h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

LOL !!!

Hmmm ... so much to say, so little time ...

My links all got moderated. Damn. They were not 'unsuitable' ... they were wholly suited to my purpose but it seems the people who run this site are a bit squeamish ... one of the pages had photographss on it, above a row of severed heads, and below the body of a person who had been crucified for real, hanging from a cross. The site was of a group of folks calling themselves the 'Christian Holocaust' movement with the avowed aim of exterminating Christianity as well as Christians, and there were some fine testimonials of people as to the people they'd killed and still want to kill. They also called their movement a 'Total F***ing War ... Total Nihilistic War ... Total Hate War' against Christianity. So anyways, folks, there are people who go to these extremes against religion and religious people. If anybody wants the links for real, contact me by email, which is on my Uspace.

Now ... there's much still I want to say, but let me address Pheroneous for a while.

Quote:

'Well, I don't know you guys. It seems we understand language diferently. It is a fact that this brick wall is hard and a fact that my head is soft. It is a fact that it hurts when I bang my head against the brick wall. The fact that I am not actually doing any head banging doesn't alter the fact that I would if I did.'

End quote.

This is where my 'special experience' comes in handy!! Like I told earlier I am schizophrenic, and have experienced psychoses. And nowadays I am on medication, but I'm still schizophrenic. And this I know:

The 'real world' is a consensus reality. The majority of people believe that this world is reality, the majority of people accept this world as the one and only true real world. But crazy people know better!!! If everybody in the world was schizophrenic, then the 'real world' would have been a totally different world, and the 'facts' about it would have been totally different facts! Now you got to ask yourself this ... do you really know, and can you really say for sure, that the majority of the people in the world right now ARE INDEED SANE, AND NOT CRAZY???

Do you know for a fact that *you* are indeed sane, and not crazy??

Consider what I asked you to imagine earlier ... that everybody in the world was schizophrenic. Then 'schizophrenia' would merely have been 'normal' 'expected' and considered 'sane'. Crazy people are crazy because they are *different* from what is normal. But could the crazy people not perhaps be saner than the so-called normal people? Look at some of the absurd things happening in the 'real world' and you may just come to the conclusion that the average people inhabiting and especially the ones running it are, perhaps, all seriously disturbed!

Being what I am, I look at the so-called 'real world' with much skepticism. I see people doing the same thing I do ... they construct great imaginary towers and palaces and countries and worlds in their minds, and they project these onto what they believe to be the outside world, and believe in these as if they were real. The same thing is going on with modern science!! They're spinning much of it straight out of their dreams and fantasies. The whole problem is that our modern scientific endeavour is based on the idea of 'objectivity' ... whereas it all depends on *human perception*, which is intrinsically subjective. I'm now reading an excellent book on human perception and maybe I'll later say a few things from that ... but anyways, we all ought to realise the importance of the subjective dimension ... we cannot really ever escape this subjectivity unless there is really a kind of mystical transcendentalism going on. To get to the point ... while scientists may believe that with their intricate experiments they are observing the 'outside world' ... what in actuality may be happening is that they are all merely observing their own, inner worlds!! And afterwards they may just all be agreeing to call a certain set of observations of their inner worlds and the theories extrapolated therefrom 'the real world'.

Hey, just to make it clear, though: I do believe in 'reality'. I do believe the Earth we are living on is a planet, in space, and that close to us there is a star, called the Sun, and in between and beyond there are other planets, with moons, and asteroids, and even further beyond are more stars, galaxies, and so forth ... but I also believe that this is by far not the only real reality. Being what I am, I know of billions of different realities, and their various relations to the so-called only real one. One of my favourite realities is a glorious Earth where the people are living in harmony with each other and with nature ... they have a global civilisation that is based on telepathy, the entirety of the world's 160 billion people (most of them living off Earth, in space colonies and on other planets) are all linked up with each other to form a massive mental 'internet' that goes billions of billions of times beyond any kind of 'net' we imagine. Some very great friends of mine come from that world and to me they, and their world, are totally real, concrete, physical, substantial, and I can observe them, talk to them, do things together with them ... but I know it's not this real world, it's totally different, and people from this world can't see them or their world. And so there are many other such worlds, with many different kinds of realities. I can observe these worlds, like you can observe the wall in front of you ... I can observe these people, I can see them, hear them, feel them ... but according to you, and according to scientists from here who may try to observe them, they are not real at all. You would say they are figments of my imagination. Well, fine. But how do you know that the people and the things *you* see, and experience, as if they were totally real, were not figments ot *your* imagination?! Remember, people who are crazy often don't realise that they are ... and they may be inhabiting whole worlds, full of people and things, that seem as real to them as this world and everything in it seems to you!

Just a little conundrum for everybody here to ponder. Truth be told, every person needs a leap of faith to get from their own subjective perceptions to the *belief* that there does indeed exist an outside world that is 'real', independent of their perceptions.

And next time, maybe a day or three from now, I'll say a few things about your conjecture of how religions were formed, as 'opiates' by which powerful individuals or groups could control larger groups.

"The 'real world' is a consensus reality. The majority of people believe that this world is reality, the majority of people accept this world as the one and only true real world."

I completely agree with you about that Willem. And the implications are as fully bizare as you suggest.

B

Pillowcase,
I state here that you are one of the *sanest* persons I ever heard of.
And this, of course, because I totally agree with your view and the implications of what you say.

And as I can be a little crazy too, let's carry this to an (apparent) extreme.

Does anybody think the world he's looking at is really "real"? That it's out of him? Well, let's talk about the way the images form in our brain. There's a whole lot of brain cells involved in this process, and usually we think and believe that we're "seeing" the processed images of what we have in front, outside of our skull.

But what about dreams? And what about imagination? We SEE those images, and smell smells, and hear noises and musics, and have feelings, and can taste things... Neuro-imaging demonstrates that while you THINK of something you activate THE VERY SAME BRAIN CELLS you activate when looking/hearing/etc. at it. So who the heck can be sure that the images he sees are not ONLY A PRODUCT OF HIS BRAIN ACTIVITY? No external object needed!!

And don't come with all this "but I can touch it too!" stuff. The same I said about sight fits all and every sense. And brain coordinates it all. Hypnosis first, and virtual reality after, taught us this.

So what were we saying about "facts"?...

twinsouls

I'll be quick, as I haven't much time - work issues .

Anyway, I actually aggree with a lot of what Wileim (apologies if I misspelled that) says. Berkely pointed out that we have nothing to go on but our perceptions and that nothing exists outside the 'mind'. No, I don't believe that the 'mind' is an entity, just a concept, but, yes, it does require a leap of faith to go outside that. Mine was towards materialism, and , because I believe in consistancy, ultimately towards atheism.

Ans the idea of religion as an opiate to control the people -- Jesus was executed for political reasons, Mohammed had to flee for his life, and Luther was dependent on protection from the powers for years. How could a controling mechanism have been created by rebels?

Mr Pillowcase, the head banging allusion was simply a rueful comment on my perception that I am having an argument with people that will not listen, which is difficult, plus a, therefore, humourous illustration of what a "fact" is, insofaras it is a "fact" that walls are hard and heads are soft.

Mr Leg, religion was around in one form or another long before Jesus, Mohamed and Luther. I don't for one minute suggest that anyone invented these characters, all of whom I take to have been very real. It is a fact that they lived, and a strong probability that they were good, innocent, and charismatic people. I am not suggesting that they, these three, or any others like them, created any 'opiate'. What I am suggesting is that the hysteria they generated and manipulated (whether intentionally or not) was useful to, and encouraged by, the powers that be, by whom I mean the rich and powerful interested in maintaining the status quo. That, of course, is the shorthand. The actual mechanisms would be much more a function of the way societies work than the result of deliberate policy or action by any group.

OK ... Twinsouls, I hope you see there is as well an inherent contradiction in saying that all that we perceive happens inside our brains, whether it be the views we see or imagine or the feel of something we touch. For the 'brain' cannot perceive itself ... we only actually know we have brains because when other people's heads are cut open there can be seen and taken out and examined an object that corresponds to the concept 'brain'. But if *that* observation also only happens inside the 'brain', then there may actually be no external brains, if you get my drift ... the whole concept of 'brain' is just one more concept that happens inside the *mind*. And all the experiments showing us what the brain looks like on the outside and the inside, and macroscopically and microscopically, and how our senses work and how the nerve cells work are still all just things happening inside the 'mind', whatever mind that may be.

Let me now get to God ... I, too, believe in consistency. I believe that realities need minds to exist in. I say there is no reality without some kind of 'mind' to hold it, to know it. That is a philosophical, metaphysical statement, I cannot prove it in any way whatsoever, I can only say that my own experiences of my own 'explorations' of my own mind, 'showing' to me this and other realities, support the contention that mind is the primary kind of 'thing' that exists. Now, if people do have separate minds, then every human being has a mind that differs from that of another ... and so every human being sees a 'reality' that looks different from that of another. But if these different realities are all merely subjective, then there is no 'overreaching' reality, only a confused mass of different and in many cases contradictory realities. There could only be a 'single, objective' reality if there was a single, objective mind to hold it. That's the mind of God! To me, God has to exist, because otherwise things would not 'make sense'. Without God, there would not be such a thing as Reality, or such as Truth. In my personal philosophical system, that is, and I can't find any other system that to me makes sense. But because I believe in God, I believe that from the mass of different realities there can emerge a single Reality, which is a 'summed total' of all the different subjective realities. God makes *all* realities real, even the realities of crazy folks, each in their own way. And to me, what God is, is merely the summed total of all minds ... but somehow, this summed total works as a single mind that is bigger than the sum of its parts. Because the way it seems to us, our minds don't 'connect' with each other very well, we seem often to be at odds with each other ... but in the Mind of God there does not exist these petty conflicts. It's weird to try and think about. But anyways, talking 'mechanistically;, just note that the mind of God may be like a 'brain' in which each human brain is merely a single cell ... like our brain is composed of single cells and nevertheless there emerges a 'mind' from it that cannot be said to be merely the simple sum of the activities happening in the individual cells. But that's talking mechanistically ... or maybe not?

Anyways, in my own case there's more support for the contention that the Mind of God exists than mere conjectures. I've had psychotic experiences, like I've said. Some of these have been extremely negative ... but some have been extremely positive. And during the positive ones, it seemed to me as if I became capable of perceiving the 'greater mind' of which my own personal mind was merely a part. As if a brain cell could on its own somehow glimpse and understand that it was in fact part of a Brain, or a Mind. My experiences of 'becoming one with God' resemble very much the experiences of people who've supposedly experienced this same mystical union, or 'Enlightenment', going by what I've read. I've read quite a large amount of such kind of stuff. To me it seems that there may be a 'way' for any human to 'become one with God' or 'one with the Universe' and to realise that one's own self is merely a small part of something incredibly vast and long-lasting. In fact during such an experience one has a dual sense of 'self'. The one sense of 'self' is merely the ordinary everyday one ... me and my body and my mind and my eyes and ears and other senses. But there's the bigger sense of 'self' that exists simultaneously ... where the *true* self is sensed to be this enormous transcendental kind of being, of which the sense of 'self' merely becomes differentiated and manifested into those of individuals beings, of which 'I' am only one.

The danger is that such experiences may be merely 'psychotic', crazy, with absolutely no basis in 'fact' or 'reality'. But we're still in a conundrum as to what exactly constitute 'facts', and how we should choose which people's 'reality' should be considered the 'real' one.

Also note that I do possess the faculty of logic. There is nothing at all wrong with my *rational* mind. Also I am not stupid and/or gullible, I hope all here can tell.

Now please note that having come to the conclusion that All is Mind, and that the Mind of God is the 'medium' in which Reality exists and happens, *no amount of scientific evidence* can convince me otherwise, because all scientific evidence and all scientific observations merely happen inside the one Mind in which reality exists ... there is no way that these 'factual' observations and methods would be able to jump to the 'outside' of this mind to observe it. Like you can't directly observe your own eyes with your own eyes themselves. To jump 'outside' you need something 'transcendental', a form of mysticism, *if* mysticism is at all possible.

OK I hope you all understand I'm not basing my belief in God on the Bible, or on what people tell me ... it is for me an a priori kind of thing, I've been this way from as long ago as I could remember. But I've as well received a religious education, and I've tried to fit my religious beliefs to my religious experiences, to try and 'match them'. Only very recently have I discovered that, in fact, they do not match. And I've changed my religious beliefs to be more in line with my religious experiences.

But now as regards how religion came to exist ... this is how I think it went.

I think people started out with a kind of mystical sense ... a way to perceive God, a way to perceive the union of their own souls with the Universe. They had this transcendental sense ... but they also had their ordinary bodily senses, with which they perceived the 'ordinary everyday' world. And there are some contradictions between the views that these two kinds of senses give. I think that is how myths arose ... as stories to try and demonstrate how the 'transcendental' stuff could arise from out of the ordinary material world ... from the 'mystical' sense people perceived that their 'essential self' goes on forever, but their everyday senses showed them that people die and stop doing things in the outside world ... so they created various kind of myths of an afterlife and afterworlds. The 'reality' is probably much more subtle than that. And the people sensed deep down that their souls came from that of God, and so too the world and the things in it ... and so they created various Creation myths to help them grab the truth in a concrete, easily understandable form.

From the earliest days religions have changed, differentiated, evolved, and departed into myriads of different ones, but mainly because people all 'felt' certain big Truths that go beyond the everyday world and experiences, but they've always found it hard to 'grasp' these Truths in a way that would still make sense to their everyday understandings of the material world. There are lots of 'traps' into which religious beliefs can fall, and many religions fall into these traps, and become instead of something empowering, something oppressive.

There has always been the 'trap' that secular authorities have tried to arrogate religious beliefs to themselves, tried to twist religious beliefs so as to support their own power bases, or even invent new religions in which they can be as Gods, or as representatives of the power of God. And as a reaction against that there have been various spontaneous movements to 'reform' the religions back towards the deeper truths, to remove the power of religion from the mighty and bring it back down to the aid of meek, by virtue of the power of believing in Might that is infinitely greater than that of the 'mighty' here on Earth, and that is accessible to anybody.

I think the earliest evidence of religious beliefs in humans come from the Neanderthals, who had elaborate burial rites, as evidence that they believed in a kind of afterlife. That was very long ago, before there were nations and kings ... not even 'tribes' yet, merely family groups and small communes.

Pillowcase, your entries have always been fascinating in this thread (no doubt also in others - dunno, haven't read them), but I will just say one thing on the subject of mind and brain -- as per Berkley, 'brain' can only be percieved in 'mind'. But I'm getting the impression, and please correct me if I'm wrong here, that you don't follow Berkley in rejecting all matter. If you follow Berkley, you have to go on to Hume's denial of self, and I'm frankly scared of that. I accept that my belief in mind being nothing more that chemical reactions in brain is itself a leap of faith, but I don't believe that it has ever been disproven.

Now, the origins of religion: this is my theory.

We should not confuse the mind (a useful word, whether or not it describes an actual entity) of homo erectus with that of our own. Not wishing to be patronising, Homo Erectus was simpler than us. Sie (to use teminology I learned elsewhere on H2G2) was living day to day. Sie had no time to ponder infinity or eternity. That is why 'philosophy' is derived from the Greek word for leisure -- the basic needs must be catered for before you can ponder the supernatural.

Early Man was totally dependent on the sun, and on rains and rivers. What more natural than that sie would ask the sun, as the powerful entity that controlled light and warmth, to bless ser family and the food that the hunter-gatherers looked for. So Early man worshipped these objects for themselves, god-like, but not yet gods. This was fetishism, the earliest religion.

As time went on, supernature would come into the minds of the hunter-gatherers -- summer always came because they worshipped the sun and rains &c. A controlling deity entered the belief system. So arrived aminism, the second phase of religion.

Then came the great invention of the fertile crescent -- agriculture. The early farmer knew that sun would come in summer, even if sie still worshipped its god. But what of the working and food animals of the early farm? What even of the crops? For that matter, ser own children? Gods having been invented, concepts of fertility would arrive. Gods of a fertility cult would emerge alongside the old animistic gods, for the first time representing non-physical matters. Death would also become an issue. Ancestor worship would emerge, with a belief that the spirits of the elders watched over us.

As civilisation developed, more and more gods would be introduced. So would emerge true polytheism, believing in many gods, but still for very down to earth reasons. Wars would become more common as cities were built, and the idea would emerge of war gods, watching over the city, and battling the enemy's war god, as the human armies met.

Certain gods, often, but not always, the war god, would be ranked above all others -- as humans developed politics in the city-state, so did the gods. A pantheon would emerge, with very powerful gods at the top. Slowly, the lesser gods would be ignored -- why bother worsipping them when the top gods would do their jobs? So the polytheism would decline towards henotheism -- belief in many gods, but worship of one. The early Hebrews were henotheists, ordered only to worship Jahweh, but believing in the existance of Baal.

But, as happened with Jahweh and, less famously, Zeus, the Henotheism would lead to this one god being seen as increasingly powerful. The other gods would be seen as mere aspects of God, if they were tolerated at all. And rival gods would be seen not as rivals, but as false, without existance. So true modern monotheism emerged. With this developed afterlife beliefs. Ancestor worship was incompatable with monotheism, so new ideas of afterlife emerged. We would all be judged by God on death, and either be reborn according to this judgement, or sent to an eternity of reward or punishment.

It could develop further. If there was one omnipotent, omniscient, God it would follow that He would also be omnipresent. So emerges (in the now fairly modern mind) panentheism -- the belief of God being in everything. And from here, it is a natural step to pantheism, the belief that God is everything that is. This is the situation of modern Hinduism, with the various Gods being seen as aspects of Brahman, the One, all that is. God by now will be very impersonal, almost more a rule than an entity. So monism, the belief in a single substance and rule governing and uniting the universe, emerges. Tao is an example of a monistic quasi god. These developments have taken place because humans, thanks to agriculture and civilisation, have had the one key need -- time. Time in which to think and come up with new ideas.

Well, that's my theory. Not all cilvilisations followed this path exactly -- there is no evidence, for instance, that the Hindus went through a monotheistic stage between the writings of the Vedas and the Upanishads. But its a general theory of religious development. At the very least, I hope it's interesting.

Oohh boy ... anyways, to start out ... I don't 'reject' matter, I think matter and mind are at bottom the same kind of thing. I don't really hold with what any philosopher said, because so far I've not encountered a single philosophers that did not have a very much too simplistic view of things. My own view of things is not simplistic at all, it is exceedingly complex, and there are some internal seeming contradictions and inconsistencies. I see the point that Kurt Gödel made.

Now, for the next bit.

I did not talk about Homo erectus. We know next to nothing about Homo erectus. We don't even know if they could talk like we do or not. I was talking about Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, 'Neanderthal Man (& woman). Like the species name says, they were fully Homo sapiens, like us. In fact, on average the brains (speaking mechanistically, now) of Neanderthal people were in fact bigger than those that we have today. They may have been in some ways smarter than us, in fact.

Next bit:

You are making a mistake if you think that 'hunter-gatherers' don't have much time to themselves. In truth, hunter-gatherers spend less time 'working' each day than do us modern 'civilised' people. We work for other people and spend vast amounts of time doing that whereas hunter-gatherers work only to feed and clothe and protect themselves. They indeed have very long periods of time in which they don't do anything or need to do anything except think or talk to each other or make up stories or sing songs. In fact, hunting-gathering societies can be culturally extremely rich and complex, with exceedingly elaborate religious systems.

I'm basing what I'm telling you on my knowledge of hunting-gathering societies that still exist today. I know most of course about the San (also called Bushmen) of my own country ... but I also know a thing or two about the native peoples of the Americas and of Australia. Now instantly what is obvious is that these societies are not all the same ... not even very similar. But there are some similarities ... In the case of the San, they can be called 'polytheistic' and 'animist' ... they believe that there are many divine beings, mostly going in the shape of animals. They believe that just about everything that exists, such as even rivers, mountains, and rocks, have souls. But they also believe in a kind of overarching 'God' that is more powerful than the 'smaller gods'.

I think in many native American cultures the beliefs are roughly similar ... animism, many god-like beings, but there is still, also, a sense of a single 'big God'. This is the same in other African cultures apart from the San. I'm not sure if the native Australians believe/d in one God, but they do believe in one transcendent reality called the 'Dreamtime'. The terms 'gods' and 'God' can be confusing; to me what is more important is to understand and have some sort of 'feel' for the kinds of transcendent realities involved, and for the mystical means by which these people access these realities. I am critical of much of that, but there are some key things that to me to withstand this criticism.

You're trying to construct a kind of progressive evolutionary history of religion. I think you're making a mistake in that, because 'evolution' is not necessarily progressive, it merely means, in most instances, 'diversification'. You might as well try and construct a progressive evolutionary history of Human Language that culminates in the English Language. If you consider that analogy for a while you may see the problem with such an effort.

Traditionally 'westerners' have paid extremely little attention to the belief systems of other cultures. And the attention they did pay them, was always framed within a conception within which they were superiors in all ways, looking down at and studying inferiors. Much of the mistake has been irretrievably made, and most of those other cultures have been thoroughly destroyed, so that today we can find out nothing more about them. But we still have historical records of such cultures, and there are still a few others surviving, but for how long I don't know.

But if you really want to understand religion, you will have to look at historical records of vanished cultures, and at the few 'other' cultures that still exist today. Also 'minority' cultures inside the mainstream kind of Western/Civilised culture. And looking at it all in a non-biased way ... considering all these people as being more or less as intelligent as yourself, and their beliefs as being held as sincerely and with as good a sort of substantiation as your own.

I've been trying to do that in my life ... and for as long as I continue to live I'll still be doing that ... I just wish I had more time for it all, there seems to be always much too little time. I wouldn't be able to bear it if I thought this life was all there was ... there simply has to be a lot more time, or it all will be kinda pointless.

How you will ultimately construct an understanding of human religion over the ages will also depend on the kind of mental categories you start out with ... if you start out by trying to classify religions into certain convenient groups, you're going to be led towards one kind of picture, one way of grouping them ... if on the other hand you try to perceive similarities and underlying essential attributes you may arrive at a completely different grouping.

For instance, for me what is important in all of this is the idea of 'soul'. Nobody would worship the Sun if such a person did not think that the Sun somehow had a 'soul', that it were a living entity with a will that might be influenced by our own wills. The various 'gods' of polytheistic religions in many cases started out as personifications of 'forces in nature' ... in other words from the same belief in 'soul' ... this time that various processes in nature were also governed by different 'souls' according to their various natures. Not just the wild 'nature', but also the 'nature' of the human mind, of human beliefs, of our emotions and desires. These things all got personified into 'gods', beings with minds and wills of their own, but that we could communicate with and influence.

Underlying to just about all religions therefore there is the concept of 'soul' ... an aspect of a living being, something we have as well ... that goes beyond mere physical life and physical causes. We believe souls are 'bigger' than the bodies of the living entities that contain them ... they exert influences by strange and subtle means at greater distances, and they also endure after the physical deaths of the bodies that contained them.

The diversity of religions that exist right now, I personally don't see as reflecting any kind of 'progression', or as having anything to do with less or more leisure time ... I see them as being based on certain kinds of essentially similar 'deep' perceptions about the nature of Life, the Universe & Everything ... the differences being due to some groups of people choosing to focus more on one aspect, others focusing on another ... and with there being a lot of ignorance and a lot of 'making things up' to try and disguise or supplement ignorance and uncertainty. And a lot of change happening through a kind of 'random evolutionary drift'

Mr. Pillowcase, I see that all... And contradictions are part of the paradox we call reality. I was just pointing out that, actually, we've no chance of a "logical", undoubtable evidence that a "truth" or a "reality" exists out of our mind. In other words, everything we can believe is anyway a leap of faith. And this fits religions too... and of course this very same statement!
You say a thing that's incredibly "true" to me. God is somehow an "unifier" for all and every individual, subjective reality. A Meta-reality. This doesn't make Him granted... But I understand the point. And He is just a PERCEPTION. You just can't "describe" God, just as you can't describe the rose's parfume. Though your own way of describing the experience of "being one with God" or "one with the Universe" is perfectly recognizable, who's not been there won't really understand. But you CAN perceive what you call "God".
What I think is that we CHOOSE to believe there's a reality, and we choose which truth we believe in. Kind of an "as if" game, we act "as if" this and that were "real", "true". And what we forget is that it's just a game.
It also seems to me that people is quite scared of that "being one with the Everything".

However, I'm not sure there is or there is not a "true" reality.

But I keep thinking to a Native American, Hyemeyohsts Storm, opening a seminar saying "I don't want you to believe in what I'm going to say. If you have to believe in a thing, then that thing is not true".

twinsouls

This conversation seems to have gone on from religion to philosophy (related subjects, but still different). And that is too much for my brain/mind or whatever you want to call it, to cope with, so I think I am going to continue to ignore this conversation, if you don't mind. I won't unsubscribe, as that's not my style, but I don't think i will try to read everything. BYE!

Tango

Hi there I am afraid of death and when I think about it shivers run through me but once I start thinking of god then I feel myself calming down. I also believe that I am being watched over by something friendly. This is how I feel but I am afraid to tell others in fear that they may think I am loopy.

Well, afraid or not, you did now tell others! But I don't think you're loopy at all! I feel the same way. If I did not believe in God I would simultaneously be terrified of death, and also be very desirous of death! Because if God does not exist, then my mind and soul vanishes when I die. But that would happen anyways because I have to die someday, and after I'm dead, if there's no God, then for me there will be no future and not even a single memory of this life that I had. My life might then just as well not have happened at all, as far as I'm concerned. If God does not exist, it feels to me that this life of mine would be a total joke and I'd want to end it instantly. But I do believe that God exists and that for me means that there's something more than just this life. I think my soul is immortal ... I think conscious existence without immortality would be pointless, an absurdity ... and if souls are immortal there has to exist a being such as God. And also, I have the feeling that I am being watched over by some friendly and powerful being, just like you have. I feel this same being is watching over all humanity. People may ask, then, if this friendly being watches over us, then why is there all this evil in the world? To which I can only answer this ... if this friendly being did not exist there would still be all this evil in the world, but seeing as this friendly being does exist, there is at least the hope that the evil could turn to good. For instance, God may allow someone to be violently killed, but God can after this violent death take that person's soul and give it comfort after death and perhaps another chance at another life ... but if God did not exist the person would just be dead with no hope for comfort or anything else again ever.

Interesting, hog wash but interesting. I am Druid, as was my entire line before me and frankly speaking you either have self worth or you do not. It is not some prize one can win, one must understand that each of us has a right to be here, a birth right if you will pardon the expression, and until you understand that you are here for some real reason, be it as simple as filling the space inside the body reserved for a spirit, you have a purpose, granted for some it is to be a whipping boy to the world while others bask in the limelight, but none the less one can not exist without the other, there must be a balance.

For millions of years, since human-forms, hereinafter referred to at humaniforms began to populate this planet, there have been many questions posed at various levels of intellect, and all of them have had a core value, that being the meaning of life, and though throughout time many answers have been forwarded, none has completely satisfied the whole humaniform.

However as with any question if it is ask enough times, and bandied about by every humaniform from juvenile to educator, eventually someone will find an answer to what seems to be an unanswerable question. Also remember that over time more has been proven correct by science and academia as a whole only after someone who is neither a scientist nor an academic has posed a plausible answer to a question. I believe the reason for this fact is quite simple in that science and academia as a whole view those not making up there ranks with far less distrust then they do of there own kind, believing that a non-member has nothing to gain from the supposition they present because they lack any credentialing that would benefit from any such supposition or answer to a question.

There fore what you will be reading in this text is what I as well as most if not all others who I have posed the following answer to is finally a true answer to the meaning of life, or more precisely put the answer to why over millions of years no one has been able to figure out the meaning of life. But before we begin on this quest let us look at what the Merriam-Webster collegiate dictionary has to offer in the way of the two issues I would like to address, and those issues are life and death.

Merriam-Webster, defines life this way.

Life \"lïf\ noun pl lives \"lïvz\ [ME lif, fr. OE lïf; akin to OE libban to live — more at LIVE] (bef. 12c)
1 A: the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body.

B: a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings

C: an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction

© 1996 Zane Publishing, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Incorporated

Merriam-Webster, defines death this way.

Death \"deth\ noun [ME deeth, fr. OE dÈath; akin to ON dauthi death, deyja to die — more at DIE] (bef. 12c)
1: a permanent cessation of all vital functions.

2: the state of being dead.

© 1996 Zane Publishing, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Incorporated

Now I have read through these as well as many others, and frankly at best every definition is ambiguous, and in most cases more confusing than the subject mater they attempt to define, so let us try to break it down to a simple statement about life, and a simple statement about death.

Life for all intents and purposes is universal connectedness, ergo being part of God, in what ever form you choose to accept that entity in.

Death for all intents and purposes is the exact opposite, or disconnectedness from God, in what ever form you choose to accept that entity in.


I feel this is as good a condensation of the definitions offered in dictionaries world wide, and is far less confusing to the reader, and the writer for that mater.

Now with that said you have the basic information needed to understand what I will propose or more accurately dissertate in the next few pages of text, but I will not try to sway you in your belief, I simply submit the following for you inspection, what you do with the presented information is of concern only to you, and with that said let us proceed to what I feel I have discovered.

Life and death have been debated for thousands of years, by theologians, philosophers, scientists, and academics. They have also been debated at millions of kitchen tables, park benches, and thousands of other places as well by people who are far less educated then those people mentioned in the first part of this paragraph. In the forward you read a common dictionary definition of both subjects, but with all of this debate over hundreds and more likely thousands of years one would think by this point a far better definition would have been agreed upon, but alas this is not the case as the definition you read in the forward proves, but I digress, so lets go on.

So it is for you to choose which makes more sense the dictionary definition, or the statement that I proposed, and quite frankly I for many reasons tend to hold that the simple connectedness and disconnectedness argument is far more valid in view of the universal need of humaniforms to reconnect with a higher power. This need alone is the reason religion, science, and education exists in the first place, because they are all various attempts to find connectedness with the universe.

Now even a functional illiterate can easily make that jump, it is not a leap of faith, nor does it require anything but a modicum of common sense. We all have a desire to be connected in some way, to not only one another, but to the universe as a whole as well, and therein lies the glitch, and I personally feel it is the one single reason both life and death have never been properly defined, and also why the meaning of life has never been uncovered.

Simply stated if life is connected, and death is disconnected, then when you consider the facts that are ever present in each day of our existence, the real reason no one can define life and death or the meaning of life is because we have the entire concept completely backwards.

In our corporal bodies we are in fact quite totally disconnected from not only every other creature we come in contact with but with the universe as a whole as well. Our spirit or soul if you will is imprisoned within a cell designed to hold it separate from literally everything else on the planet. We can feel things and experience things, and we are even given the ability to partially connect with one another, but this can only be achieved during a the act of sexual intercourse, and at best this is a fleeting moment in time given the duration of our time locked in a humaniform body.

This brings me to a very important side note, which I find quite humorous and at the same time quite illuminating. Every religion in its own way preaches to its’ partakers of the after life, the eternal life, the time after our spirit or soul leaves our corporal bodies and returns to the universe , or to God if you will. Yet they refer to this transfer as death, and now you have the key, and hopefully an understanding of why I feel we have the whole of it reversed.

Frankly the way I see it, and from what the facts indicate, every creature that is currently viewed as alive is in fact quite dead, and only after our spirit or soul is released from our bodies is it alive once more. What we call birth should for all intents and purposes be a time of great mourning, not a time of rejoicing, or celebrating, because simply put a birth is nothing more than the gestational growth of a prison cell to imprison another living spirit or soul. On the other hand the time we call death should be a time for celebration and rejoicing, not a time or grief and mourning, because at the death of the humaniform body prison cell, another spirit or soul is released from imprisonment, free to be alive and connected to the universe once more.

Now the truly astounding part of what you have just read comes when you apply the concept to the world as a whole, and the things going on in it daily. Take a good look around your own neighborhood, with a critical eye and you will discover that no one is safe from seeing the decay of everything. Small towns and big cities alike all have drug problems, child abuse problems, and various other issues that have been around for centuries, but were until just a few short years ago hidden from the world.

The reasons for this are as varied as they are complex, but as a general rule we can simply state that most if not all of the problems we encounter on a moment by moment basis in our daily existence can be more or less directly related back to the fact that somewhere inside each of us there is a knowledge, a knowing if you will, that keeps telling us that something is very wrong with the world we live in. What is wrong is the whole of the issue we are examining, and that is life and death, but more than just that, we are examining imprisonment of a sorts, imprisonment of our spirit and soul, in a very deceptive mobile prison cell called a body.

Why do I call it deceptive you may ask, well the answer to that is at the core of the issue as well as any of the others thus far discuss.

The humaniform body is a work of evolutionary art, because it is so utterly simple in form but so absolutely complex in its workings that after thousands of years of study we only understand a small percentage of the body and even less of the mind, and when we take time to think about it, that too makes perfect sense, because any cell designed to hold a spirit which is pure energy would by its’ nature need to be so complex as to make it for all practical purposes inescapable until such time as our term of imprisonment had ended.

This concept is as alien to all of us as any extraterrestrial that has ever been dreamed up in any book, movie, or game, but it still remains quite clearly the truth of the mater when we examine all the facts. We demonstrate our understanding of the imprisonment theory by designing ever more complex physical facilities to house those humaniforms that even when there very lives have been interrupted by imprisonment in a humaniform body, refuse to conform to even the most basic moral context.

Now we need to make a short but extremely important digression once again for demonstration purposes, and what I will try to demonstrate here is the obviousness of what I am saying overall in this text, and that is simply that for all intents and purposes every single technically living humaniform is a spirit or soul disconnected from universal life, dead for all intents and purposes.

Now that being said, let’s look at that digression for a moment. We currently have an estimated 6.5 billion humaniforms on our planet, as estimated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and of that total number we have nearly 9 million of them (about .001% of the current total population) currently criminally incarcerated, as estimated by the home office of the government of the United Kingdom. The United Nations estimates that there are 9.7 million people internally or externally displaced on the planet and that well over 1 billion people regularly abuse not just use some form of intoxicant. And another 2 billion overindulge in some form of intoxicant on a regular basis. Then we can add well over 2 billion humaniforms with some type of mental disorder, from mild to extreme, and frankly speaking, even taking into consideration that obviously many of the humaniforms mentioned in the previous paragraph fall into more than one of the designated categories, and allowing for even and extremely large 25% miss rate in the estimates, the facts remain the same, and that is that approximately a quarter of the worlds population continues to display and demonstrate behaviors that in all likelihood resulted in there original humaniform imprisonment in the first place.

Getting back to our original discourse, we can factor in the information discovered in the digression, and once again we find that the original supposition is further supported by this new information. If for some reason, you have been asleep while reading this text let me lay out the obvious for you. If you are alive for lack of a better term, in a humaniform body, you are for unknown reasons imprisoned, or disconnected from the universe for some transgression while alive in your true spirit or soul form, so frankly speaking is it really any wonder that such a large percentage of the population world wide deviates from acceptable behavior as determined by our social as well as or governmental rules, laws, and behaviors. Is it any wonder that we have thousands of organizations, both religious and secular, disseminating volumes of rules, regulation and suggestions as to what is and what is not acceptable behavior.

Then we come to the real crux of the core issue, the pivot point if you will, and that is why would any living creature need to be trained, educated, and forced to know what the difference between right and wrong is, unless somehow, somewhere, during its’ life, while connect to the universe and truly alive, that soul or spirit lost its’ inborn ability to distinguish between the two.

Now a point to ponder and this is a very touchy one, and frankly I already know that about 99% of all the readers who answer my next question will initially lie, but remember you can not lie to your self, so the point is moot, and now my point to ponder. Have you ever in your life taken something that doesn’t technically belong to you, and I am not talking about money or jewelry, I am talking about a pen or a pencil, or anything no mater how small that did not belong to you. The answer is universally yes, every single humaniform has taken something that did not belong to them. Yes sometimes it is done without intent, like when you use someone’s pen or lighter, and just forget to give it back. You did not plan to take it, nor did you intend to deprive the owner of the item or the use of the item, however, you have the item, and the rightful owner of the item no longer possesses it. We even come up with sayings to cover our deviation, sayings like possession is nine tenths of the law, and it’s ok to take these that’s why they put them out there.
Now think about this, what if there was only 1 universal law, 1 simple rule governing all truly living spirit and souls, and violation of the rule or law in any form resulted in disconnection or separation from the universe for a specific amount of time. Let’s call the law “The Universal Law of Existence”, to give it a reference we are more able to understand. Now frankly we could spend years trying to figure out exactly what this law is, and there could be millions of books, theories, papers and comments written about exactly what the law would say, but none of that would be of any consequence to this discourse. Suffice to say that the law exists, and the breaking of it results in death to the spirit or soul by imprisonment into a humaniform body, totally disconnected from the universe, safely from the universal point of view stashed away on a penal colony, in this case the earth.

If you think about it, this is the perfect prison, we can’t get far enough off the planet to be of any consequence to the universe, the planet its’ self takes up a ridiculously small space on the universal scale, and even if there were a need for a billion such penal colonies in the universe, all of them combined would take up less space than a speck of dust takes up on our planet, due to the utterly enormous size of the universe as a whole. The universal creator would not even have to oversee the penal colonies, nor would there be any need for large quantities of guards, because through directed evolution the perfect prison cell was grown, and to make it even more effective the prison cell is self replication, translation we reproduce our own kind, thus making an ever increasing number of prison cells for those convicted of breaking the “Universal Law of Existence”.

Now let’s look at some other interesting factors that also contribute to the facts at hand. Many millions of humaniforms, planet wide, have had experiences with ghosts, or disembodied souls or spirits. Well lets imagine that a humaniform prison cell housing an imprisoned spirit or soul, somehow discovers the information that I am discussing in this text, and they escape the cell by intentionally or accidentally terminating the life function of the prison cell body in which they are housed. This would in fact release the soul or spirit, but if the universal has sentenced the soul or spirit to a specific term of incarceration and that time is not at end the spirit is even further disconnected from everything because except in rare cases it can not even communicate with the others that are imprisoned with it on the planet. The reason that ghostly or spirit related incidents are so very rare is that I believe that a very high level of rage must be reached by the ghost or disembodied spirit before it can even briefly make its’ presence know to those still incarcerated in a live humaniform prison cells.

It has been said that art imitates life, and frankly speaking, this statement becomes far more valid in light of this discourse, because movies like the Matrix, or paintings and sculpture by Picasso, and Dali, do not look so very far fetched in light of this discourse. In fact when viewed in the context of the arguments presented in this discourse, a great deal of the literature, art, and cinema presentations of the last 100 years take on a whole new meaning.

We crave at a cellular level connection, it is the core that permeates every moment of existence, and it has such an extreme value that we are ever increasingly building a connected society. The internet, home computers, cars, etc, are now and were at the time of there creation nothing more or less than ways to get reconnected to one another, and the universe as a whole. The internet allows use to connect with people anywhere on the planet any time we choose to do so, any time we are feeling especially disconnected we can log on and talk to many thousands of people everywhere on the planet. Language is no longer even a barrier, because translation programs working in real time make it so that what ever language you use, can and is instantly translated into what ever language the person you are connecting with understands, and visa versa.

We crave connection, but when we were connected, when we were alive as spirits and souls we broke the “Universal Law of Existence”, and we are each living out the prison sentence for our crimes in these humaniform bodies, when we have paid our debt to the universe, we will be released from our humaniform prison cell, by its’ death and we will be once more allowed to cross the barrier that holds the disembodied here as well, and then we will once more be alive and connected to the universe.

Now everyone who has read this far is most likely either forming or trying to form scenarios that disprove the theory resented, so let me help you by playing out the scenarios I have played out and present what I have uncovered.

Many religions believe in reincarnation and I attempted to use that as a dispute for my argument but upon contemplation, I discovered that the simple answer is once again the accurate one. If a spirit has done a crime so heinous to receive a multi-life sentence for that crime, the sentence will endure beyond the life cycle of a single humaniform cell, and the spirit will simply be transferred into a new humaniform cell when the current humaniform cell terminates. Now a point to ponder would be a life sentence. If a spirit did a crime while alive that was so terrible, such as murder and I have no real way of knowing if it is possible because our understanding or the spirit or the soul if you will is that it is eternal, but I imagine that there are ways to destroy or kill even a soul, and if this crime was committed then the spirit or soul committing that crime would be sentenced to a life sentence, and that would initial an endless string of humaniform body cells, and that would explain reincarnation quite adequately. Now after many years of dealing with people in the psychic business I have also discovered that people who are reincarnations, are usually very miserable people, who have suffered greatly during each of there incarnations, and incidentally working with hundreds of people over 20 years on past life regressions has also helped me reconfirm this conclusion.

The next scenario that I played out mentally was the quick death scenarios, which are those infants and children who die prior to, during or shortly after what we call birth and that was even easier to understand than the reincarnation possibility. Our world in some ways mirrors the world of the living, in that we sentence people to short terms in jail or prison for more or less minor infractions. The problem is that the humaniform cell must house a spirit or a soul to continue living, and if a spirit was sentenced to say 1 year in our terms, it would do something like 9 months in a womb, and then 3 months as a live infant, then it would be released, and the infant would in our eyes die. This would also effectively explain the saying “only the good die young”, because if a spirit or soul was repentant for its crimes and was very good while incarcerated in a humaniform body, it would only suffer a short sentence in a humaniform cell, then upon its release the cell would die in our eyes.

Now if we look at this a bit further, the early release of a soul for good behavior could also effectively be used to inflict extra punishment on those left behind. Think about those totally unexplained accidents, a young person is driving down a crowded highway, and suddenly loses control of the car or truck they are driving, and many people are hurt in the accident. Let us suppose that the soul was released, a moment prior to the accident, the humaniform cell body would die more or less instantly thus the car would go out of control because no one would be driving the car. The accident would cause many other drivers additional pain and injury, thus increasing their individual punishments while incarcerated.
Wars could be explained in a duel fashion, in that criminal souls choose to continue in the behavior that got them imprisoned in the first place, and while doing so effectively increase the punishment level of those affected by the war. The war could also be a way of achieving a mass release of souls that are being released from incarceration.

Now you can see my quandary, because no mater which scenario that I play out the theory presented in this text easily covers it, and try as I may I have found no effective dispute that would help to or finally disprove the theory. Frankly speaking, I would be greatly appreciative of any contributions from those who read this text, on ways to disprove it.

Now to save some time for all of you let me list the things I have already looked at in an attempt to disprove the theory, then if you have others that I haven’t tried please send them to me via e-mail to [email protected] and please put disproof in the subject line.

Heaven and hell from the Christian concept, was one of the first things I tried, because some of the first people I spoke about this with happen to be of that faith. Heaven would be more or less a pre-release center where spirits or souls could be reintroduced into the world of the living, and hell would be the logical place to further isolate those spirits or souls that were to evil to even rate a humaniform body cell, kind of like solitary confinement with extra punishment.

I have run the scenario about space travel as well, and being able to physically leave the planet and it worked for a short time, until I realized that the spirit or soul was still imprisoned in the humaniform body, and at some point would be right back on earth. I took it a step further as well and added in the potential of the humaniform body cells death while in space, but that didn’t work either because something would have to be attached to the spirit to keep it out of the realm of the living in the first place, and that would by its nature immediately return the suddenly released spirit or soul to the earth to inhabit another humaniform body cell and finish out the prison sentence.

I looked at astral travel which I have done my self on many occasions, and long ago discovered that there is a point near the end of our milky way galaxy that I can not cross even astrally, it is like an impenetrable wall, and I do mean it can not be penetrated, I’ve bounced off it many times.

I have looked at a scenario that a dear friend played out, because she has trouble with the prison aspect of it, she suggested that spirit or souls being free and alive would by nature not take to education very well, so she felt that it was possible that they were sent to planets like earth and given humaniform bodies so that they would be forced to learn the things they needed to learn.

Sadly this is a case of semantics, no something that disproves the theory, because if you are forced to do something against your will then you are in fact a prisoner, and weather you call it an educational center or a training unit, or anything else, a rose is still a rose, and if you are placed somewhere against your will you are a prisoner and the place where you are kept is in fact a prison.

I have also played out the to many freedoms to be a prison scenario as well, and frankly I felt sure that this would be the one to disprove the theory so I could toss it in the trash and move on, I was wrong, so wrong in fact that it not only didn’t disprove the theory, it made the whole theory far more plausible, than it had been.

We claim we are free to do what we wish to do, but that is only an illusion, and if you do not believe it try mowing the lawn with out your clothes on. Unless you live in a nudist colony you’re going to get arrested for public indecency. Try walking down the sidewalk in town sipping a martini, or a beer, and see how fast you are in front of a judge. Try calling off work because you want to take the kids to a play or the zoo or some other place for the day, and see how long you keep your job. Here’s one for ya try to borrow a police car, you paid for it, your tax dollars were used to buy it, but try to use and your humaniform prison cell will end up in a hard wall jail so that you are doubly imprisoned. We must work, we must abide by thousands of laws, we must keep our homes at or above a certain standard, we must mow our lawns regularly, and these things are all governed by laws. My neighbor was fined $300 and given 5 days to get his lawn mowed and his bushes trimmed, he refused so the city did it for him, and sent him a bill for $500.00. He took it to court, and was told that he had to keep his lawn mowed and the bushes trimmed, or the city would do it and bill him. He laughed at them and told them to bill away, he wouldn’t pay the bills. He didn’t, and they sold his house at auction to pay the unpaid bills, and the sheriff forcibly removed him and his family to the curb. He was able to get the house back from the person that bought it at auction, but it cost him $6000.00, and the city would not approve the sale until he posted a $10,000.00 cash assurance that the lawn would be kept up and the bushes would be trimmed. He paid the $10,000.00, plus the $6000.00 the guy, who bought it at the auction demanded, and now he mows his lawn about twice a week and he had all the bushes removed. If he keeps the property up he will get his $10,000.00 back in 3 more years, and to make it even worse there is a no interest clause in the assurance so he will get back $10,000.00 less the special fees needed to process the whole thing. The best estimate he has gotten is that he should feel lucky if he gets $7500.00 total back, and if he sells the house before the 5 year assurance period is over he looses the entire $10,000.00, plus he would owe a fine and penalty of an unspecified amount for not complying with the assurance contract. Are we truly free or is it just the illusion of freedom?

I have also looked at the free will concept. That is that we have a free will to do what we choose, but this too is an illusion, because we can not choose to be free of our humaniform body cells and return to the world of the truly alive. Yes we can choose to cause harm or good, but either choice has costs, if we choose to be good, we usually get hurt by those who choose to cause harm, and if we choose to cause harm, we can end up further isolated, ergo disconnected by being sentenced to a jail term, in which our humaniform body cell is placed inside of a brick and mortar jail cell. So once again even free will is an illusion, because if free will was in fact free it would have no cost, but as you can plainly see it does have a cost.

I have had some readers say that the church or the fact that we have a government makes the whole theory impossible, well in case you have never seen the inside of a prison, let me tell you a couple of interesting facts. Inside every jail and prison in the world there are in most cases 12 or more governmental bodies and 40 plus religious bodies. You have the prison ministries of every faith you have ever heard of as well as a whole group you have never heard of. As for governmental bodies, you have the federal government, making rules for prisons, then the state governments, and then you have the prison administration, the parole board, and the guards. After you get through that governmental bureaucracy, you have the trustees, (inmates with privileges), then you have the inmates, who also have little governments of their own, the blacks have there own code and system of laws and rules, as do the whites, and the Latinos, then you have your splinter groups, like the skin heads and the white supremacy groups, and the Islamic radical groups, so once again the supposition that religious bodies and government prove the theory wrong are quite the opposite of the truth.
Then someone offered our freedom to choose, where we live, where we work, what we eat etc. I pointed out that most if not all of those same choices were available to inmates in brick and mortar prisons, and that many prisons were even more free as far a choices than were those who were not in a brick and mortar prison. I say this because an inmate in a brick and mortar prison can choose to refuse to work, of take a bath, or even get out of bed if he wants to, and yes there are repercussions for these choices, but they still get 3 meals a day, and a minimum of a 66 square foot (6 foot by 11 foot) cell, with a bed with clean sheets and blankets to sleep in, and clean clothes to ware, because the law says they must. If they choose to follow the rules, they can also get cable television, and in many cases free internet access, as well as earn money to use at the prison store which sells things at prices far below what we pay on the outside. Now yes the violence level in a maximum security brick and mortar prison is very high, but not any higher than in a ghetto neighborhood in a large city, and in medium and minimum security facilities the violence and crime rate is lower than many of your most rural areas, so in some ways there life is freer than ours on the outside is. No they can not choose to go outside of the prison, but frankly with all the terrorism going on in the world, do you really want to take a trip to New York, or London, or Egypt, or anywhere else for that mater, and expose your self to a bunch of strangers who are planning who knows what?

Now a final few words on freedom, for those of you who still insist that they are free and not in fact prisoners. Think for a moment about everything you have done for pleasure over the last year, then ask your self this question, was it a totally free choice that I made to do these things or were you actually trying to reassure your self that you had the freedom to choose those things. Did you rent that video or DVD because you wanted to see it, or so you would have something to talk about at work with all the other prisoners who say the same movie? Did you choose that vacation destination because everyone was going there or was it because no one else was going there and you could be the first? Did you feely choose your car, or did you buy what was practical, did you design you home specifically for you or did you buy one someone else had designed because it would work for you. Did you buy that suite or shirt because it truly looks good on you or was it more so you fit in with your co-workers and friends? Do you public ally ridicule those weirdoes with the face piercing and the huge tattoos, only to think back in secret and realize that you envy them the guts it took to do that to them selves? Do you have a secret wish list that will never come to pass because it just wouldn’t be proper or your friends would stop being your friends, or your family would disown you, well if any or all of these things is true of you then guess what, you are no more free than a caged bird, and no more alive than that car you dive to work, or that computer you connect to the world with.

Now you have seen the list of things I have already pitted against the theory, now it’s your turn, get busy and help me disprove this theory, please send any possible disproof’s to [email protected] and don’t forget to put the wood disproof in the subject line.

Also please note that by sending me your disproof of the theory you grant me permission to use it in further study of the theory, including adding your disproof to this ever growing text. I will give credit to anyone asking for it in the work if I use it in the work, and please understand I can not acknowledge every submission, but rest assured I will read each one and if it is not a duplicate compare it against the theory to see how it fares.