trenton

I am making this post because I had a deep conversation with a Yoga instructor. The class was canceled sense not enough people showed up. We instead had a long talk about how we understand reality. We talked about many things including what I have termed metaphysical relativism. Currently, I haven't figured out which metaphysical context would most accurately describe my relationship with reality, but I have noticed that depending on these presuppositions they hold radical implications in terms of how worldviews form and are contextualized. Presently, a big range is open for me and I'm not really sure how to navigate this big terrain. I'm also trying to do genuine inquiry rather than just believing what Leo says. During this talk, he eventually mentioned UFO sightings. He claimed that he had seen a UFO twice with the most convincing encounter being the second one with his girlfriend present. He described a detailed account of a massive ship that appeared to be flying sideways. His girlfriend took out her phone and tried to record the UFO. It looked like it was recording so there would be clear proof. The sighting lasted for about two minutes. However, when they looked at the video used for proof, it was just a black screen as if the entire film was just deleted and blacked out with no sound. It sounds like if there is intelligent life on those spacecrafts, they are capable of interfering with the radio waves from our phones, thereby preventing us from using the evidence. This is when I started to experience cognitive dissonance. I have already seen disclosures from the military regarding many UFO sightings. Part of me uses those sightings as evidence that UFOs are real. At the same time what this Yoga teacher claims still sounds like a big claim despite there being other convincing supporting evidence for it. How should we address UFO claims like these in the event that intelligent life is capable of undermining our capacity to get this evidence? This is a problem with our relationship to proof. If something is true but cannot be proven, then how does one know if it is true or not without direct experience? The story could be fabricated, but I myself have stories which cannot be proven which are nevertheless true. It includes scenarios of organized criminals manipulating evidence such that I can't prove it was them. This involved set up and frame up scenarios which exploit how our society uses proof while weaponizing those evidentiary standards against victims. In both these cases and the UFO cases, it involves outside actors with a capacity to undermine our evidence. Are there other situations that might involve inherently limited evidence that are nevertheless true? I know Leo has covered God extensively. Therefore, I have identified three scenarios with this kind of proof problem and there are probably many others. This includes UFOs interfering with radio waves and preventing recordings, organized criminals manipulating evidence to frame victims, and God which is true but cannot be proven through outside means.

Basically, I want to connect to people. I feel so much better when there are people I feel safe with. The absolutely God awful problem is that the only place I can reliably find these people are with support groups. It gets worse. The only support groups that are actually good enough for me are in places like hospital settings and inpatient care for severe depression. The horrible thing is that this is where I feel a sense of belonging with people I can actually relate to and feel safe with. There is actually a routine with which I can predictably see the same people without feeling like I'm in danger. Meanwhile, the other support groups are not good enough. Transportation is often a problem. Additionally, in order to actually get the kind of support I need outside of inpatient, it would require me to reorganize my entire life which is what I want help with doing because I feel way too alone. I also tried getting a job at one of those and they just delayed me for months and months on end. They seem overloaded. An additional problem is that I was already promised that inpatient would help me get away from my family. They instead sent me back to them over suicidal thoughts caused by my family. I realize that this is a similar psychological mechanism that gets people in jail over and over again. The only place where I can find belonging is in a place where I shouldn't be. At the same time, I have doubts that they would actually help outside of temporary stabilization. In order to get stabilization outside of inpatient, It requires a lot of work while carrying a heavy emotional burden alone. The work I have been doing was a lot of independent research on a broad range of topics, often trying to get knowledge of how human psychology works in order to detect and understand why my pathologies are emerging, what I can do, and how I can keep myself safe. The problem is that according to my research, I need a sense of belonging. This sense of belonging cannot be found with more knowledge. It requires finding people I can connect to. This is a recurring theme across all of my psychological problems. This is also why I want to live on college campus so I can try to find a new group of people to associate with. I want something outside of mental health that makes things worse long term. The reason the system I would be turning to makes things worse is because they shove a bunch a pills down your throat, temporarily make you feel better, and then set you up for relapse by leaving you without a future. This is all done while draining you until you are homeless or you die. I hate being alone. But in order to not be alone, I would have to do a lot of difficult emotional labor alone. A lot of times it seems unbearable. I often feel like it isn't worth it if death seems like the easy way out. The reason I haven't killed myself is because I could choose, or I could choose perpetual misery with the life I have, or I could choose an uncertain future by living on college campus and building a completely different life. Uncertainty is actually a good thing here because at least there is the possibility of a good outcome. If I fail and end up in a worse position, then I can revisit the idea of killing myself via a method I won't detail. Additionally, my psychological profile predicts that I would stay stuck in life rather than improve. I know the mechanism by which my psyche stays stuck. One factor is rumination on grief due to a lack of healthy relationships due to family estrangement and difficulty finding the support I need. In reality it barely exists at all unless I do all of the emotional labor necessary to get it, at which point I won't need it anymore. I especially hate weekends as that is the most isolating time of all. Everything is closed and there is much less to do. Personal development is what I reach for because I struggle to find anything else that would help. No hero is coming even when I actively look for professionals that specialize in my needs specifically. I hate life. I reach for spirituality from a broken place. I reach for achievement to find anything worth pursuing. Eventually, I just burnout. My desires have too frequently been an obstacle to overcome rather than something to embrace. This is part of why personal development is a mismatch for me as it falsely assumes my desires and passions are actually conducive to improvement. Instead I end up learning I'm supposed to grieve and then build a totally different life unrelated to my passions and for some reason not kill myself. There are way too many cracks in society for me to fall through. I want to take a shot with college, but the loneliness in the process feels unbearable. This is probably why I post a bunch a stuff like this on the forum because I wish I had somebody, but in the end the forum can't really solve this kind of problem either. It goes back to the same problem driving all my other problems. I ended up being recommended dating by multiple therapists, but this needs to be balances with employment problems and childhood sexual abuse which is what drove me into isolation to begin with. It particularly made me avoidant of dating. I also want to model what a healthy psyche for me would look like. I modeled all the versions of problems I could have with my psyche, but I want to focus on building the better psyche which requires connection and belonging. I tried to find a way to build a psychological fortress against this dilemma, but it doesn't seem to hold given enough time. I think there was an actualized video on loneliness in personal development a while back. Maybe I can find that video and watch it.

I made this video because I thought it would be funny. Is this video funny? Or is this video disappointing and unentertaining? I thought taking casual games really seriously would make it funny. I know it isn't actually that serious, but I hope you enjoy.

Okay, I figured it out. The short answer is no, we cannot prove that you took a shit. The explanation boils down to hard evidence versus circumstantial evidence that is commonly used in criminal justice. Circumstantial evidence can prove that you had the means, motives, opportunities, and capacity to take a shit. The problem is that circumstantial evidence cannot prove that someone did a certain act. In this case, you have access to a toilet and you have access to food which you eat. These circumstances prove that you would have the means and so forth to take a shit. The hard evidence helps, but isn't enough. We can use your water bill and theoretically calculate your water usage, including toilet flushes. This would prove that you went to the bathroom. It would not however prove that you took a shit. It could have been you screwing with the toilet for some other reason or maybe you took a piss. Even if we had an average calculation of how frequently you take shits generally, we could estimate the approximate time at which you would have taken shit if the pattern continues consistently. However, the problem is the absence of the shit itself. It is the most important evidence of all. If it were flushed down a toilet, the evidence is not recoverable. The problem is that if your shit mixed with other people's shit we won't know which one is yours. Ultimately, the problem with hard evidence is that it can be destroyed or it can deteriorate. It is also needed to prove definitively that a thing did happen and it isn't just speculation or a story or hearsay. This is a problem with history and especially ancient history. Past events are no longer with us physically, which allows for evidence to deteriorate. This is why we can't prove things like Jesus being a pedophile even if it were true.

This one is truck driver Jesus. I want to see what other ones I could find because the possibilities are endless for how Jesus could be depicted. This one is Jesus as a carpenter This one is Jesus as a jedi Jesus and the Buddha Chinese Jesus Blonde and brown Jesus. Brown Jesus is thought to be the most realistic. Black Jesus. This looks like a nice Jesus in my opinion. Capitalist Jesus. Jesus beating capitalists with a whip of cords. Jesus your buddy. Breakdancing Jesus DJ Jesus Lawn Jesus Misty using the power of Christ in the Pokemon Universe. Weed Jesus Skateboard Jesus Dentist Jesus Jesus on wheels Surfing Jesus Basketball Jesus Football Jesus Soccer Jesus Astronaut Jesus Cyberpunk Jesus McDonald's Jesus Cashier Jesus taking your order Computer Jesus Jesus with a cat Super Saiyan Jesus Sad Jesus Jesus the Airplane This is some very fun art of Jesus. Clearly the possibilities are endless. I hope you like these examples. I like how realistic Jesus seems to be my least favorite. At the same time, it makes sense given the circumstances he would have grown up in. The pretty looking Jesus makes sense when you think of it as a cultural symbol. It is supposed to look prettier than an actual human being. Although actual Jesus might seem a bit off-putting to me by comparison, if that is what actual Jesus looked like, then I accept it. The idealized versions would be a fantasy.

I ran into this by accident and I am not creative enough to make this up. I have been exploring Christianity and Islam while looking for similarities and differences. I believe I have a decent grasp on the historical Jesus and in the process I discovered inconsistencies in the history with one example being that Satan was not always a coherent character. Satan is closer to a modern invention and didn't come up until much later in terms of how we would think about him today. I previously toyed with videogame ideas when I was in high school. My idea was that there would be an apocalyptic threat with Jesus coming back to defeat the evil destroying the world. In my version, a priest runs to a church and prays for the savior who comes out of a white light emerging from the cross just in time. Jesus wields a golden spear that shoots lightening and uses a Bible like a spell book. You gain new spells by collecting scrolls that read Bible stories. One example would be "Let there be light!" which blinds the enemies so you can smite them. Jesus then goes onto tame and ride a bull into battle. This includes slaying countless demons, including the seven deadly sins as major bosses. The final battle would be Jesus versus Satan. This would involve "stars falling to the earth" interpreted as a nuclear war with ballistic missiles causing mass destruction throughout the battle. Satan would have lines like "you're mother moaned like a fucking whore when I ravaged her! Bow to your father you son of a bitch!" I think this would be fitting for Satan's character in such a game. Ultimately, Satan is defeated when Jesus holds the spear in a white light, causing it to take the form of a divine cross with which he impales Satan through the heart. Some thought this idea for a videogames sounded epic and they would play it. Others found it hilarious claiming "Jesus wasn't like that." Some found it blasphemous. I thought that sounded fun and epic. That said, I did discover that different cultures depicted Jesus in different ways. He wasn't always depicted as the humble healer. Sometimes he was depicted as a bloodied warrior, involving imagery even more radical than anything I could have imagined. In my opinion, the book of Revelations has an even more epic version of Jesus than what I came up with. The Rider on a White Horse 11 Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. 12 His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself. 13 He is clothed in a robe dipped in[a] blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. 14 And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. 15 From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. 16 On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords. I didn't think of a sword coming out of Jesus's mouth. That is even better than what I came up with. This opens up a lot of creative possibilities like Jesus holding a demon up by the throat, and then as the finisher move the sword comes out and impales the demon. He could even have a white horse that just runs on air instead of on water like what I was thinking. I was thinking of imagery like Jesus running across water and then up a tidal wave, after which he would shoot lightening into the mouth of a dragon called Gluttony. This kind of imagery was actually a source of schisms in ancient Christianity because it was incompatible with the loving and forgiving Jesus that we would normally think of today. Based on my understanding, Jesus was more like a social justice warrior who was opposed to the corruption of those in power who used their position to enrich himself. This ultimately led to his crucifixion and there was no resurrection that followed. The idea of bodily resurrection existed prior to Jesus by about 100 years. Given that ancient societies had different standards for evidence, it would have been possible to spread rumors that are given more credence than they should have. It probably mixed with Jesus performing "miracles" as a healer which allowed the myth to stick and spread over time until it became a theology about Jesus being God incarnate. This also fits with how Roman culture deified human figures such as emperors, by treating them like Gods. Describing Jesus as God would be part of the cultural transition for the religion. I also looked into the scholarly debate behind the virgin birth story. Some argue that Mary wasn't intended to be a virgin, but rather a young woman. This was a problem with the translations between Hebrew and Greek. Although we don't know for sure who the father was, some suspect that Mary may have been raped by a Roman soldier whom she could not identify. Jesus would then go onto to learn through oral traditions, but never learned how to read and write. Therefore, Jesus needed disciples to write for him as he couldn't write himself. I think this helps to see Jesus as more human rather than God-like if he didn't have this knowledge, and it makes sense given that education back then was kind of crappy due to the absence of the printing press. At the same time, this reminds me of the cutting line I gave Satan, as he could have been the Roman soldier in this scenario. There are also stories in the Christian traditions about demons coming to Earth and mating with human women, which again fits with the satanic narrative of the virgin rape theory. I find it very interesting that my idea of Jesus the Badass wasn't actually that far off. In fact, the tradition at times went even further than anything I imagined. I hope this is a good illustration of how idols are constructed across cultures. Jesus could range anywhere between loving, forgiving, and healing or total badass drenched in the blood of the wicked. Personally, I would fear God if God came to me in this form. It also seems very difficult to hold these two images of Jesus side by side.

I think part of the problem is that although I don't intellectually believe in the claims of religion, the symbol of Jesus sticks in my mind anyway somewhat as a comforting figure that operates independently of whether or not the source material is true. I am also afraid of being lumped together with pre rational religion if this part of me were known. This carries with it the risk of various judgments that I then start guarding against in advance. It would be from all sides including Christian therapists I had who I had terrible experiences with or rationally minded people who might box me in a way I don't belong. In my experience, I generally feel safer with rationally minded people overall because at least I can follow their reasons more easily. I also know the problems with religion they would find hilarious. Meanwhile, with deeply religious people, I risk triggering them by not fitting their narrow interpretation even if I operate within the overall framework. I don't like the looks I get when I start mentioning the Buddha or Muhammad. In terms of my overall beliefs concerning the historical Jesus, I seem to more closely align with the atheist interpretation. I think atheists would be more willing to accept my interpretation than theists. I also remember that I took the agnostic position partially because I learned managing people's emotions as a relationship survival skill. I don't really feel safe or like I belong with these communities as a result of the stigma and labels that make me feel like I'm in danger of being judged in some way. It reinforces isolation once again.

@kavaris Yeah. I sense that these themes relate to my life in some way but I have a hard time explaining it. It included things like a dream in which I met Jesus. I jumped into a black abyss willing as if it were honorable in some way. I had faith that I would one day return to the light. I have had this struggle sense childhood in which I didn't believe in what religion claimed, but at the same time it stuck in my mind anyway. I didn't want to convert to any religion unless I first verified that it was true. This is why I started researching various religions by around age seven. I wasn't really convinced by any of them though. Even so, my family was Christian in name. They prayed at the table and occasionally went to church, but they didn't seem very confident when questioned and didn't seem very devoted. Meanwhile, since early childhood my father fled the state to avoid paying child support. He was a criminal who I knew wasn't trustworthy but I loved him anyway. He also preached religion while being a drug dealer who made me the subject of a child prostitution deal for his gang. He was also using crack. I knew my mom and dad got into a lot of fights, but for some reason I thought that if I were good enough then maybe mom and Dad would love each other. Jesus first started sticking in my head when my mother threatened me with jail at age six over sexualized play with my four year old sister. She seemed to have been accusing me of rape while assuming adult motives for a child. For some reason I had a dream in which uncle Mike molested me and I didn't realize this behavior was illegal. Once my mother calmly and coldly dismantled my entire psyche and caused me a mental breakdown through her lies, I had no stable reality anymore. I started having Jesus stick in my head even though I didn't believe it. I was also growing up as the only boy with an absent father. The closest thing to a father figure would have been my grandpa who was most consistently present though occasional visits. He told me I was worthless, would get stuck at a dead end job, and that my sister had more potential than me. Much of my understanding of relationships became managing other people's anger so I wouldn't be hurt. The next closest father figure was my other grandpa. I remember when I was seven I had one moment with him when he got on his knee put his hand on my shoulder and told me he wanted me to be good. Other than that we didn't typically talk much. This memory still held strong though and it is what I remembered at his funeral when I collapsed. After that my dad told me about how that man was a gangster. He told me I could tell him anything so he could get information on mom to use in court. This is how he learned about her drug addiction and used it against her. For some reason I wanted to kill myself. I wished that I could have a decent human being in my life to help me understand life, but I was upset by the fact that I didn't spend as much time with my father's dad as I wanted to. I hate having to figure out everything myself. It makes things way more difficult than it needs to be. I seem to have this conflict between trustworthy in terms of epistemology versus trustworthy in terms of safety. Jesus seems to represent something in all of this, but I struggle to pinpoint what exactly. If you can explain the connection between Jesus and all of this in my life, that would be great.

I have recently stumbled into this topic when exploring mythology. I started with hero archetypes, then villains, and then monsters. As I followed the origin of monster stories, I came to the medieval ages to find what on the surface looked like blatant insanity. Upon closer inspection, I started to realize that the apparent insanity wasn't as obvious as it first appeared. It has raised some interesting philosophical questions in terms of what we consider obvious and why. A few of the monsters I started exploring were vampires and werewolves. I understood that the witch trials already had a bad reputation, but I learned that in addition to that there were also werewolf trials, pig trials, and beetle trials. Firstly, the vampire panics were explainable by ignorance concerning the decomposition process of the body. The process resulted in the appearance of nails and teeth continuing to grow, bloating which looked like feasting, and blood appearing in the mouth as a consequence of decomposition. Sometimes the bodies would appear fresher than expected, which appears to be the origin of vampire stories of blood sucking monsters. Furthermore, the mental state of the people during this time period is explainable by food poisoning. Ergotism didn't have an understood cause. However, the fungal infection on rye often caused people to develop vivid hallucinations and delusions. This would explain the outsized fear of supernatural entities causing mass suffering if there was no way of confirming the existence of germs during that time period. The most interesting part in my opinion were the pig trials. Animals were believed to have held moral standing to face human judgment for breaking the law. It sounds obviously crazy, but I started looking more concretely. The most difficult pig defense trials involved a pig entering a cottage due to hearing the sound of a crying infant. The infant was kept in a cradle near snout level. The pig would then eat the baby while the parents were doing long labor elsewhere. Pigs were often able to do this because cottages often didn't have doors and pigs commonly roamed freely. Pigs killing children happened frequently enough that it was considered as normal as babies dying from disease. This creates a weird contradiction in terms of how we determine if an animal has moral agency or not if we cannot experience what it is like to be an animal. This question isn't as easily answered from my point of view, although there might be a known explanation I haven't seen yet. Personally, I can see why someone would think that my cat has the capacity for willful moral agency because she jumps on the counter only at night when nobody is looking, but jumps down immediately and runs upon being discovered and therefore stopped doing it during the day. The pig trials start to almost seem reasonable given the need for legal documentation of the cause of death, separating it from a death caused by human action. This would include issues such as killing a dangerous animal, similar to contemporary euthanasia for dangerous animals. It would include penalties for the owner if this animal has repeatedly shown violent behavior. It starts to look like the only crazy thing is the added layer of moral judgment to the pig with much of the behavior otherwise mirroring what we would expect for a dangerous animal that needs to be put down. The part that threw me off though was when I read about how confessions were extracted from animals. The idea was that a pig would publicly have its limbs mutilated. If the pig squirmed or squealed, then that counted as a confession and therefore met the gold standard of proof of guilt for that time. Much of the pig trials seemed almost reasonable until I looked at how confessions from animal defendants were extracted and interpreted. I also have a hypothesis regarding shadow figures and sleep paralysis that I intend to explore later. I had nightmares with shadow figures myself and I am connecting to demon stories. It included the incubus and the succubus as sex demons who raped people while they were sleeping. This corresponds to my nightmares of being sexually assaulted by shadow figures during sleep paralysis, and this phenomenon is probably linked to real sexual abuse perpetrated by humans in many cases resulting in nightmares from PTSD. Shadow figures appear to represent a persons deep insecurities, hence they might also be satanic figures trying to harvest your soul. I believe I may have found an intersection between modern understanding of trauma, sleep disorders, and mythology which explains why ancient people would have attributed the phenomenon to actual demons. The advantage of blaming a demon is that the demon cannot be punished in the same way as a human who could therefore shift blame to things like demons who deceived a child. This would therefore allow the child molester to avoid accountability by gaslighting children into believing that it was an actual nightmare with a well known demon to explain it rather than the human actually being responsible for molesting the child. This sounds like something a child predator would realistically do in these circumstances. If you are interested in exploring apparent insanity in medieval reasoning, are you able to find things that almost seem reasonable given the circumstances? How do we know animals don't have moral agency in their actions? How would you explain phenomenon if you didn't know germ theory? These seems like a rich topic in terms of how we know what we know and why people believe crazy things.

I'm curious. Couldn't I simply say that if you believe in Jesus, then you will be damned because he was a false prophet and only in disbelieving him will we be saved? I could in theory take the opposite position of the church and say that believing them will lead you straight to hell. This forces a position in which no matter what there is always a risk of damnation no matter what you believe and there is no safe belief as any incorrect belief in regards to ancient history leads to damnation. Fear mongering in the direction of religious belief seems to be effective at scale, but I could also fear monger about genocides motivated by religion and ideology in general. At the same time, I did recognize a difficult cognitive dissonance I still struggle with to some degree. From the beginning I never intellectually believed in the Bible. I was like this since my family first started praying at the table, but they didn't explain it very well so I wasn't convinced. However, from mere exposure, I would have dreams about Jesus anyway as if he represented great virtue and a means of redemption as it related to things like depression and trauma with deep shame and self-blame. This internal cognitive dissonance in which mere exposure caused familiarity and a sense that it is somehow true despite conscious disbelief became deeply confusing and it is probably the main reason why I read so much into religion despite knowing its numerous problems and why I would have to be intellectually naive to believe these things. Maybe the reason I do so much learning is partially because I mistook a need for love with a need for knowledge. It is hard for me to find love though, so I often end up sticking to more learning on a broad range of topics instead. For me love requires trust, but it is hard to trust humans if they believe in things like this. I seem to define people committed to honest truth seeking as more trust worthy. I might be confused with what trust means in the context of love. It probably means trust that I will be safe and I will not be endangered. This might relate to how trusting that Jesus will save you will stop you from being damned. In my case being damned would be more like perpetual self-hatred and the absence of love.

@LordFall I didn't know about the fortune telling, but that does seem to be a way to avoid execution in some cases. I am somewhat baffled as to why a messenger would be killed for bringing bad news. If the bad news were never received, then the outcome would realistically lead to worse news. Maybe bad news makes the King look fallible and therefore ungodly which in turn challenges his authority. As for the werewolf trials, apparently people suspected you of being a werewolf if you engaged in cannibalism. There were also regular wolf attacks that when put together led to the idea of man transforming in wolf. It was a specialized branch of witch hunters that targeted shepherds. Here is a quote from Google I find funny. There are several layers of irony in this 1692 case. An 80-year-old man who testified in court that he was a werewolf who fought witches in Hell to secure good crops was ultimately laughed out of court and convicted only of minor folk magic. [1] As for institutionalized Christianity, the contradictions seemed structurally unavoidable. Due to being persecuted early on by more dominant religions, in order to survive as a religion at all, Christianity required imperial backing. Imperial backing would therefore allow the religion to persist at all, similar to Islam which was founded on an empire. Because other religions challenge the truth of the dominant religion, the incentive is therefore to eliminate less dominate religions. The outcome is that Christianity started out as a Jewish reform movement designed to fight corruption, but by necessity became a persecutor in order to even exist today. If not for the imperial backing and mass executions, Christianity would not exist at all and would have been wiped out along with many other forgotten or abandoned religions that are occasionally mentioned only briefly. This is the basis of an entire alternative history in the event that Jesus and his followers were executed so there would be no rumors of a resurrection or if persecution continued more aggressively or if Constantine's conversion failed. I believe Christianity survived in large part due to rumors about Jesus coming back. This pattern continues to this day with things like prophecies predicting the end of the world and constantly being wrong. I believe this applies to the resurrection myth as well due to people at that time more readily accepting such rumors as true as a consequence of these miracles being adjacent to the types of things these people would already believe anyway. I also found that early Christians did not always think of Jesus as God himself. This idea become more popular in Rome and Greece because this culture deified beloved figures constantly such as emperors whereas the Jewish reform movement did not characterize Jesus in this way originally as it would therefore be blasphemy. Therefore, the idea that Jesus is literally God and the Holy Spirit who descended into heaven is a consequence of being filtered through multiple cultures as this wasn't always the mainstream position of Christianity. In fact, it looks like the ending might have been "forgive them father for they know not what they do." Then Jesus was executed and he never came back. That isn't very inspiring though, so in order to survive, there would have to be rumors of his return from death. This also fits with our historical findings that a man named Jesus was crucified during this time period, but news of his return didn't come until years after the three day resurrection myth. Fan fiction was also common around this period which explains the contradictions along with the politicized processed of selecting the Biblical cannon by excluding certain versions of events concerning the crucifixion and the nature of Christ. Also, it looks like Jesus would be considered a witch if he did these things in a different time period. The last interesting point I found was the pattern of terminating the line of succession while maintaining unfalsifiability which would be necessary for maintaining power and authority. This included things like Jesus is the savior, and any words added would be blasphemy. The implication is that people suspected future prophets would come, claiming similar things to Jesus, which in turn would falsify the religion. This is also identical to Islam which claimed the third and final prophet. Religion has to add finality in order to discredit other religions regardless of their content while maintaining unfalsifiability. They can then say "well Jesus could walk on water, so when you say all these crazy things and fail to walk on water, then it means your lying and should be hanged for spouting such nonsense!" Jesus among other prophets have to made Godly because if they are too human, then the religion is immediately falsifiable and therefore loses authority and power. This is a similar trial of ordeal in those times where they would also torture pigs. If the pig squirmed and squealed, then that would be proof of a confession of guilt. Likewise there were trials like being thrown into a river where if you survived, it meant you were guilty and needed to be put to death and if you drowned and died it would mean you were innocent. Therefore if you want to die with integrity, you should kill yourself while we tell everybody you were guilty as to avoid even worse torture. So die, or die!

No way in hell. Humanity has too many problems it needs to sort out itself. We are a long way off from aliens being ready to show themselves. Where did you get this secret knowledge from? Humans?

@Basman awesome! I did that too! I actually saw all kinds of monsters and I discovered that if I focus on the monster closely and don't close my eyes, I can will the monster to fade away and become nothing. If I close my eyes, then I start feeling pressure on my body and sometimes it feels like hands wrapping around my arms. Some of the monsters I saw included the following. Shadow figures, mechanical clowns but oddly not the one from poltergeist that most assume, ghosts, my grandma as a vampire, general grievous from Star wars which actually looked terrifying when you see that thing for real but he then transformed into the door near my bed, a redead from the legend of zelda who I escaped by flying out of my body and into a zelda like dungeon except this one had an elephant in it, and a demonic symbol with my sister smiling at me along with another nightmare with my sister storming into my room angrily. I remember one of the shadow figures looked like a girl from school who grabbed my penis and the nightmare was about her coming to my bed while I couldn't move. Meanwhile, my older sister would often yell, scream, and badger me for hours on end to the point that I would freeze, shock, have nightmares, and so forth as I tried walking on eggshells to prevent catastrophe. Sometimes I talk in my sleep. I started talking about Cindy who died by suicide. I also noticed that I can consciously control my dreams by forcing myself awake by focusing my awareness on my eyelids while noticing that I am still seeing images despite my eyelids being closed. Alternatively, I can start rewinding my dreams and going back in time to earlier parts in it which delays it enough for new content to pop up. I ended up in the Simpsons in one of these dreams. It kind of looked like that arcade game with bart doing a long essay. I also remember a really fun one in which I played the role of Sherlock Holmes, working together with Harry Potter to defeat Darth Vader. Sometimes I would go back in time or reload to the previous checkpoint when I was losing. In the end we defeated Darth vader by collapsing a building as Harry summoned his broomstick, allowing us to jump on and escape. I do remember there was a really annoying level with Malfoy though who had dementors helping him and that part was a pain in the ass which required going back to previous checkpoints to make sure I clicked the buttons at the right time. I also had this other epic zelda like dream in which I was fighting these mutant insects with fire swords. There was a gold skulltula in it, but the best part is when I figured out how to beat the game. Once I got to the main villain, he said "if you want to stop them, then you need to hit pause." My girlfriend was like "hit pause? What is this some kind of videog-" Then a pause menu came up and I scrolled down to quit. I selected quit. Then I woke up. There was also this epic dream in which I fought the British who were red coats on unicycles with assault rifles in attack formation. I used a flamethrower on one of them. Eventually I ran away and one of them got my flamethrower. He then started chasing me while shooting fire at me yelling "get back here you bloody bastard!" Eventually I got away from though. Many of my comrades were lost in that brutal battle. I felt like I was going to pee myself, but I woke up in time to go to the bathroom. There was also this really epic one in which my high school principal tried to execute me because the second paragraph of my essay sucked so badly that I was a dishonor to my school and I deserved to die for the bad paragraph on my essay. I woke up flailing my arms and legs and then I whited out the second paragraph for fear that my teacher would ruin my life over confessing my love for Alice. The essay prompt was to write about people who inspire you, so I wrote about someone who makes life feel meaningful but was afraid I would be hanged for it.

@Leo Gura I'm curious. If you were born in a society like this, but you were as committed to truth in that life as you are in this one, then how would you go about truth seeking without having you and your followers killed for blasphemy? I would probably be beheaded just for listening for to you. I probably wouldn't talk much and I might not even be literate if there was no school. In this situation it seems hard to avoid turning out crazy or stupid sounding.

@Ulax I heavily doubt rape statistics. I have seen many unreliable statistics such as how many women make false rape allegations. The ranges are crazy and there is no clean way to measure it. In the event that an accusation is ruled false, it doesn't mean it was false as there could be insufficient proof. Likewise just because an accusation is ruled true, doesn't mean it is true and it could in reality be a false conviction. Trying to measure things like false allegations would need to assume that the data from courts is perfect and there are no false convictions ever under any circumstances. Trafficking victims are commonly accused of making false rape accusations because they are framed as prostitutes when really they were coerced. This would be a true accusation labeled a false accusation as one example. I doubt even more heavily that 2% statistic. I believe it is more like 0.01% or less rapes lead to a conviction. We would need to account for incest victims who never report, drug facilitated sexual assault victims who never realize what happened to them, trafficking victims who are framed as prostitutes, and especially war time rape which is probably way less likely to lead to accountability. It might be even more like less than 0.0001% of rapes lead to conviction when accounting for other countries and war zones. Add to that how many people our prisons can even realistically hold. There is no way that our prison could hold even a fraction of the number rapists there actually are. It simply seems impossible for these convictions to get anywhere near the majority. On top of that, think of how expensive the entire legal process would be in addition to having family members that protect perpetrators over victims. There are so many factors that would prevent conviction on top of difficulty with the burden of proof. There are definitely cases that happened but can't easily be proven by our standards. These don't make it to court not because they are bogus, but for a lack of proof, often being labeled bogus. Obviously we need proof in order to know for sure if these allegations are true or not, but I also know that true cases cannot necessarily be proven such as my case with my father and his gang. My family members therefore called my allegations slander when I described child sex trafficking carried out by organized criminals who concealed evidence such that I wouldn't be able to prove it was them due to their awareness of this very legal process while finding ways to exploit it.

Am I just noticing this, or are there actually more rape allegations coming to light than there used to be? It might be the case that victims have now felt emboldened by the Me Too movement and the previous allegations that came to light and gained clear momentum. Is this actually different from how it used to be because of the Me Too movement or have their always been this many rape allegations in the public light but we didn't take them as seriously as we do now because of the proven cases we have seen by this point?

I don't remember this being mentioned in deconstructing science. You might have mentioned it elsewhere. I know there is the polygrapher which can be decieved by a psychopath due to how they are neurologically wired. It is the closest attempt I have seen along with body language which also fails due to ambiguous signals. In courts there are homicide investigators who could find counter evidence to the murderer's alibi. I have a vague sense of what your frame of reference is with the scientific method breaking down when evidence is deliberately tampered with, suppressed, and falsified. This is probably why to this day courts haven't figured out how to handle frame up scenarios when the evidence all points the wrong way. Currently developed countries still haven't found a good solution to countless frame ups due to compromised evidence being inherent to such cases.

If you took a shit in the toilet and flushed the toilet, then the evidence is gone. We will never know which shit is yours due to the shit being mixed with other shit. You also could be lying and it could have been a piss even if we had your water usage and tracked your toilet flushes.

@Leo Gura so it sounds like at the end of the day if evidence is destroyed in the case of empirical questions, the answer is simply that we don't know. Otherwise there are countless UFO stories that could easily be fabricated. Part of what concerns me is that it sounds like for empirical questions, even if evidence could theoretically demonstrate the claim, practically evidence will often be lost or destroyed. The passage of several thousand years will one day make all of this ancient history with many unprovable claims. I seem to be looking at the limitations of empiricism even if a claim is theoretically provable but practically complex enough that it isn't discovered until the evidence is gone. It suggests that there are an endless number of empirical facts which are true but won't be proven even if they theoretically could be.

@Ramanujan according to my understanding, IQ measures the rate at which you learn. It doesn't mean that what you learn will be true as you can learn all the wrong things. By learning all the wrong things quickly these beliefs can sometimes become entrenched depending on the environment this person operates in. For example, a person with high IQ could learn religious justifications for slavery quickly and deeply. They might even out debate you by making it seem convincing. It doesn't mean what they believe is true. Similarly, they could become con artists by learning how to effectively lie to people for their money. IQ matters for the rate at which you learn. Commitment to truth is a separate matter. Here on actualized we see intelligence more as commitment to truth and alignment with God through consciousness. This requires open mindedness and a willingness to question what we believe. If a person has deeply entrenched beliefs, then you might have someone with high IQ who sounds like a complete idiot from the outside because they learned the wrong things quickly and didn't question it.

@Miguel1 Thanks. A similar example of proving a negative would be unconscious bias in things like racism and sexism. Can you prove that you do not have an unconscious racial bias? I can't say "I have black friends" because that would be the proximity argument. I can't say "I'm not racist" because that would be defensiveness which makes me look racist. Theoretically, if I accused you of being racist, then how in theory could you possibly prove that you are not racist and have no unconscious bias? I am very curious to know the answer to this because I don't think there is one. I believe the best defense against this would be if a person were born blind, deaf, and mentally disabled such that they can never learn communication at all. That way they would have no way of knowing that race exists. They would be truly color blind. Leo has a similar problem with being made to prove a negative. Sometimes it is actually impossible.

The problem is the duality of natural versus artificial. If humans are living creatures, then we have an instinct to survive. The tools available to this end is our rationality. Rationality itself is a result of natural processes. Human systems stemming from our higher order thoughts would therefore be the result of us trying to survive as a species which is still natural. Man made objects are still part of nature just like an ant hill being made by ants. I'm also curious. If you wanted to invent your own ideology, what would you come up with? How close to perfect could an ideology possibly be? Currently, I don't know what ideology I would invent. I have many different frameworks which ultimate tie back to helping me understand reality. I think of them more as theories or positions within limited domains which get refined over time. Many of them are connected to my survival in some way. That said, maybe a meta ideology about lenses through which understand ideologies would be a better ideology than most while still being able to deconstruct itself.

@Leo Gura I think it is fair for you to be annoyed with these claims. 1. You are not forcing adherence to any ideology. 2. Others probably conflate your claims of absolute truth with absolutism. 3. You give many different sources such as the book list, creating diversity rather than an absolutistic stance. 4. You are frequently being characterized as a narcissist with no obvious way of proving a negative without extensive psychological study. 5. It probably hurts your business in the process of being alienated with no way of combating what sounds like slander. 6. When accused of being a cult leader, any argument you supply runs into the problem of proving a negative. "He is just saying that because he is a cult leader." There is no way around the narrative once it is set.

It sounds like environmentalism is the most defensible so long as we don't start a genocide against the entirety of humanity. I remember there used to be "let it burn" policies for forest fires. It raises the question of what is natural. is genocide natural? Maybe if someone views the world as an interconnected environment, then from that perspective humanity is a data point in the environment rather than the most important thing in the universe. This can create a morally detached position in which humans are just animals with rationality, barely more important other animals if at all. I guess if I were truly detached, then there is no need to save the world either. The idea of saving the world taken to extreme is what destroys the world.

This is disturbing. Apparently, LGBTQ was bad but this is somehow acceptable for schools to do. I am kind of stunned that this somehow passed, but I guess tech companies want money that badly and the AI bubble is exhausting itself rapidly with this race to the bottom.