Expanding on That Last Post

Dan wrote: I've also often wondered how the less than fortunate deal with their lives as well. I find it curious that many people who seem to struggle the most in life are also the most religious. I wonder if they turn towards religion willingly because it's the only thing that gives them a sense of hope, or if they're simply more vulnerable to the parasitic clutches of organized religion. Perhaps it's a bit of both.

I can understand how people who are struggling may find hope in a religion that promises a rewarding afterlife. After all, if this life isn't going so well, there is opportunity to experience something better after death. My desire for a clean end comes from a fairly privileged perspective: I feel that I can try to wring the most meaning and joy out of this life before I'm ready to go. Assuming I have the chance. If you don't have nearly as much opportunity to experience comfort and security now, why wouldn't you hope to have it later? I think this hope and desire for some divine justice will lead a lot of people to embrace religion. Personally, I still think "just dying" would be just fine, because once you are dead you have no desire or regret. But whatevs.

Jeff wrote: If there is no Hell or Heaven yet we, as a species, either individually or collectively, can manifest reality from thought, would we then create a Hell or Heaven where there was once nothing? Does this make us Gods?

Can we, individually or collectively, manifest reality from thoughts? Jeff did not define exactly what he means by "reality," so I will be forced to assume that he is referring to our common experience of "reality*": that which we can experience with our five senses, in 4 dimensions (time being the fourth, of course). Can we manifest "reality" using only collective ideas? I believe that we can to an extent. Yet that requires more action than just collectively thinking about something - it requires communication, technology, even physical labor depending on what it is we are creating. That's how we've created most of our cultural traditions and ideas about how to behave and what people are like. It seems to me that outside of the actual potential reality or unreality of Heaven and Hell, our culture shares a common understanding of these concepts. Heaven and Hell as a concept or cultural manifestation is "real," in that it exists within our collective minds and ideas. But whether or not we can experience it the same way we experience our day-to-day existence remains a mystery. So I dunno, I wouldn't consider people Gods because they can come up with a collectively-understood concept such as Heaven or Hell (assuming people did invent these ideas themselves). And I don't have at my fingertips any evidence that we can manifest what I would consider "reality" from thought and I am lazy today so I'm not looking it up.

In other news: hooray for fall! Also, next weekend I'm going to be presenting a paper at an academic conference in upstate New York. Hooray for new experiences!

*Please excuse my lazy definition of reality. I don't even want to get into a philosophical discussion about the nature of reality because I am woefully undereducated when it comes to these common philosophical tropes.