u/Kwahn

Most people generally want to follow the rules. In a recent study in Nature, 55% to 70% of all humans, even when no one is around and no one is watching, will follow arbitrary non-zero-cost rules. Rules allow functioning societies to scale up via the establishment of expected behaviors sans explicit context and awareness (thus letting society grow beyond the bounds of any one human's knowledge), and thus exist for reasons.

Rules existing for reasons, and not for no reason, should be relatively uncontroversial. Any rule, law, moral prescript or expectation has to exist to serve a cause. A "Duty" without a reason for existing is senseless and arbitrary.

So let's talk about a very specific duty that has almost no explanation, despite being considered the reason we're being told we need salvation.

Why does sin exist? Not, "Why did Adam sin". Why does the system as a whole and in its entirety work this way? Why did God construct the framework known as Sin, categorize some behaviors as specifically "behaviors that are anti-God", and then make it so that humans, against their free will, are forced to inherit and incorporate it into their very base nature, and then need to believe that someone else's story is true in order to escape the consequences God designed for people to inflict on themselves?

A good moral framework has a reason for existing. Sin doesn't seem to. It's just arbitrary nonsense that God decided would be caused by humans disobeying him, after God decided to make the concept of obeying vs. disobeying for some reason, and then decided to make disobeying cause suffering for billions of people for some reason.

A good moral framework has clear rules. The concept of sin doesn't. What counts as a sin? What doesn't? Is it even a binary state, or is sin a sliding scale? The Bible never says. We're told some examples, but are never given any functional framework for sin identification - and as a result, humanity cannot even agree as what counts as a sin or not. There's no helpful indicators or useful tooltips in life indicating what to avoid, so even a good-faith attempt to be sinless may fail due to God's choice to not enumerate all sins or provide a proper heuristic for what is and isn't a sin.

A good moral framework relates the consequences of actions to the actions taken in ways that logically flow causally. Sin doesn't - it causes "separation from God", whatever that means, and might send you to hell, or might not, maybe sin doesn't actually have consequences and universalism is true, or maybe sin has consequences and some people burn for eternity, or maybe hell's temporary - no one knows, because nothing is explained and nothing has reasons and nothing follows rules and it's just chaos instead of a well-ordered framework on how to best live your life.

And I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm part of the group that just wants to follow rules and not cause harm. Why does the Bible have to make figuring out what counts as a sin and what doesn't so darn difficult? Why does it have to do absolutely everything to force everyone to have to be a sinner against their will? It makes no sense.

And people have tried to give me explanations - just had a good conversation with someone where they insisted they were choosing sin. Well, I'm not - I'm apparently having it forced on me. People told me to look at Catholic documentation, but when your explanation explicitly says, quote, "the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand", that's not helpful. Generally, every discussion I've ever seen, instead of directly tackling any of the many questions I raised above, dances around them and tries to find satisfying and fruitful platitudes that make people worry less about the problem, rather than answering the problem. I state this as an explicit prediction of behavior for later checking, and dearly hope I'm proven wrong and people explain why the concept of forbiddenness had to and has to be a thing.

Let's review the Gospels without the assumption that the main claiming to be Jesus must be Jesus.

Jesus is killed. His body vanishes. Then, people start encountering a man calling himself Jesus.

First, Mary Magdalene in John 20:14 fails to identify the man by sight: "she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus." She is eventually convinced he is Jesus. How do you confuse your dead associate with the gardener? There's only one clear possibility - he didn't look like Jesus. Note that I'm not saying here that it was not Jesus necessarily, but that I believe we can firmly establish that he does not look like Jesus.

Luke corroborates - "But their eyes were holden that they should not know him." They encountered a man they initially did not recognize as the very influential and notable man they knew, and only came to the realization after being convinced through discussion.

John adds another example, John 21:4: "Jesus stood on the shore: but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus." Something's preventing people, on a large scale, from recognizing Jesus as Jesus, and Jesus is having to talk to people to convince him that he is Jesus.

Matthew corroborates, 28:17: "And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted."

This isn't randos doubting, this is Jesus's own disciples who doubted that Jesus is Jesus on a purely physical basis, and were convinced only through discussion.

So what's this timeline look like?

Jesus dies, his body vanishes, and a man that does not look like Jesus shows back up claiming to be resurrected and convinces Mary and then slowly convinces even very close yet doubtful disciples that he is Jesus over time through discussion and in spite of his appearance being distinct from Jesus.

Now, this doesn't mean Jesus was an imposter. This doesn't mean Christianity is necessarily false. But I do find it odd that a resurrected being was not restored to their prior physical state. It's much less odd in the context of Jesus being an imposter, of course, but that alone doesn't make imposter theory true. It would take someone who knew how Jesus acted extensively to mimic his behavior, but not a lot of people knew how Jesus a-well, okay, maybe a few people knew how Jesus acted, and thus had the potential to mimic his behavior.

That, however, gets into a stronger claim than I'm actually making, which is that, at its core, the Gospels focus around a version of Jesus that is the story of a resurrected man who did not look how he used to pre-resurrection, convincing people that he's Jesus over time.

You tend to find that shorter words are used for more important and common things, so you'd expect the most important and most common thing, a god, to be the shortest! and Ra is exactly that.

It's short, pithy, useful in chants, and represents the shortest and simplest possible representation of the concept for ease and effectiveness of communication.

Allah's right out, as it has two syllables and represents an almost unconscionably inefficient method of communicating the concept of said deity. Same with YHVH, and Jehovah is even worse!

And don't get me started on Nyankapon–Nyame–Odomankoma, which is essentially a list of its primary characteristics disguised as a name, German-style. There is no need to include all of that extra baggage every time you talk about it. (The actual word for God is Nyame, which is much more palatable, though not ideal.)

I give "God" like a 9 out of 10 since it's monosyllabic at least.

So what are long names good for? In my opinion, the more specific or limited the deity, the longer of a name is justified. As an aside: How many syllables is Quetzlcoatl? Perfect name for a feathered serpent deity, as that's far more specific than being a generic creator deity!

El Cantare starts off great, with a good, solid El, but Cantare is extremely superfluous when El should tell you everything you need to know - Cantare is only there to provide specificity that that particular incarnation of the Ultimate Creator was Incan. I haven't decided how much I like Thoth - it's very short, but the English language makes it unnecessarily lettered, but Fof is distinct and I'm sure looks incredibly silly to English speakers, so I suppose the "Th" is a necessary component of its name.

I don't think people think about what they call things often, but I think there's objective, though minor, utility in having shorter, more efficient names to refer to things. I'm a linguistic minimalist who believes that natural languages have major pitfalls, and think this should apply to the names of deities just as much as I think short usernames and human names are efficient. This may seem incredibly silly, but how you refer to things matters.

This is a post after some very fruitful discussions with labreuer and ShakaUVM, which I highly recommend reading (and if you leave an outside opinion on those, I always really appreciate it!).

P1: God is perfect.

P2: God is omnipotent.

P3: God is omniscient.

P4: God is atemporal (and necessarily aspatial as a result).

P5: God created our universe R.

C1: P5+"duh"->God can create our universe R.

E1: Relatively uncontroversial so far, I hope!

C2: P1+P3+C1->God knows exactly how it created the universe.

E2: If it created an R, the "how" is a fact it definitionally must know or lose omniscience. The knowledge of how to create R must be a logical impossibility for God to not know it. Since God in this framework did create a universe, that is an ontologically real fact it must know.

C3: P1+P2+P3+C1+C2 -> If God is perfect, omniscient, omniscient, can create universes, and knows exactly how to create our universe, then God can do it again and make R', a universe with all ontologically real facts identical to our current universe.

E3: Probably the most controversial step, but to contest this, you must find something that renders creating only R' and not R a logical impossibility, as the process of the creation of a second identical universe R' is perfectly identical to the process of the creation of R, and the creation of R is possible, so almost all ways of contesting the possibility of R' contest the possibility of R.

C4: C3+P4 -> God can create R' such that all internal ontological facts are identical, but the facts in R' happen any number of years before the events in timeline R with respect to God's perspective.

E4: God can take any action at any time, at all times, or at no time at all. Therefore, the creation of identical universes may be staggered arbitrarily far apart.

C5: C3+C4->It is logically possible for God to know everything about the future state of R via a future-state R'.

E5: If God can create our reality but it runs ahead of ours, then events in R' happen before R. R' is internally identical, so what happens in R' is what will happen in R. The only escape hatch I am aware of is to embrace brute facts, as anything derived from or based on anything ontologically real will be identical. Agents? A and A' were created with the same will. Randomness? If randomness is based on anything, it's the same, and if it's not, brute facts. No real thing within R and R' can avoid this.

C6:C5+P3->God knows all real things about the future state of R.

E6: It's logically possible for an omniscient God to know, so it logically does.

P6: Decisions we make are a fact that can be known.

C7: C6+P6-> God knows all ways in which we will choose to use our free will.

E7: If it's logically possible to know all future facts about R via R', and the utilization of free will is a fact that can be known, God knows it.

And that's it. Please contest a specific premise or specific conclusion with, preferably, why the step is logically impossible, as omnipotence and omniscience cannot be restricted from doing anything. Thank you!

I see people say that Porky's going to be trapped in an eternal torment type situation, since even the creator said that Porky will be hanging out in five billion years after the sun explodes, and will just be sitting bored in there forever.

but The Absolutely Safe capsule protects Porky from absolutely everything.

Why wouldn't it protect him from boredom?

My head canon: the Absolute Safe Capsule keeps porky eternally in a state of smug satisfaction, ​and he does not consciously experience the passage of time, but instead is blowing a raspberry and thinking smug thoughts for all eternity.

Take this head canon if you agree! 😃