Youthful Wonderings

Here are some things that I used to wonder about in my youth. Remember that much of this was from before I became a Christian.

One thing that disturbed me was about people being dead. A person is certified as dead and then their body is buried or cremated. But do we really know for sure that they are completely dead? Although they are dead from our point of view can we be sure that they are completely dead? Maybe there are ascending levels of death that we cannot be aware of since we cannot communicate with those levels.

How do we know that life isn't just a dream, and maybe dying is waking up? We can see by history that we always think we are right but our knowledge often turns out to be incomplete, or wrong altogether.

We are made of matter and we live in reality. While it is true that we are more complex than our inanimate surroundings is it even possible that we can imagine something that is completely impossible? While we can certainly imagine things that are not realistic, an argument can be made that it is impossible for us to even imagine something that is completely impossible. What would people of two hundred years ago think of modern knowledge and technology? I am writing this over here and as soon as I post it anyone in the world will be able to instantly read it. If we are made of matter and inhabit reality ourselves can we even imagine something that is completely impossible?

So much of what people in the past thought has fallen by the wayside. It used to be believed that the sun rises and sets because everything revolves around the earth, and that people get sick because they have too much blood. What is there that we think we know today that will one day fall by the wayside?

How much might there be to be learned that we have no idea of now? Suppose that there are some teenagers playing soccer (football). Maybe it will be determined, a thousand years from now, that this soccer game, which will have taken place a thousand years in the past, was actually the peak of human history, or maybe even the peak of the entire universe. We cannot imagine this now but how much is there today that could not possibly have been imagined a thousand years ago?

How much are we told what to want, and what we should want to be? All of our lives we are bombarded by advertising, as well as taught in schools. How much do we want what we do because we are told that is what we should want, that we wouldn't want otherwise?

In ways that we do not fully realize how much does our language shape the way that we think? Language is not just a way of communicating but a way of thinking. People who speak different languages think differently because their language is a map of how to think.

Suppose that there really were space aliens, and they visited earth. A lot of thought, as well as sci-fi stories have been about how we would interact with them. We presume that they would interact with us, of all living things, because we are the leading form of life on the planet. But what if they didn't see it that way. What if the space aliens pretty much ignored us and considered ants as the leading form of life on the planet, or maybe butterflies?

Just how real are we? Of course we perceive ourselves as "real" because we are at the same level of reality as our surroundings. Suppose that there are people in a painting, we do not perceive them as "real". But if they could think they would consider themselves as real because they were at the same level of reality as their surroundings in the painting. That means that, at some level, we are like people in a painting.

When I was in tenth grade I wrote a report that the universe is expanding but the expansion is slowly down and the universe will eventually collapse back together, which will then be followed by a repeat of the Big Bang, over and over and over again. Since there is no new information from anywhere else the universe must repeat exactly. Billions of years ago I was at this same desk writing this same report. My body, the desk, the paper and the pen were made of exactly the same atoms as they are now. Billions of years from now I will be here, made of the same atoms and writing the same report again. I have since abandoned this scenario because I believe in God, not that I exist just because of atoms coming together. Also we know now that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down, it is actually speeding up, and so won't fall back together.

Is humanity alive? I don't mean each individual person, I mean humanity as a whole. Each cell in our body is alive but functions as part of the whole. In the same way each of us might be like a cell in all of humanity. We each have an occupation just as cells in the body have different purposes. Criminals are like the cancer of the living humanity and wars are like diseases where the body attacks itself. We can see that great civilizations have life cycles very much like that of humans. Since people are not physically connected to one another, as the cells of our bodies are, we could say that each of us is a contiguous life form while humanity as a whole is a non-contiguous life form. Who says that life forms have to be contiguous?

We study how people lived in ancient times. But someday our times will be considered as ancient times. From a distant future perspective we are living in ancient times. 

In Hungary the Holy Crown itself is considered as ruling the country. The king is just someone who is deemed worthy to wear the crown. The king issues orders on behalf of the crown but it is the crown itself that is actually ruling. Maybe that is the way it really is. What about our clothes? Maybe the clothes are actually the real person and "people" only exist to make and display our clothes. Just as we consider our skeletons to exist only to support our bodies maybe we are just skeletons to support our clothes. Of course we think that our skeletons are just to support the rest of our bodies but if our skeletons could think maybe they would consider themselves as the real person and the rest of the body as just their clothes. The same can be said about our buildings. Maybe our houses and buildings are actually the real life and we just exist as their internal organs to assemble and maintain them, although we see them as existing for our benefit.

Just how self-centered are we and how much does it distort our view of reality? We see ourselves as humans and other creatures as animals. But every creature sees itself as the "humans" and other creatures as the "animals". Deer do not see people coming and think "Those are humans and we are just animals". I have had dogs and cats who clearly thought that they were the "humans" and I was an oaf that they had charmed and outsmarted into providing a living for them.

We consider creatures that can think, including ourselves, to be a higher form of life than plants, which cannot think. But maybe this is more self-centeredness. Maybe plants are ahead of us. Maybe we think because we need to think to survive while plants have no need to think. We think that plants exist to sustain us and we have the right to harvest them and cut them down. But that is exactly the way germs think about our bodies. If plants could think maybe they would see themselves as having gotten sick by catching these destructive germs. If the earth itself could think it would certainly see us as an infection.

How much will we discover in the future that we cannot even imagine right now. People centuries ago could not imagine that there would be atoms and electrons and nuclear energy and relativity and that we would have cars, computers and, phones. Maybe there are passages through time that we have no idea of. Maybe a boy is at a table in a school cafeteria. Through a window he sees a man doing maintenance work who looks like he might have been the boy's father, with the same color hair and eyes. What neither of them realize is that they are actually the same person, a past and future version who have happened to come into contact through an unknown time passage.

How do we know that we are not just characters in somebody's comic book or computer game? Maybe we have been designed so that we do not see things as they really are. We Know that colors or the blue sky don't really exist, and we see many optical illusions. Maybe we are an experiment in a science class. What we see as stars are really science students who have designed us so that we see them as stars. What we see as the sun might be the teacher of the class.

How do we know that the way we see things is not very distorted from reality? In a parking lot at night, while it is raining, the rain on the windshield distorts the lights into all kinds of shapes and forms. How do we know that is not how reality really looks, or at least is a view that is just as valid as ours? Maybe the way we see things works for us but that does not necessarily mean that it is a true view of reality. What does reality really look like?

When I found God things started to really fall into place. All of this is really a test. If we can completely put our faith in God then we will have nothing at all to worry about because He will make sure that we will have everything that we need and guide us to what He wants us to do. There was a television commercial about a product that was shown to work as advertised and a competitor product that didn't. The reason our present world has so much wars and crime, and other bad things, is because it is like the inferior product that has troubles because it doesn't really follow God. The superior product is like the Kingdom of God that Jesus will establish on earth after His Return following the Tribulation Period. The world will be the godly paradise that it was always intended to be. We have everything we need to build a paradise now but human nature gets in the way. The purpose of all this happening is to show that we have to follow God.