Category Archives: religion

Purpose and meaning

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My son recently got into photography, and, as those things usually go, he started experimenting with film, since he heard all kinds of stuff on the Internet and wanted to check it out for himself. My reaction was “wait, film is actually still being used?” The last time I checked, Kodak went bankrupt and stopped producing film altogether, Fuji left the film market, and when I did my last experiment with film you could no longer get anyone to process E6 properly, and the best you could do was get some of the C41 emulsions that were still being produced (mostly Kodak Ektar and Portra and Fuji Reala), develop it in some rare places that still do it, and then either have it scanned in their Frontier minilab (to your detriment), or try to do it yourself, and good luck with that since film scanners were basically an extinct species at that point. Since the result of my experiment was that a 12MP m43 digital camera matched Mamiya 645 medium format with Fuji Reala negatives in resolution, and handily beat it in dynamic range and colour quality, I decided that film is not worth the hassle anymore, put the film gear in a drawer and thought that was it. However, it appears that the film market was having some kind of a resurgence – it’s mostly because of the motion pictures industry that started using it with some regularity again, and those C41 emulsions are being packaged in 35mm and medium format rolls, and black and white film was never much impacted by the move to digital. Also, there’s a surprising amount of activity around film, but when I looked into it, I was shocked that I couldn’t find good examples of film photography online anymore. Almost every example of pictures taken with film that I could find online looked like absolute garbage. I was like “that can’t be right, there has to be someone who shoots film because it’s beautiful”, but if there are such examples I couldn’t find them under the pile of all the hipster lomo garbage. I literally had to use my old film scans in order to show my son what film colours are supposed to look like when everything is done right – fresh film of good quality processed in good chemicals and scanned on a proper scanner. I literally couldn’t find an example of EBX online that isn’t cross-processed in C41 chemicals or developed in cat piss and scanned by a webcam or something, pretending it’s art. My first thought was “why do the film photographers put up with this”, but then I realized: they are actually actively looking for that, and when I saw a “film emulation” plugin for Lightroom that emulates the results of poor scanning, it became clear: people think film looks like shit, and they actively seek out this as a result, thinking it’s “nostalgic”. They actually want it to look washed out with colours that look like a result of age-fading for decades in some drawer. They don’t try to make film look good, because that look is perceived as “digital”. Not just that, but they are so obsessed with the “look”, that they completely neglect the photography itself, thinking that the “look” itself is somehow “art”, and when you look past the fact that the photo is taken on a poorly processed colour negative, there’s hardly anything there. A house, a street corner, a garage door. It’s all generic, stereotypical, vacuous and meaningless. Sure, most of everything used to be that way because most photographers used to follow trends and copy the things they saw somewhere without really understanding what made it good, but I think it’s even worse now, probably because poor results get applauded in some online echo-chamber and this amplifies the noise and kills the signal if there ever was any.

I continued to explore the technical part of what they are doing today, and found out that scanning, as expected, is a problem, because they are still using the same scanners that were current when I used to shoot film, but those are aging out of their life span and people are figuring out new methods, and the best one is to basically put film on a lightbox, and take a picture of it with a good digital camera with a macro lens. The detail captured is pretty much on par with film scanners, and the colours are in fact better. Then I asked myself the obvious question – why not just use the digital camera in the first place? And then it started dawning on me: that would be easy. That would skip over all those artificially introduced problems. It would reveal the fact that the photographer doesn’t actually know what he wants to do, has no ideas or goals in his work, and hides this under all the artificial problems created by using a completely fake technological process that pretends to be authentic, the way vinyl records mastered from digital files are a fake process pretending to be authentic.

Then I went deeper, trying to figure out why people create artificial problems for themselves and then whine as they solve them – it’s not just photography; I saw people heating their house with a wood stove or have an old car that keeps breaking down so that they have to fix it, and in general create all kinds of problems for themselves, and then solve those unnecessary problems in order to pretend that there’s something going on in their lives.

And there it is: they create fake problems for themselves because there is nothing else. The real problems are completely beyond their ability to solve, and the lack of smaller, solvable problems reveals the fact that their lives are empty and meaningless, and they are trying to bury this realization under all kinds of artificially created clutter.

Here’s where I really started thinking, because I remembered that experiment with a mouse utopia, where the scientists created an environment where mice will have absolutely everything they need, and the mice soon started acting in all kinds of dysfunctional and self-destructive ways, and their “civilization” collapsed in a very ugly way. The phenomenon became known as a behavioural sink, and humans seem to manifest the same patterns. When they lack obvious obstacles and problems to overcome in their daily lives, they reveal their existence as meaningless and start circling the drain.

Apparently, everybody needs to have a sense of a “mission”, a grand over-arching purpose of civilization and society, in which they partake by living their daily lives. If there’s no mission, and the problems they face daily are too easy and trivial, both mice and people go insane.

So, what’s the mission?

That’s an interesting question, because the same question seems to have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. The mission was initially obvious – Rome was threatened by the Gauls, by Carthage, by all kinds of powerful neighbours. However, as Rome grew stronger, all those threats were eliminated, and as there were no obvious threats, and there were centuries of peace, people had enough time to think about what was the whole point, and the answer was no longer apparent. People started doing all kinds of extreme stuff to fill the spiritual void created by the fact that there was no longer an obvious problem their existence was meant to solve.
This is why Christianity took over the Rome like a wildfire. Christianity introduced a new mission. The physical life is merely an entrance exam for the true life that is beyond it, and what we do in life is a choice for either God or vanity, for eternity or nothingness. This is a mission, an over-arching mission that saturated both civilization and individual lives with meaning, the same kind of mission that made the Egyptians build the pyramids. They probably thought they were building the mirror image of the Orion’s belt on Earth, and as such they were building a portal into the afterlife, merging Heaven and Earth. Similarly, the Christians of the “dark age” thought they were building Heaven on Earth, living the Augustinian God’s Kingdom on Earth. However, for some reason this sense of mission wore out, probably because they neglected the things of this world to the point where they were philosophically vulnerable to modernity and humanism, which pointed out that science should be applied to produce technologies that improve daily lives of people. At some point, modernism took over from religion, and the idea of conquering the world with science and technology and creating a modernist technological utopia became the dominant over-arching purpose.

This made complete sense when there were entire continents to be conquered and colonized, but we quickly ran out of those. Then we started “conquering” wastelands like Mt Everest and Antarctica, where “to conquer” no longer meant to go and live there, but to go in and out quickly before you die from hypoxia and hypothermia. “Conquering space” first meant to put something into orbit, then to put a man there for a few orbits, then to put a man on the Moon for a short period. However, the pattern soon started to emerge: space is even more hostile than the worst, most hostile and uninhabitable places on Earth. If you put a man in orbit for a year or so, his health degrades significantly. If you put a man on the Moon, radiation will quickly kill him, not to mention that there’s literally nothing there to sustain human life – it all needs to be brought from Earth, at great cost and literally zero benefit, because there’s nothing on the Moon. If Antarctica is undesirable as a place for human settlement, Moon is even more so; Antarctica at least has breathable atmosphere and radiation shielding. So, what’s there in space after the Moon? Mars? Let’s see: corrosive soil that is hostile to life, thin unbreathable atmosphere, no radiation shielding, already lost its atmosphere once to solar wind because it has no magnetosphere, and it’s even more expensive to get there than to the Moon. Also, there’s absolutely nothing there worth getting. What’s next? The satellites of the gas giants? Far from the Sun, so insufficient heat. Some have water. None have breathable atmosphere. Extremely hard and expensive to get to. Also, there’s nothing there.

Planets around other stars? Sure, if you have faster-than-light travel, but speed of light is very slow and it seems to be an insurmountable barrier for our technology. However, even if you get there, what evidence is there of places that are hospitable to human life? None. For all we know, the planets are all as inhospitable as Jupiter, Mars, Venus or the rocky bodies, and the star systems are mostly non-unary, which means stars orbiting the barycentre, often creating 3+ body problems of chaotic orbits, and squeezing each other tidally to produce extreme coronal mass ejections that sterilize the planets periodically. In order to realistically colonize something outside the Solar system, and not just go somewhere else to die, you’d need FTL travel that allows you to inspect a vast number of star systems quickly in order to filter out the inadequate ones. That’s completely beyond the reach of our technology, either now or in a foreseeable future.

Also, science fizzled out. It promised a lot, but the curve of progress flat-lined decades ago, and there’s nothing going on other than marketing for industry and politics, because science is currently a marketing brand rather than a method. Science no longer promises great things, and even if it does, people don’t really believe it.

So, let’s summarize this before it turns into another book. In the Ancient Egypt, the Grand Mission was to connect Heaven and Earth, to build a portal between the world of the living and the world of the dead. After that failed, their civilization fizzled out. With Rome, the Grand Mission was to build a huge empire to protect themselves and project their image upon the world. After that succeeded, everything felt empty and people tried to fill this emptiness with all kinds of crazy behaviours, until Christianity gave them another Grand Mission: create the world in the image of God, and choose an eternal afterlife in God. At some point, this fizzled out, and science offered the next Grand Mission: master the physical world, conquer the world, then the Solar System, then colonize the nearby star systems, and create a Galactic Empire, and maybe become Masters of the Universe. That went great until people landed on the Moon, but the next step never came, and as our space exploration atrophied, and our efforts turned to all kinds of navel-gazing, culminating with the Internet, people in general feel there’s no Grand Mission at all, no point to Everything, and thus no point to anything, and if they face this outright, they go insane like the mice in their behavioural sink utopia. And so, in order not to go crazy, they create fake problems for themselves, like living in some wasteland on primitive resources in order to keep themselves busy with survival despite not needing to, or doing photography with film, or maintaining an oldtimer car that keeps breaking down, or doing Christmas every year, where they pretend it’s something meaningful to do, spend all the money, get annoyed by the family and relatives, get fat from too much food and hung over from too much alcohol, and depressed in early January when all that shit passes and they are left with more debt, more lard on their arse, and meaninglessness of their lives staring at them from the abyss of the future. So, what do they do? Invent fake goals, create non-existent problems that require fixing, and make everything worse so that they could feel they have a purpose in making things better again.

There’s obviously a real problem underneath all the dysfunction, and it needs to be addressed, not just covered up with pointless nonsense. To me, the answer is obvious. The purpose and the point of our existence is not in this world, it’s on the other side. If this life is to have a purpose at all, it is to get to the other side safely, without leaving pieces behind, and by choosing the right kind of spiritual existence for ourselves, the kind we would actually want to have forever. St. Augustine was right all along; it’s just that people got side-tracked by materialism, which hijacked science and turned it into a false theology. God is still the Eternity which we are trying to reach, by following the Ariadne’s thread of God’s presence through the labyrinth of the world. That is the Way, for both the civilisation, and the individual person.

Syria as a liberal Utopia

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I was thinking about what happened in Syria, and what lessons can be taken from this.

Basically, what’s happening is jihadists killing, looting and pillaging, the Western propagandists lying and whitewashing their crimes and producing fake material in order to blame the Assad regime, and the neighbouring states capturing territory unopposed. Essentially, it looks similar to the collapse of a bee hive or an ant colony, and the first lesson, I think, is about the purpose of the state. Unlike what the liberal idealists imagine, if you remove the state you don’t get a Utopia. You get post-collapse Syria and Libya, or, in other words, you get hell on Earth. You get criminals in power instead of in prison, you get rule of the strongest, you get murder as a possible answer to absolutely every question, you get a division of society into warlords and slaves, you get unlimited slave trade and you get neighbouring states taking over the territory. Nobody gives a damn about “human rights” or similar nonexistent bullshit. You get violence, misery and suffering, and the only thing that limits human depravity is religious fanaticism, which in case of Islam is hardly a limitation.

You get a zombie horde with automatic weapons, pickups and motorcycles, and you get victims. Soon thereafter, you get starvation, sickness and everything else that leads to a dramatic population drop. Then the dust settles and the survivors make rules that are meant to avoid the depravities that led to this outcome, and the cycle of civilisation slowly repeats. Alternatively, the aggressive neighbours who split the territory between themselves and introduce the rule of law limit the bad outcomes before it comes to that point. Unfortunately, history shows that this is actually not a likely outcome; the territory formerly known as Libya, for instance, was left to the warring fractions of fanatics there, and slave markets are a normal thing for years already. Early years of the Soviet reign after the fall of the Russian Empire saw widespread famine and cannibalism, murder, persecution and all kinds of depravity. After the fall of Rome, during plagues and wars of the early dark ages, Europe was a hell on Earth.

So, this is what the state is for. The purpose of the state is not to distribute wealth to the poor, indoctrinate people or legislate “carbon credits”. The purpose of the state is to keep the savages in prison and afraid. The purpose of the state is to keep the borders controlled so that the people inside can be protected in their culture, beliefs and customs. The purpose of the state is to keep the normal people safe, and enemies afraid. What happens when the state collapses is unlimited human freedom, which translates as unlimited human depravity, and lack of civilised options that would create the playing field for freedom to practice non-depraved things in safety. The only thing that stops unlimited depravity is the controlled savagery of religious zealotry.

Heaven isn’t good because people there are free. It’s good because people there are good. The concept of freedom defined as the ability to do whatever you want is inherently flawed, because if evil people can do whatever they want, you get the hell that is Libya and Syria, where their freedom negates all options for others; basically, you no longer have the option to do normal civilised things because you’ll be killed. On the other hand, in heaven everything is limited by not wanting to do anything depraved, and by the fact that those who would want to automatically teleport into hell. As a result, not having certain “freedoms” creates all kinds of beauty and possibility – you can create art without jihadists raping and murdering you, for instance, because they are not allowed to. You can have things without being robbed and murdered. You can study science without being recruited into some army’s cannon fodder. You can live a long time because nobody’s trying to murder you, which in itself opens up all kinds of options. It’s interesting how Satanists keep harping about freedom from authority. Please, do everyone a favour and go live in Syria. See how you like freedom from all authority. Yeah, it’s hell, in ways I cannot even begin to describe, because freedom from authority doesn’t mean that you are free to do whatever you want. It means that both you and the most savage criminal who rapes, pillages and murders for fun can do whatever you both feel like doing. So, you like to listen to music, and he likes to flay people alive and listen to them scream. In a place with freedom from all authority, that guy forms an armed gang, and you get to be a victim. You don’t get to live in an autistic Utopia where you get to do your thing unopposed. You get to be a slave and a victim, or you learn to be so savage and murderous that even the warlords fear you. Freedom from authority causes reduction of the pool of available options to almost nothing, and freedom thus cancels itself. If everything is allowed, almost nothing is possible. Where evil is not allowed, almost everything becomes possible.

Hard problem

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I was thinking how people seem to have a very poor understanding of what problems are hard. They would think that walking on water or creating a Universe is a hard problem, and dealing with sin is easy. However, whatever they think is a hard problem might be trivial or easy not only to the point that God can solve it, but to the point where a huge number of spiritual beings can solve it.

Sin, however, seems to be such a hard problem that God can’t seem to solve it in any way other than by suffering and dying.

Let’s just stop here.

People think sin is a trivial issue – a good and forgiving God will of course forgive it and everything will be fine. No problem. You go to Church, confess, receive absolution, you’re done.

Wrong. Sin is such a hard problem that a good and forgiving God has to suffer and die in order to even try to solve it. That’s because sin is not an accounting issue. It’s not an entry in some book, that logs all your transgressions. No. Sin is a breakage in the structure of your soul. It’s a breakage in your relationship with God. Healing such a breakage, removing its causes, restructuring your soul in vivo without destroying it outright, is much harder than creating the Universe. After all, this Universe was apparently created by a damn fool with some help. Restructuring the soul as to remove a fracture that is sin, to remove a discolouration in the soul-substance, a weak spot at which the soul would break under pressure, and heal it to full theoretical strength, requires something that can best be described as dying and being rebuilt from the ashes of your former self. It requires surrendering to God to break and rebuild you, according to His perfect idea of what you ought to be, in Him, in His light. That’s what “sincere remorse”, the pre-condition of forgiveness, actually means. Sincere remorse means surrendering to God to destroy you and rebuild you in His image, as He wants you. It means not barking your wishes and conditions at God, and instead accepting His guidance and judgment at the most fundamental level of who you are and who you ought to be. It means understanding and accepting that your way was wrong, and had bad consequences, and you need to do more than just erase the bad consequences, you need to be a better person, the one made from God’s light, and not your stupid nonsense. In order to be of God’s light, you need to let Him break you and rebuild you, because He is the one who knows, because the goal needs to build the path towards itself.

On compassion and kindness

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I am so annoyed by stupid, superficial, arrogant and godless people on the Internet who pose as “compassionate” and “kind”, but who are in fact everything but. Honestly, I don’t think they would be able to recognise actual kindness and compassion if they saw it; in fact, I think they would condemn it as some kind of evil.

It’s actually very hard for me to define kindness. I can recognise it when I see it, but definitions are tricky, as they have to be accurate, specific and exclusive – basically, they need to say what something is, but not by being so broad they are useless. They need to exclude all the similar things something is not. In this case, a definition of compassion needs to exclude all the things that look like compassion, but are in fact not.

So, let me think about it. Compassion is samyama on a person. If I had to explain it to a non-yogi, I’d say samyama is to “grok” something or someone, to understand the inner nature of a thing or a person by means of being. Kindness is now easy to define; from a state of compassion, kindness is to give someone that which he needs to become more of self; to exceed limitations and attain realisation of one’s true nature (or, should I say, attain realisation of God’s true nature). Kindness, in essence, is what a bodisattva or a dakini does and you are awakened from an illusion and prodded forward on a path toward buddhahood.

Making “poor you, I’m so sorry for your predicament” statements is neither compassion nor kindness. It’s a manifestation of narcissism, nothing more. You just wish to be seen by others as a good and compassionate person, in a value-system where those are desirable qualities that elevate one’s social standing. People making such statements don’t really care if they actually helped someone; they just want to be seen as well-meaning and helpful, and in reality they never touch the actual person they are talking to, nor would they wish to. It’s like one of those formal greetings, where you say “how do you do” and you don’t really care, nor do you expect an answer.

I think it’s the problem with the Internet; it empowers poseurs and sociopaths to an extreme. It rewards people for making statements and gestures, that don’t necessarily have to be backed by anything real. Sure, things of this kind existed since forever, but an inherently superficial environment really encourages them.

What’s the difference between a compassionate person and a poseur? Well, a compassionate person sees someone with a problem, feels personally touched by it and drawn to act, and does something very real to help the person. For instance, see someone you used to know who fell on hard times, so you do very concrete things to help them – give them a place to stay, buy them clothes, find them work to do so they can earn money, basically help them end the downward spiral and reverse the negative trend of their life. You can’t really solve anyone’s problem, but you can buy them an opportunity to do it themselves. That’s what compassion and kindness are. What’s the fake thing that postures like the real thing in order to get social points? Mother Theresa. She didn’t solve anyone’s problem, nor did she even try to. She basically faked compassion in order to be thought of as a saint by other people, but she didn’t actually help the people she supposedly helped. Everything she did was for self-aggrandisement only, and it worked; she is generally recognised by people as an icon of compassion or whatever.

Internet is full of people like that; judgmental, self-centred ego-trippers, who always know the right thing to say to make them look good. How can you tell a fake from a real one? See how they deal with the “nazis”, the “tax collectors”, the people their ideology demonises. An excellent example is a black musician who heard about the KKK racists, and didn’t like the idea of being judged and rejected by someone for things that had absolutely nothing to do with him as a person, so he basically went there and talked to the KKK leaders, and eventually befriended them to the point where they renounced their former ideology, which they could no longer espouse in clear conscience. A poseur will call everybody a “nazi” because that’s what you do if you want to pose as someone who’s “a good one”, on the opposite side of a nazi, and would immediately reject a person for a mere suspicion of embracing an ideology that’s not the left of Chairman Mao, thus indicating that he’s so extremely “left”, that anything less than absolute extremism on the leftist spectrum is a “nazi” to him.

What is my recommendation here? Well, stop rewarding worthless people with positive social score just because they make extremist statements of virtue-signalling. Stop assuming someone means well and is a good person because he said all the “compassionate” words, such as congratulating people on apparently good things and telling them how sorry he is when something apparently bad happens. How about putting all such people in a spam filter and completely ignoring them, because that’s what they actually deserve. They are like those people Jesus talked about, who make everyone know when they do something pious or charitable, because what they are actually after is social approval and elevated rating. They don’t give to the poor because they care about the poor, they just want to be perceived as compassionate and generous. They don’t fast and uphold religious rules because they care about God; they do it so that people would perceive them as properly religious, and as such better than all those who aren’t. Interestingly, if you actually helped another person, you would know how wrong it would feel to even mention it, let alone brag about it to third parties. You did it because it felt like the right thing to do. You might have even gotten punished for it in some way. It’s a real thing that exists in the world of real things, and the reward for it is to feel reality, and participate in it. You do good things because to elevate others is to feel close to God, who is the great attractor on the coordinate axis of all greatness. Social posturing would make a real person feel diminished and soiled. On the other hand, it’s everything a fake person lives for, thinking that if they convince people, God will have no other option but to sign off on it as well, because if all the people think someone is a saint, how could God ever reject such a person, yes? The entire thing makes me want to puke, but the phenomenon is quite real, I assure you. Well, let me tell you this: God is not God because he has your vote of approval. In fact, you can all call him Satan or a Nazi for all He cares, and it would affect only you. God is God because he’s the fullness of sat-cit-ananda. God is God because He’s where all the greatness and beauty originates from, and to which all saints aspire. God doesn’t become God by giving His imprimatur to fake people who managed to deceive gullible people who lack discriminative faculties. That’s my opinion.

Why are we still here?

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This part of the comment section needs to be made into an article of its own:

“Since S.K. has been dead for a while why is existence of this place being prolonged?”

Because the contractually agreed time has not yet expired. Sanat Kumar’s life is in no way bound to the existence of this place; it’s maintained by the Jewel, according to the will of God expressed in the original contract. Believe me, I tried to shut it down in so many ways. For instance, I tried to revoke the contract by stating that his permissions were authorised on fraudulent grounds, meaning that he didn’t intend to do what he stated, but this argument was not accepted since Sentinel was aware of his intent and nature and approved the contract regardless, and since he had authority given to him by God, none can dispute it.
I also tried to revoke the contract, based upon the premise that since all original “signatories” are dead, it ought to be dissolved. This was also rejected, based upon the fact that the authority of the contract stems from the word of God, and not from either of the signatories.
Furthermore, I tried to argue that the foremost principle beneath anything is not the word of God, but dharma, meaning alignment with the inner nature of God, and this entire thing is fundamentally adharmic and should be dissolved on the grounds where things that are inherently opposed to the nature of God should not be allowed to exist. This was also rejected on grounds that although God in His nature of sat-cit-ananda is indeed the supreme principle upon which everything is to be built lest it crumble into non-being, existence of things opposed to God is not forbidden; it is just a bad idea and very much discouraged, because it can lead to terrible disasters such as this one. The terrible consequences, however, will not be denied to those who choose against God, and saving them would invalidate choice and freedom which are inherent to the nature of the soul. So, albeit this place is indeed a terrible nightmare opposed to God to the point where it would simply not exist were it even a bit worse, its existence is temporarily allowed, because eternity in God, salvation and blissful fulfilment are not obligatory, nor can they be imposed. This implies that terrible suffering, perdition and ruin are a viable alternative and can be chosen.
I used other arguments as well, but I was essentially told that God was smart enough to limit the existence of this dark pit of doom by imposing a termination date, and many other measures were put in place in order to assure orderly termination with the least possible amount of harm, and foremost of those measures is my incarnation here.

As a post scriptum, there’s something I’d like to add.

This is not a fucking game. God is not your daddy. There is no safety net. Nobody is going to undo your bad choices to reset the situation if you really badly fuck up. The consequences are real. Yes, this world is not ultimately real; it’s a virtual reality, or a simulation, or a holodeck, whatever you want to call it, but there’s one misconception I’d like to dispel. There’s a sanskrit word lila, which is usually translated as either game or pastime. Some religious schools like to say that this world is lila, God’s game or something. The implication is that you’re safe, it’s only a game, everything gets reset to the initial state afterwards, doesn’t matter what you do or what is done to you, it ultimately doesn’t matter.

This is completely and utterly wrong. Everything you do here absolutely matters, and it will determine the nature of your soul and your destiny. You can die here, permanently, without possibility of rebirth; your soul can be destroyed and absorbed into this place, and used as bait to attract other fools, and energy to power its binding mechanisms. You can commit sins here that will cripple your soul or destroy it outright. You can also become spiritually stronger and attain higher initiation, perhaps faster than anywhere else, and this is the bait Sanat Kumar used to attract souls here. The promise of evolution is real. However, what he didn’t say is that the price for that is extreme spiritual hazard. You can get destroyed here much faster and easier than anywhere else. You can commit terrible sin here easier than anywhere else. Also, the probability of spiritual achievement is very slim, while the probability of death and perdition is exceedingly great. You can argue that this is a game, but it’s a game where you can shoot with live ammunition at your family and friends while being deluded into thinking you’re using blanks and paintballs. Actual souls are getting butchered here. I’ve seen their parts recycled into the system. It’s not a theory to me.

You are having your memory suppressed, and you are having your spiritual insight suppressed. This means you essentially don’t know what you’re doing here. Think very carefully about this, because it means you can be deluded into committing acts you would otherwise never do, and the consequences will be both real and devastating. It means you can sin against God while thinking you’re serving Him. You might not survive this fact once you’re out and you see what you’ve done. Case in point people who spat at Jesus and ridiculed him. They thought they did a good or harmless thing, turned out they were fucked. Think they could forgive themselves “because they knew not what they were doing”? Yeah, as much as you could forgive yourself for killing a family member because you thought they were a burglar. You didn’t know what you were doing, but tough shit, you didn’t care to check, you’re fucked.

This is a virtual world. It’s not a game. Souls die here. We are all in mortal danger until it permanently ends, and even then the consequences will persist.