Philosophical Drivel

http://www.philosophersnet.com/magazine/article.php?id=1043 discusses an article I find of interest. Epicurus argument, part 2, doesn't work, though, because there probably will be people after you die. I know what he meant, though.

Time doesn't exist. There is only now. There is no past, there is no future, in a real sense. Time is a series of nows, that we parse into increments that don't exist. It's always now.

Is this what is meant in the philosophical conundrum of existence "outside of time" in the question Does God exist outside of time? He doesn't believe in time? Or is it that He or She never existed, will never exist, and is not now. That is to say, has never been in any now, which is a ridiculous way of putting it, as there is only now. So, if God doesn't exist, then He is outside of time, as he is not inside of time. But if he doesn't exist, then he is not outside, either. An extra-temporal God, must, by nature, not be in the now, which would either mean He's dead or He isn't born yet (although he's certainly conceived of). My answer to the question is this: God doesn't exist, time doesn't exist, and if it did, nothing can exist outside of the Now. Memories exist, of course, because your brain exists, for now.

I am not playing a word game. I do not mean to query if God exists as a word. It obviously does. I am not one to say that God, therefore exists. I would say 'God' therefore exists. I also do not mean to query, since God is defined as love, if love exists. Or, since God is defined as One, if the number one exists, or even if One of anything exists. Or, since he named himself I AM, if anything IS. I believe love, a unit of anything, and objective existence exists. So, you can play games and therefore say God exists. I exist, but then again, you may be reading this after I am dead.

But God is generally held to mean a being, a beneficent creator, with names and attributes like omniscience, omnipotence, etc. Even this is unclear. Creator can be taken to mean Creator of the Universe, or just the Creator of You. They're kind of the same thing. The past, History, is God, in a way. The bible takes the chain of causation back to some mythical "Adam" and "Eve". I take it back to the future (through time travel creating a circle of life), to space aliens seeding the earth, to evolution from life that arose spontaneously from the primordial soup, or all or some of the above.

Maybe, in a very real sense, "Adam" was an amoeba or something, and his "rib" was what became the second life form. It's called asexual reproduction. The very definition of life is that it reproduces, so an Adam without an Eve is like a rock or something, animated with breath. For Adam to have been created with genitals, without an Eve is preposterous. Eventually, sexual reproduction evolved. (Adam is a word meaning humankind, not a proper name, as used in Genesis).

Your parents created you, and we all know they're not God, aside from creating your universe, in a way. We can all rest assured that the universe would have existed had you not been born. Let's define the universe. It's not a verse of any book. It's just space. It doesn't even require anything in it. If all Billion Trillion stars or so vanished, for me, there would still be a universe.

You might say the perception of the Universe is what makes the Universe exist in the first place. That's nonsense. Trees make sounds in unoccupied forests. In a virtual way, the Universe only exists in our brain, and it becomes for us what we perceive it to be. We may believe the Universe to exist on the back of a turtle, but that doesn't make it so. IT just becomes the operative principle. But in the objective, real, way, the universe exists, as it truly exists, whether or not we or anyone else perceives it, or perceives it rightly. Perception or lack thereof does not change it's real nature, aside from the fact that we are a part of the universe.

You might posit that Maybe, just maybe, if you define yourself as the universe, the universe will cease to be when you do. That's nonsense. Jesus thought he was the light, and when he died, the sun wasn't extinguished (although the sky got darker, they say). Certainly not all the stars in the telescopes, or even in the sky, were extinguished, as I just read in Scientific American will happen to the Earth's sky in a Trillion years. Things are what they are. They will all fade to black. Jesus said he was the alpha and omega, and I guess he just wanted to cast a spell over "eternity", referring to the ultimate omega, oblivion.

Just like Creation, Oblivion could refer to the death of an individual, or to the Extinction of a species. People think the undeniable truth of oblivion gives them a free hand to be rude, trample other's rights, and enjoy life while you can (even at other's expense). Compromise becomes a bad word in the face of mortality. You only live once. There is no heaven or hell (in an afterlife). But other people are spiritually connected to you, and their (un)happiness affects yours, in this life. You may think it's a zero sum game, that you'll be happy when others are unhappy. That's what religion calls the devil. I think God and religion and heaven should be irrelevant to doing good. Maybe religion is necessary to inculcate values of service, but it can be discarded for humanism while remaining operative, in effect. God is love, and humanism is about loving humans, not some ethereal embodiment of love itself. Of course, if you don't love love, then you might have a problem. Make somebody else happy. I guarantee it'll make you feel good too. No I don't. They could be a sadist. I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Happiness is a warm gun? a movie? making someone laugh? a drug? a hug? Whatever.

I was talking about Oblivion. Then again, does Oblivion even happen? Nothing will die, because nothing was really alive to begin with. We're just matter in a conscious form, no different from the dust we are made of or the dust we will become. We feel pain, and that is the only evil (for those who dislike pain). The golden rule (Do unto others as you would have them do to you. Also: sometimes formulated as the converse, Don't do unto others as you would not have them do to you) doesn't apply, because people have different tastes. Do you really want a masochist torturing you, for example, just because HE likes pain? We say a property of life is that it is capable of reproducing, yet there are many of us living who are not. We could just as well be robots. And robots may someday be able to reproduce. That is what I am saying. We're just matter. And nothing matters. Not objectively.

Do you want God to kill you? A lot of these Christian songs on the radio, when interpreted literally, seem to be saying just that. It's like their goading people who aren't Christian into killing them, as gambits for a religion war, or to increase the probability of capture of unstable people who take stupid lyrics literally. Maybe Jesus allowed himself to be crucified because he felt guilty of something. Maybe he "nailed" a few "sinners" of his own, and he felt obliged to live by his own golden rule. Maybe he wanted to be crucified all along, for eternal fame, the twisted sick bastard. Why would anyone want to take up the cross and be Christlike? It's just pain.

I think Christians live mostly comfortable lives. But they believe in the redemptive value of suffering, like they can redeem some pain like a coupon for some eternal life in a hereafter. This is delusion. Belief in Jesus' name (meaning Yahweh saves), it is said, confers eternal life. But it could be an eternal life in hell, or suffering. It doesn't specify. You gotta be careful with tricky genies like Jesus.

An empty universe is still plenty big. And there's plenty of nothingness through you, with you, and in you, in the name of the "holy" spirit, amen. Okay, sorry, permeating reality, I'll just say. Maybe we have entire universes in our bodies, or, conversely, our entire known universe occupies the head of a pin in some other universe. I like those matryoshka dolls...

Literally, the expression "nothing matters" would seem to mean that matter would pop up from nothing, or pop into existence. I think I read somewhere that that's possible. Very low probability, but possible. I don't know what the explanation, or physics, or mechanism of that would be, or what the probability is. I assume somebody knows what he's talking about, with all this infinite dimensions stuff and superstrings and M-theory and quantum foam and what have you. I really wish I knew.

Jesus may have been extending the Adam and Eve metaphor. Father in Heaven could refer to evolution from a space alien. Your parents may have made love, to conceive you, and that's about as Godly as it gets, making God, and making you, who may or may not be God, the creator of the universe. All of us participate in the ongoing creation of the universe. We're all contributing to the omniscience of the future. Let's just say God is the Creator of the Universe, for the sake of argument. Some dude, in human form of course, then, initiated the Big Bang. Well, maybe not in human form. Humans already come in a lot of forms, and we only came on the scene recently, especially in geologic time. By the time we invent a time machine, to send God before the Big Bang to invent the universe, we humans may look very different. But let's not quibble about form. We can call ourselves quargs, or vampires, or whatever. A rose is a rose by any other name.

There are alot of different kinds of roses, and different kinds of people. There are pygmies and really tall people, which, to be politically incorrect, may even be different species, by the definition of a species population as able to make children within themselves. I don't think pygmies and say, tall Kikuyu or whatever can produce children.. I'm not saying we should start calling chimpanzees humans, by that token, but.... whatever who cares. Call anything anything. How can there be free speech violations? Words will never hurt anyone. It's possible Hitler never hurt a soul. And that's okay. People should be held responsible for their own actions. Possession and avolition's a bitch, though. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Same thing. Words don't kill people, even if there is the song, "conversations kill." People kill guns. Speaking of arms, almost everyone has them. Stop making sense. Am I making sense?

God is love, and love is the answer. What was the question? Oh yeah. Does God exist outside of time. As South Park would say, Tim-may! Drifting, turning, through the NEVA. Thank you, Metallica. Time, like space, goes on forever. In a Trillion Trillion years, there won't be any record or memory of any of us. We basically don't exist, from a theoretical perspective. Love exists always and everywhere, even in a hell created by the technology of one of those military's ray guns. Geezus.

We're all outside of time, in a sense, because everything we experience is a brief fraction out of sync with real-time. For example, it takes time for our sensations to register as perceptions, in addition to the time, say, for the light to reach our eyes from the objects we're looking at.