfect realities to perfect imagination. It's similar to a violation of Hume's is/ought divide. Such comparisons are good for generating goals, but they are being given credit as two hypotheticals or two realities being compared, apples to apples. Marx used this. He postulated an imaginary perfect future and compared the very imperfect contemporary world to it. That's all very well and good for generating a plan of reform, but he went further and postulated that the principles underlying his particular plan of reform were in every way superior to the principles underlying the status quo on the basis that his imaginary future was superior. In fact his principles also encountered real problems in practice. He didn't stick to saying, "I want this, let's make it," he had to say, "this is inevitable because these ideas are better. Because look how great it would be." Libertarians use the same technique. Like Marx, they postulate a perfect government free society and compare it to real ones. Because their plan has never actually been tried (The Gilded Age? The force free, law abiding Jacksonian enlightenment?), their plan is unbesmirched and impeccable. It's like saying "A perfect rotary engine we have on the drawing board is theoretically better than conventional cylinder engines currently on the road, so clearly rotary engines are a superior design." That's why we've all switched to Mazdas. Ideally we shouldn't have to have organizations or unequal power and people should all be naturally nice and we shouldn't have to farm because apples will fall off trees into our mouths and we shouldn't need clothes because it should always be 72 degrees Fahrenheit. So I'm going to do whatever I want and go naked and if I'm not fed on time or I get frostbite it will be a moral travesty and surely someone has duties that make it their fault. More to the point of religion, if God is omnipotent and benevolent then we must be in Heaven. God's being omnipotent is being falsely presumed to mean God can just magic stuff instantly like Samantha on Bewitched. There's a process. God's will actually does get done. Eventually. Doing it instantly would make fewer worlds. OK, go ahead and compare your reality to my hypothetical. And do better, and more of it. Please.

All possible time lines were created and now more of the better ones are being created. Each is a Rube Goldberg machine that goes off kilter at some point, so something is adjusted and it gets run again and again until it goes right. Eventually, it will be just right and then it will get copied many times so most copies are the perfect one. Then it will get enlarged, so it will be imperfect again. If things were perfect they would not be changing. They would be finished. We wouldn't notice. So we are in the imperfect part. Life is work. We must accept that reality Stoically, but that acceptance then requires that we be motivated, that we care and get involved. You must accept that you have a problem to solve , but that means not accepting that it remain unsolved long if you have anything to say about it.

God constantly nudges history to promote effective civilization and the thriving of intelligent life.

The first job of any task is to assemble the tools you need. You don't start in with bare hands. You leverage. Organized intelligent beings and their tools are God's leverage. So the first step is to make people more organized and intelligent and get them to make better tools. Then get them spread out all over the work site. Meditating in the forest is not our main assignment. Maybe it can help us instrumentally. We all have our different needs.

God nudges constantly, using probability adjustments at the microscopic level and knowing all their ultimate impacts at the level of universe-spanning deep time. Synchronicity is just when we notice. Most of it is just the way things are, how the story goes. Nothing stands out. Synchronicity is like an actor breaking the fourth wall. Or the director shouting at a player in rehearsal.

Miracles happen all the time. Atoms don't implode. What more do you want? But seriously, why else do you think all these little interventions happened? People can't handle chaos, God uses it like a virtuoso. These interventions played a role in promoting one slightly more civilized tribe over another or getting that greasy puddle to form replicating bubbles. Admittedly it's taken a long time, but apparently there's no hurry. I hear the universe will be there for a while. Fact is, our universe and our planet are both particularly blessed by the designs of the necessary multiverse. Is this necessity, the multiverse, or design? What's with the insistence on "either or" rather than "more"?

To digress about fine tuning: all universes are made, there are just more of the kind that have parameters that make for making more universes. And that's also how God functions. The preponderance of favorable universes is not a justification for God, it's an explanation of God's metabolism. And the retro-causality that God's functioning also produces happens to promote life and intelligence under some circumstances. But the two are unrelated. The coincidence is probably synchronicity. Which incidentally is my actual evidence for God--and it's inadmissible, but that's fine. I don't need you to believe me.

Those who are more inclined to be useful to that effort are more likely to be given the power to do their good works, while those less inclined to productivity are more likely to be steered away from the power to do harm.

Also, your position and environment and ability come into it. It's all about potential. And your potential is constantly changing every moment. You can apply strategies and maintain commitment to goals, but you don't control everything. The only approach is to commit to serving God's goals and then trust that you will in turn be empowered to make that possible. You can divert some of that power to maintenance of your own abilities and potentials.

Good proposals get the loans. Potential attracts attention, thus increasing potential. To magic up civilization out of dinosaurs might have been theoretically possible, but it was more efficient to let natural processes do most of the work. An asteroid here and there at the perfect time, maybe. And anyway, the project these monkeys are for will take billions and billions of years, what's a few million years left or right? But once it does start hopping, stuff gets critical. As you have an increasingly advanced civilization, interventions produce bigger results, so that's where you focus your interventions. Synchronicity happens more where there's lots of random stuff happening (so it's cheaper to do with fewer side effects, like the conductivity of a thicker wire) yet also lots of likelihood of random stuff having profound consequences (it happens more to people who are powerful or in pivotal situations--which may be the same thing).

But there are no guarantees, as we manifestly see.

Religions constantly try to assert that God or the Universe is "just." It's mystifying why. They'll obviously be called on it immediately by people who very well know better. I guess this tells you that some people live kind of isolated from the real world. And usually they're the ones in a position to posit theories about God. It's BS given in hopes people won't take into account all the available information. When it became clear that people knew better it became necessary to invent the afterlife. Justice occurs in heaven or hell. Justice occurs in your reincarnation. But God is a consequentialist. Things work a certain way, which I'm telling you about. Operate it correctly and you get the desired results. That's a sort of justice, right? But seriously how could all these atrocities be allowed? On the religions page I illustrated the example of the conquest of the Americas with a picture of the natives of Hispaniola being burned alive by the Spanish. It was OK because the Spaniards were Christians, you see, and the natives weren't (so they weren't human because they weren't in the lineage tribe, er doctrinal empire--or either they get mixed up). So why did God allow this to be done? Maybe it was a sort of sunset clause. Maybe God allows religions to be besmirched with such things as a way of planting the seeds of people coming to reject them. Having served their role, they will someday need to go. Or maybe it's something else. Yes, there are no mysteries about the general trend, but the details are often hard to make out. God can always intervene, but there's an economics to it. Intervene one place and it affects something somewhere else. The effects of the intervention matter, and the side effects of all the manipulations necessary to bring it about--and not just in this world, in many others, for they are interconnected. Ultimately this is the same as saying the world is imperfect because everything possible must be created and we are part of the process of correcting it. The arc is long, but the tendency is for justice to get more affordable.

Theoconsequentialism is unfalsifiable. I'm using the old dodge "it's a mystery" in a way. I'm using "maybe" as an excuse, saying "And when it doesn't work, maybe it was this possible exception." But I'm not trying to persuade you in a scientific journal, or even a court of law. I'm providing a concept. Check it against your own experience. I'm betting you'll find it useful. Replicate my results. But yes, things don't seem to always promote good outcomes. Here's my hypothesis: if things happen like seemingly promising people having sudden car accidents there's a reason, what it is just recedes into complexity and chaos. For a simple case, maybe that promising young artist in Vienna had some good reason to be shot by that time traveler. Or someone who knew someone who was critical to a turn of events. Like I said, I know it's a cheat to base an argument on "maybe". So instead of meaningless hope we can choose meaningless despair? Wise. "All the cool kids are anguished"? Sure, that sounds like I'm making an artistic choice. But I think I'm going with the grain here, not trying to impose anything too artificial. There do seem to be some traces here that kind of look like something, let's just play them up. Maybe it will even be convincing, people will think it's real wood. I'm pointing out the face in the cloud. Decide for yourself.

Life is full of uncertainty because the world is imperfect, so we can't be sure of outcomes, but given that we are aware of that uncertainty it is logical that we choose the path of serving God's will because that gives us better odds, among all the unknowns.

More to my point about the unreliability of earning God's favor. It's like rolling dice. If you roll 6 ten times in a row, your probability of getting another 6 is still just one in six. Similarly, being someone likely to work for God will likely get you empowered to do so, but a minority of the time setbacks may occur. But that shouldn't stop you because the future always starts right now. Always maintain commitment, it's always your best bet. This isn't Job like commitment here, it's just playing the odds. But that doesn't mean you can't speculate about whether unexpected turns of events are giving you a message about alternative courses of action. Perhaps your role is to serve God in some unexpected way.

What am I asking you to do? Act as though this God exists. Devote yourself to promoting a glorious future for humanity. Alternatively, you can do that because God doesn't exist, or based on no metaphysical grounding--just instinct or peer pressure or upbringing (probably not ultimately based on religion). Or you could prefer logic and therefore choose to serve your desires, drink beer and play video games. Well played Mr Spock. You are clearly the center of the universe that you can see. Logically, your instinctive desires are the meaning of existence.

Learn it the hard way, or the easy way.