RE: What is God?
August 7, 2015 at 11:18 pm
(This post was last modified: August 7, 2015 at 11:29 pm by JuliaL.)
God is a machine, a mechanism;
An emergent pattern of matter and information resulting from human social interaction.
Useful in cementing groups of persons into a unity with more effective power than any of its individual adherents.
Once united, said groups engage in activities, often violent, designed to suppress other, similarly constructed entities.
Successful gods reproduce and propagate into the mind-space of surrounding communities covering more and more territory.
Like slime mold.
A near universal characteristic of a god is that it is nominally supernatural. This protects the god from falsifiability and guards against the observation that the god is never observed. Only moderate pig-headedness is required to ignore the point that supernatural, imaginary and non-existent are objectively indistinguishable.
Gods and humans co-evolve. More gullible and malleable humans make more fertile ground for gods to populate. The larger societies formed by these persons are better able to kill their neighbors and prosper themselves by expanding into the real estate left open. Less rapacious, often more effective gods leave their victims alive but colonize minds and similarly expand their areas of influence. This is called evangelism.
An emergent pattern of matter and information resulting from human social interaction.
Useful in cementing groups of persons into a unity with more effective power than any of its individual adherents.
Once united, said groups engage in activities, often violent, designed to suppress other, similarly constructed entities.
Successful gods reproduce and propagate into the mind-space of surrounding communities covering more and more territory.
Like slime mold.
A near universal characteristic of a god is that it is nominally supernatural. This protects the god from falsifiability and guards against the observation that the god is never observed. Only moderate pig-headedness is required to ignore the point that supernatural, imaginary and non-existent are objectively indistinguishable.
Gods and humans co-evolve. More gullible and malleable humans make more fertile ground for gods to populate. The larger societies formed by these persons are better able to kill their neighbors and prosper themselves by expanding into the real estate left open. Less rapacious, often more effective gods leave their victims alive but colonize minds and similarly expand their areas of influence. This is called evangelism.
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat? 
