I've wanted to make a blog entry there, but have been too tired, too preoccupied, too exhausted, too distracted, too forgetful, and so on and so forth and just haven't. But, to put a long story short: I picked up the story approximately 3 weeks ago. I believe it was 3 weeks ago's Friday, making it 22 days ago, approximately at the very end of July.
In that time, I've gone from the very beginning to closing in towards the end of the story. I've read what has to have been 3-5 years' worth of content, in 3 works. In a story that I believe updated very frequently, nearly daily, for a long long time, with each update containing literally hundreds of words. Hundreds of words, almost every day, over 3-5 years, and I've gotten through all of that.
I still want to blog more about that story, but that isn't why I actually came to my blog to make a blog post, believe it or not. (Come to think of it, did I actually make a blog mentioning ELLC before? From that story I got a perfect reference image for Elemental Ruby and I know I wanted to make a blog about it, but I may have neglected it and left it as just something on twitter. OOPS. Ah well.)
What I actually came here to blog about is something else that I've wanted to blog about for quite some time, but never really had a good chance to do so. Well, having a breakthrough there thanks to the recent part of the story I'm reading which got me in a philosophical mood where I was really pondering some deep questions I actually made some progress there.
And the subject at hand?
Religion.
I do not follow any faith. I am not too terribly religious at all, in fact. While I respect people's beliefs, deep down the vast majority of them I cannot find myself actually truly believing. But while I don't follow their beliefs, their beliefs can and have inspired my own beliefs.
I am a deeply spiritual person. I am also fascinated with "witchy" stuff, as it were, which is why I always enjoy watching a Witch doing twitch streams (originally every Wednesday but now three times a week, even!).
I've wanted to do a blog detailing my, continuously evolving, beliefs, especially since certain aspects of my belief system I know I could forget and need to rediscover later. I even considered writing a "Book of Meism" at some point, being a Biblesque piece of literature (well, probably closer actually to Dante's Divine Comedy in that it had a couple of main viewpoint characters on a journey through the universe and it was through the lens of the guide and the main character that my beliefs and viewpoints would be shared, and the final punchline at the end of the book would be a summary of some of the most important aspects of my Meism beliefs).
Unfortunately me being me, I never actually did most of this so a lot of my beliefs have regressed, where I lost important spiritual discoveries that I had worked hard to develop, but at the same time, other aspects of me have progressed, where in some senses there was a draw and discard aspect of my beliefs. Drawing in new things that got added into my beliefs, but losing core aspects of my beliefs, not out of them becoming obsolete or being replaced, but simply due to having forgotten what should not have been forgotten, where I am lesser because of the loss, but it's not all bad because I'm also greater due to the gain.
My meism draws a lot from various sources. It actually has a fair amount of scientific viewpoints mixed in with various religious beliefs and also concepts that I fully believe in such as various forms of Systems and also dreamscapes but also involves spiritual realms and entities and a fair amount of what may be called "woo-woo stuff".
I've lost the details I put into pioneering this theory, but one thing that I had a belief in and still do I just forget how it works is a tie between the realm of dreams and imagination and a spiritual realm, how the two in spite of working completely differently can accomplish much the same end result because they are not entirely separate, they are linked.
I believe that there are spirits, guides, entities, angels, ghosts, and whathaveyou, although I've lost the details in how I tied them into the above, our world, and more.
I believe in a form of life after death, and it is actually from this that a lot of my core beliefs are derived from, from this form of life after death, it literally ties somehow into almost everything in some way shape or form although in most cases I've forgotten how. (Again, consequence of not writing down breakthroughs in my belief system.)
And I'll talk a bit about this form of life after death because it's vaguely tied to the breakthrough I had Thursday Night as I was going to bed (so like, technically speaking 7 am on Friday morning but I still call that Thursday Night).
Basically, a belief I've had for quite some time is that any entity capable of 2/3 of these is worthy of being called God with a capital G:
-Omnipotence, being All-Powerful, able to rewrite the rules of reality and/or outright break them, in being able to mold, shape, create, etc. the Universe and even Multiverse as they will;
-Omniscience, being All-Knowing, able to see not only into the current universe but to see into EVERY universe, past, present, and future, seeing all of the infinite branches expanding out endlessly;
-All-Loving, being able to empathize with humanity, loving them, cherishing them, wishing humanity the best, always trying to help them, always trying to do the right thing for them, always trying to guide them, because they don't want harm to come to them.
But a long-standing question of mine has been. Any entity with 2/3 of those could qualify for being God with a capital G, sure, but...how could our world exist as it does with an entity, a being, that is truly 3/3 of them?
For the longest time, I had only one possible answer/solution to this, but on Thursday I developed not one, but TWO possible breakthroughs. Note that, by and large, most of these are not mutually exclusive. You can have a God that is 2/3 and a different God that is a different 2/3 and you can have a God that is 3/3 and theoretically, all three Gods with a capital G could exist--all of them worthy for being called God with a capital G but not truly being the 'one true God' as we tend to think of God with a capital G as. We tend to think of capital-G God as singular, as in, if you pray to God, then God is the highest form, the ultimate (and sometimes only) divine being, singular.
After all, if there were multiple Gods with a capital G, 1: wouldn't they be gods with a lowercase g, and 2: who would your prayer to God with a capital G be to? Every thank, every wish, every prayer, if there's multiple Gods with a capital G surely there would be some sort of conflict in who you are praying to, right?
Not to me. I'm not sure that there's three Gods with a capital G, but I do believe in at least two. One much much much stronger and more fundamental than the rest as that God is directly tied to my belief in life after death considering that God basically IS the life after death. (Not quite, it's more complicated than that. God and Heaven at not entirely one and the same entity, but they are linked together.) That God is omniscient and all-loving because it is literally made out of all of us and vice-versa, with us shaping that God and that God guiding us but sadly is not omnipotent.
That God I strongly of strongest beliefs in is able to subtly guide us, through various forms of connections that I don't remember the link to, in the spirits, angels, entities, guides, whathaveyou, to subtly try and direct us down the better paths we can live but cannot rewrite the rules of reality, merely subtly guide them. Small miracles that are not impossible but are freak occurrences for the better, and helping hands to try and give us help.
It's a two-way street as well, because one of the core aspects of my Meism is that we have an influence on our reality. Reality is slightly shaped, and molded, by us. I don't mean just through physical actions, I also mean through perceptions, beliefs, etc. Our minds, quite literally, make it real, to some extent. Not to the ludicrous examples shown in media where we think, therefore it is, not to our beliefs singlehandedly fueling gods or God, but still there in a form. Where we helped shape and mold the universe as we know it, as part of God. Not to the point of God being omnipotent, mind you.
(Again, sad to say, the details of how this process works have been lost. I thought them up, I had them, but I've since forgotten how the exact process works. I lost so much that I don't even truly remember why I gave my belief system the name Meism but I know that name was not chosen arbitrarily, that it was actually tied to this 'we shape the world' and connection to the God that is connected to the afterlife/heaven/it goes by many other names which is the all-loving all-knowing not all-powerful entity.)
This was a big part of my only answer to the trifecta for a capital-G God. I believe in a God that is 2/3 for sure, but beyond that, I've been less certain. I don't know if there is a God that is all-powerful and all-knowing who happens to not be all-loving, but if such a God exists, they would have a thought process utterly alien to any human, with humanity utterly incapable of comprehending that God's thoughts, and vice-versa, too, with that God unable to truly comprehend humanity.
It's definitely possible that God exists, but I'm not sure.
Still, though, that's what I was getting at. ELLC made me revisit the subject of the trifecta for a capital G. The first and for a longest time only solution was that there couldn't be a God that was all three, that we could have one or two Gods (theoretically three I guess but I don't imagine an all-powerful God that was all-loving would be so blind to humanity even if they aren't all-knowing so I don't think that combo exists, it's the other two 2/3 combos which are plausible imo) that were 2/3, with the omniscient all-loving God definitely existing and the other all-powerful all-knowing God being possible but being more of a maybe rather than a definite.
The breakthrough was in realizing there was not one, but two, possible ways for there to be a God that is actually still all three.
Neither of these ways is truly mutually exclusive with each other, and neither actually contradict my first belief. Neither of these I am sure about to the same extent I am sure about the God tied to the afterlife. (That is the only God that I am positive exists, but I continue to explore my faith for considering, thinking about, etc. the possibilities, plausibilities, probabilities, etc. of the other potential Gods with a capital G.)
The first idea I came up with, and the second overall solution to the trifecta for God issue, was simply a breakthrough in realizing the infinite nature of the multiverse.
What I mean by that is, if the multiverse is constantly branching out infinitely, who's to say that God hasn't done more? There could be realities where God has directly intervened, where God has directly influenced events, where God altered the rules of reality, either blatantly or more subtly.
...And that we just so happen to have the misfortune of being in a reality where God didn't do that. Think of it in the terms you often see time traveling to the past rationalized in fiction where it is not in fact a stable time loop:
The moment an individual travels in time, they are not traveling back in time to their own timeline, their very existence in the past automatically branches reality out in two. Their original timeline still exists, and the altered timeline from their presence also exists.
Now instead of a time traveler, imagine it being God intervening blatantly and overtly. The reality where God intervened blatantly and overtly exists, but the reality where God doesn't intervene blatantly and overtly doesn't magically disappear just due to God having made the intervention. That reality continues to exist.
Of course, God could delete the reality where God did not intervene (or vice-versa I guess)...but why would God do that? It'd be murdering, killing off, all of the individuals ever born in the reality God deletes. Yes, those individuals would still exist in different realities, but just because they'd be 99.9999999999999999% identical doesn't mean they are quite literally the same exact individual across reality.
Each individual in each individual reality is slightly different. Which makes each individual in each reality their own person. And if God is truly all-loving, then how could God decide to effectively kill off one version in favor of another? An all-loving God would love all of God's children, and each individual reality would have their own version of the individuals and God would thus love every single version of them.
In other words; it's not that God can't intervene or God refuses to intervene. It's that God already can has and does, but we just so happen to live in a reality that these interventions are either minimalistic or nonexistent, and while better versions of us exist where God did more than what God has in our reality, God didn't have the heart to delete our lesser, so to speak, 'inferior' reality because we are still different people, even if we are less happy versions of people there are more happy versions of.
There will always be versions of us that are worse off than we are and there will always be versions of us that are better off than we are and given the infinite nature of the multiverse, they basically all exist. (Now, granted: infinite may not be truly infinite. There might actually be far fewer paths than we think, but I still believe the ever-expanding tree of the multiverse still has 'branches' so to speak, meaning it is our responsibility to try and live the best lives we can and to give the best lives to everyone else we can so that as many of these branches as possible are better. Just because the possibilities are endless doesn't mean some possibilities necessarily actually exist, so it is best to try and steer the possibilities towards the better ones, just in case.)
If this is true, then it actually does solve things to me. A God that is all-loving, truly all-loving, cannot in good faith kill off individuals born into a less-fortunate branch of reality, in spite of having the power and knowledge to do so. Such a God could still make as many branches as possible be as good as they can be, but we just so happen to be in one of the less-fortunate ones. Not the least-fortunate I'd imagine but not the most-fortunate.
It would thus fall to us with our own influence on reality (see above in how the God that is tied to the afterlife works) to do everything in our power to shape it as much as we can to maximize the good and minimize the bad, because while God already does that, we live in a version of the reality where God didn't do that because God refused to delete our reality after having creating the maximized-good/minimized-bad path.
The second breakthrough idea I had, the third solution to the divine trifecta of capital-G God being omnipotent omniscient and all-loving was surprisingly simple.
What if God Himself (used 'Him' here because the dominant religions in the world which believe in God with a capital G usually refer to God with male pronouns, have tried to avoid using it but can't think of a non-pronouned way to say this even though I don't believe that any God with a capital G could have a gender, as any God with a capital G would be an entity that is explicitly genderless) made the universe in order to more or less experiment with something?
For instance. If God existed before anything else, then the question is: how did God come to exist? If God was the first thing to exist, a being all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, could it be that God has in common being a bit philosophical in wondering things like how God existed? I realize it can seem paradoxical for an all-knowing God to not know how God came to exist, but in some weird way it actually makes sense to me that God may not know how God came to exist in spite of otherwise being all-knowing because there's a bit of a loop. If nothing existed before God and God was the first thing to exist, God needed to basically will God into existence but if God didn't exist then how did God will God into existence?
If God were to have some form of desire such as pursuit of figuring out the existence of God, then our entire reality could be a sort of experiment towards that:
All of the universe coming into existence as a first version of that. What caused the universe to exist and what caused the big bang of the universe?
The birth of life on our planet is another.
At some point, there was no life on our planet. But then at some point, life existed. What caused something that had no life to gain life?
You can in evolution probably have various other pinpoint questions.
Like what caused the birth of sentience?
What caused the birth of sapience?
We can, to some extent, answer many of these questions with our understanding of the universe with our scientific knowledge of evolution. Mutations that are favorable to propagating existence, the whole process, with a mutation being the cause of that.
...But what in that mutation made sentience/sapience emerge?
And so on and so forth.
In that sense, the development of our world could be a bit of an experiment of God's. And if God relates to us, truly, then it is perhaps possible that God is an imperfect parent, that God has a, so to speak, "human" element.
Ain't no rule which says that "omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving" also means perfect and infallible.
In fact, it explicitly does not.
God is not necessarily a perfect being in spite of being all-powerful and all-knowing. Just because God is all-knowing and therefore would know of God's faults and imperfections does not necessarily mean that in spite of being all-powerful God would necessarily work to fix them.
A bit of a human mindset, sure. Humans might know what a problem is, but not necessarily choose to fix it in spite of having the power to do so. They are flawed, imperfect, and often selfish. Who's to say God cannot also be selfish?
After all, just because God is all-loving does not mean God necessarily cannot have desires. Humans can be fairly selfless, love their fellow humans, but they still usually are still somewhat selfish, and understandably so; if you give literally every bit of yourself to being selfless, you have nothing left for yourself and the result is that you quite literally die because selflessness without restraint, without holding back, is fatal without some selfishness to reign it in.
God could be similar. God, being all-loving, would see what humanity wants and the suffering we go through and the misery and such and hurt and want to try and help us out, but have His (again apologies for the pronoun) own needs and wants and desires and be unable to intervene overtly for us while still attending to God's own desires.
I'm probably not explaining this adequately but both this idea and the second made a huge amount of sense to me as both being at least plausible.
Again, they're not necessarily mutually exclusive.
God could love everyone, but have some selfishness, but still not have the heart to delete less fortunate realities (ours among them), and there's still a different (technically lesser) God that is attuned to the afterlife.
Still figuring it out.
But I felt like recording this so that it's not forgotten.