Opinion

A bunch of idiots in Israel believe that the tooth fairy wears blue shoes. A bunch of idiots in Lebanon believe that the tooth fairy wears red shoes. Idiots who believe that the tooth fairy wears red shoes can't stand idiots who don't think that, and in particular think that all idiots who believe in the blue shoes should be wiped off the face of the planet. The idiots who believe in blue shoes are getting pissed off with this, and have the moral superiority (not to mention the financial and military superiority) and want to put a stop to all of this red-shoe nonsense. The blue-shoe idiots oppress and discriminate against the red-shoe idiots. The red-shoe idiots see it as their duty to kill blue-shoe idiots. The blue-shoe idiots unleash hell on the red-shoe idiots. Plenty of idiots who merely disapprove of the other idiots get hurt. Theology is like arguing about whether the tooth fairy wears red shoes or blue shoes.

I wonder if the future is fixed. Not quite the same as fate, since fate implies we can know our future, and nothing we can do can change it. We can't second-guess our fate, and deliberately change it, since then how do we know that what we changed it to wasn't our true fate all along? But are the future and the past as real as the present? Is time really an illusion, and we are really a bead on a 4-dimensional wire? To me, it seems silly to give the "now" a greater reality than either the past or the present. That would mean that what is "real" is constantly changing. Absolutely, what we perceive is constantly changing, but that is because our brains are a part of that physics. Our brains have a physical state that changes with time, and only represents the "now". That does not mean that "now" is the only thing that exists, it is just an illusion that our minds play on us. If we believe in an objective reality - a reality outside ...