Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Belief Creates Reality II

I would now like to talk about apocalyptic thinking in regard to belief creating reality. The problem with apocalyptic thinking is what if you are wrong? What if you decided to create the apocalypse because all your relatives believed it needed to happen and you were all wrong? So you go out and get your one megaton to 20 megaton nuclear weapons and blow up a city. Then you are angry when people don't surrender immediately so you blow up another city. The Soviet Union and the United States and even Europe and China have already played this game with computers and all know that no one ever wins but also know that no one can afford to give up or surrender. So after one after another of all the big cities on earth are gone, what then? Earth?

The problem with all this is like when someone owns a football when they are a kid and unless that kid gets to be quarterback he takes his football home so no one can play. It is really kind of like this. Only in this case all life on earth is gone. What if what you believe turns out to be a fairy tale and you just drove all life on earth extinct? So just because what you believe wasn't true you ended it for everyone.

Now, one with this kind of belief system might say, "It has to be real because all my relatives and friends believe it." No. It doesn't. Look how many people believed the earth was flat or believed that the earth rode on the back of a turtle for thousands of years. Millions of people believed those things too but it didn't make them true either.

All humans need to believe in something so parents thousands of years ago made up stuff so kids could sleep at night. Slowly, over thousands of years those things got codified into what we believe now. However, how much of what people believe is actually true and what just makes people feel good so they don't kill themselves.
The answer is no one really knows. Only Time will tell.

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