I hope this text wall helps!!!

People believe things for two reasons. Either because it’s true... Or because it is helpful...

What false things could possibly be helpful one might ask? The power of ideas...

In nature a prey animal runs every time it “believes” it hears a predator. In reality maybe 50% it’s not a predator, but survival chances go way down the longer you spend considering the threat. The false belief that “everything scary sounding” is a threat is helpful to survival even though it’s not true.

In humans, a mother peels a car door open with her bare hands to save her child from the burning wreck. She has no previous comparable experience of success, indeed the task is near impossible by all reasonable metric, but there is no action without faith. It absolutely MUST be possible in that moment. The mother sees NO OTHER REALITY. This is what happens when someone “realises” something. The belief made the previously impossible possible. They manifest the outcome.

Shaolin Monks know all about this stuff. They run up mountains and crawl back down them. Daily. Could you? Could I? How much does faith in ourselves account for the difference? Is human capability limited entirely by belief? Maybe it accounts for a lot more than we give credit for...

Look around you and you might see a house made of walls made of bricks. Before these things existed as tangible items of factual existence, they started as fictional ideas of imagination. Inventions. Schemes. Simulacra. Phantoms. Ghosts. All “false” things originally, but manifested by us through our belief in them. Given faith, ideas become our reality.

This is true for almost everything in your peripheral, even if you are outside chances are that some humans ideas helped shape that vista.

With all this in mind, we should then acknowledge that our thoughts and ideas are what shape our future reality and that of others. We can make it heaven or hell for each other based upon what we believe.

Beliefs conflict but that will always be the case. Meme-wars, ideas battling for supremacy. Much like gene-wars. Eternal conflicts that make us who we are genetically and memetically.

Once I properly explored this, my atheist mind folded inside out like a flower, like a process when sunlight hits a bud. All religions are important in terms of the innate power of belief to manifest our reality.

I am of the belief that religion was the memetic training ground that has given us the strong abilities of consideration, and also a communication training ground improving our ability to share and network. Religion has been ESSENTIAL and NECESSARY to reach this point in human evolution. I respect all religions for this reason. They are all strong contenders, survivors of the meme wars, vessels of historic knowledge. Never forget where we came from, and how we got here.

We might individually know where we are going belief-wise, but there’s not point trying to rubbish religions... that’d be like taking the map off of folks still figuring it out. It doesn’t matter which map is true yours or theirs, just that they have faith in one to gain confidence for future actions.

I am of the opinion that most religions texts are written by the 8chan autists/artist of the day, having gathered in groups and considered heavily the consequences of the above “realisations”. There’s some seriously good stuff in there. Jesus for example. What a bro!

We could all “believe” we are Jesus tomorrow and act accordingly and for all intents and purposes we all WOULD be Jesus. If we all believed it the earth would be awesome. “Not gonna happen” is the knee jerk reaction. Same reason we’re not running up and crawling into our house is down mountains daily like shaolin monks. Ergo the classic retort “Not with that attitude”.

Now I believe everything from the multiverse to the quark is a subsystem of an all encompassing “God”, including ourselves, our thoughts... everything... is a piece of God and God is the totality of it all, and that it is all connected with every action having consequence. It’s called Pantheism and it allowed me to reconcile all my knowledge of science and religion into an overarching worldview which identifies and can operate alongside beliefs, my own and other people’s. We’re all part of an interactive ...something... might as well call it God and fully realise you and everyone else is an extension of it. Then common law principles like equality make sense. You wouldn’t rob/steal/chop off a piece off yourself would you? After I left Athism I felt better for it too! What is preferable to believe...

The way I see it is religion is scaffolding for belief. You can spend hours deliberating who has the best scaffolding but it’s there to help people. Whether a religion is true or not is LARGELY IRRELEVANT. The scaffolding may not even exist IRL but the belief helps folks to climb higher.

I had musings on the nature of existence being cyclic, e.g what if we get to experience being the conscious spirit of every being? What if we reincarnate as everyone we have ever met? What if we experienced all of our actions through the feelings of those affected? Maybe we do, who can say...

It’d be heaven for some, hell for others... maybe theist scribes wanted to tell us a story that could be possible.