Narz
keeping it real
The god thread got me thinking, assuming one believes in god/gods, is this the best he's got? Or is this a version of hell?
I mean there's a lot of flaws with this reality. The fact that half of life has to hunt down, maim, slaughter & consume the other half, the fact that pleasure cannot go beyond a certain point & we quickly adapt to our comforts & even joys and of course the inevitable decay and death of everyone we know & love (including us).
The human mind can conjure up many visions of utopia. Even if we couldn't defeat death eventually humans may be able to so alter our own brains that our greatest joy in this lifetime will be below the baseline emotional state of our descendants (assume we manage to maintain Earth as a suitable home for human civilization). Without all the stress, drama & nonsense the fearful human mind conjures up we could probably achieve much more.
If there is a designer (of which I'm doubtful and especially doubtful that if there is that he's the big boss & not an alien teenager doing a science project) I don't think he's playing us like a game, more seems like we're an experiment left to run it's course. Human beings will either rise to better ourselves in ways the guy/gal who started the sim running could not have anticipated & ourselves become gods or we will self-destruct.
It's an interesting time to be alive for sure, it seems like by mid-century we should be able to tell which wall things will shake out. I actually used to be more of a pessimist (like 90% sure we're screwed) now I'm thinking we have maybe a 30% chance. Don't ask me why, I have no data to back up my hunch.
Anyway, I think the HIndus have different realms, hell, then hungry ghosts, then this one & a few levels of heaven (is that where 7th heaven comes from?).
To me heaven would be in charge of the game, able to design infinite universes forever & insert yourself into any character in any universe, to create & change laws & try to design the perfect utopia (I guess you could design hell-realms but without scarcity I see no reason why anyone would be cruel or morbid). I see zero evidence that this universe (or at least being a mammal on this Earth) was designed for the comfort of sentient beings. All humans have accomplished it's been our own hard work (and with many negative consequences, perhaps even the seeds of our own eventual extinction) and still, our hard work has had puny results, living a few decades longer, more creature comforts & ability to move ourselves about, but still the underlying suffering of life remains & we're here but for a blink of an eye cosmically, after which we are never to be heard from again. But who knows, perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps when we expire we wake up in the next level of reality or to the "true reality". It's certainly a better thought than non-existence. As crummy as life can be I've gotten rather used to it & the thought of not being is... well, terror.
I mean there's a lot of flaws with this reality. The fact that half of life has to hunt down, maim, slaughter & consume the other half, the fact that pleasure cannot go beyond a certain point & we quickly adapt to our comforts & even joys and of course the inevitable decay and death of everyone we know & love (including us).
The human mind can conjure up many visions of utopia. Even if we couldn't defeat death eventually humans may be able to so alter our own brains that our greatest joy in this lifetime will be below the baseline emotional state of our descendants (assume we manage to maintain Earth as a suitable home for human civilization). Without all the stress, drama & nonsense the fearful human mind conjures up we could probably achieve much more.
If there is a designer (of which I'm doubtful and especially doubtful that if there is that he's the big boss & not an alien teenager doing a science project) I don't think he's playing us like a game, more seems like we're an experiment left to run it's course. Human beings will either rise to better ourselves in ways the guy/gal who started the sim running could not have anticipated & ourselves become gods or we will self-destruct.
It's an interesting time to be alive for sure, it seems like by mid-century we should be able to tell which wall things will shake out. I actually used to be more of a pessimist (like 90% sure we're screwed) now I'm thinking we have maybe a 30% chance. Don't ask me why, I have no data to back up my hunch.
Anyway, I think the HIndus have different realms, hell, then hungry ghosts, then this one & a few levels of heaven (is that where 7th heaven comes from?).
To me heaven would be in charge of the game, able to design infinite universes forever & insert yourself into any character in any universe, to create & change laws & try to design the perfect utopia (I guess you could design hell-realms but without scarcity I see no reason why anyone would be cruel or morbid). I see zero evidence that this universe (or at least being a mammal on this Earth) was designed for the comfort of sentient beings. All humans have accomplished it's been our own hard work (and with many negative consequences, perhaps even the seeds of our own eventual extinction) and still, our hard work has had puny results, living a few decades longer, more creature comforts & ability to move ourselves about, but still the underlying suffering of life remains & we're here but for a blink of an eye cosmically, after which we are never to be heard from again. But who knows, perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps when we expire we wake up in the next level of reality or to the "true reality". It's certainly a better thought than non-existence. As crummy as life can be I've gotten rather used to it & the thought of not being is... well, terror.
