Religion

Last edited Sat May 18, 2019, 11:43 AM - Edit history (1)

Would you have created the world you now live in? I know I wouldn't have. Are you part of someone else's world creation? Seems damned unlikely to me.

There's a world my brain creates sometimes, but those are dreams. All sorts of weird shit happens in my dreams. But, then, I wake up and Donald Trump really is in the White House. Even my dreams aren't that weird.

On the other hand, people have succeeded in creating gods that suit their needs, over and over again. But, there's no actual evidence that such creations exist, except in people's minds. And think about it, if you can create an omnipotent deity, why aren't thinks going your way all the time? I mean, omnipotence means something, after all.

Solipsism lets individuals think they understand stuff and know stuff, though. For example, someone might think he or she understands exactly what an atheist is and might believe that he or she can predict exactly what atheists believe. That person might "know" that atheists really have the belief that gods exist but are able to suppress that belief. So, that someone might think he or she can quantify and define atheism.

Its a depressing sort of world view, though. Solipsists are forever failing to get things right, so they must think that their ability to create the universe around them is somehow defective. That would depress me no end. So, I look at it all as pretty much random, but random within boundaries. It's sort of like a computer random number generation algorithm. It's really only pseudo-random. For all intents and purposes the numbers it generates are random enough, but most such algorithms will also accept a seed number. They're not really random at all, although they certainly appear to be.

One of the shareware programs I used to sell was a LOTTO number picker. It would generate random lottery number selections and display them on a state lottery ticket simulation for you. It sold pretty well, actually. One of its features was its "personal secret number" entered by the player. The program's pseudo-randomizer used that number as a seed. Now, that personalized the randomization just fine, but it didn't matter, except to the person using the program. It had nothing to do with the odds of winning a lottery, but had a significant psychological effect on its users. As far as I know, nobody who bought the program ever won a Lottery. Its most frequent purchasers were from Spain, since a Spanish-language version was available that produced a beautiful image of that country's lottery ticket you could print out.

Nota Bene: The randomizer for the quick pick lottery tickets is also only a pseudo-random algorithm.