'Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”' Bible

For all my talk about the risk of cynical post-dated apologies for evil grace periods it's still much harder to beat pre-emptive forgiveness before the crime was even carried out! Perhaps each of our divine judgements in the afterlife has been pre-prepared by deterministic faith systems! After all if we're not fully self-aware in a dreamy afterlife then the judges wouldn't possess as much free will as they once had! An atheist might ironically end up knowing more of Christian theology for their critique than a few lay faith-based Christians! Perhaps pantheism could serve the role of devil's advocate! Good people often joke about evil sins in a way that evil people never joke about being kind. For example we watch so many movies where good people have to contend with evil themes even though the film crew could have made a movie with moral behaviour only. Perhaps good people must always strive to be more independent in how they do good rather than comparing each of themselves as good relative to the low standard of evil people. How industrious would we be in a world with good people only where capitalism didn't even need amoral and immoral people? Let's imagine the most hateful of Richard Dawkin's criticisms of religion as them being deluded. Then the mere act of consenting to another's delusion is actually charitable! In fact viewing the delusion as being evil now creates a perverted bond which can actually be caring to fellow members of the faith! In other words a group of friends often have a shared emotional trait as a common denominator. Thus all criticisms of religion forgets that morality can be paradoxical relative to an uncaring universe. Evil criminals never think through their crimes inter-generationally where they don't want to end up back in Ancient Rome. Even Hitler never considered that his take on Arian physical supremacy neglected that the German Gauls were singled out for destruction by the envious Roman emperor Caesar. Moreover ancient combat was far more athletic in the harshness of close combat as opposed to the convenience of modern day projectile warfare. Thus all evil criminals could be dubbed psychotic and deserving of an insanity defence if we had to be metaphysically pedantic. Evil criminals within a good society don't understand the hedonism of evil war lords are an order of magintude more intense then any evil persona they could mimic. Hence if they fully understood the futility of evil then it's likely they'd never persue it as a worldview even if they didn't empathise with the victims. Society can't afford to re-enact Roman and Mongol conquests just to remind native criminals of how boring evil would be if everyone engaged in it. Yet good people are limited and humble beings and are thus entitled to discipline convicts seeing as no one is as metaphysically pure as God. If being evil can be now viewed as humble relative to the dominance of good societies in the world then good people can also be humble and apathetic about how forgiving we ought to be to evil people! Being humble in a vengeful way is a paradox when Christianity freely inherited the wealth of Ancient Rome by the contradictions of an evil empire without any Cold War being waged against Rome.

'A grace period is a set length of time after the due date during which payment may be made without penalty. A grace period, typically of 15 days, is commonly included in mortgage loan and insurance contracts.' investopedia

Just how much abuse can Christianity take by a Christian while remaining Christian? Perhaps we'll all be succumbing to intoxicating neo-colonial dance vibes!
Wynter Gordon - Dirty Talk

"Idolatry is the worship of a cult image or "idol" as though it were God. In Abrahamic religions idolatry connotes the worship of something or someone other than the Abrahamic god as if it were God." Wiki

If Christianity ever had to compete against radical polytheism and panentheism then Christians could imbue far more importance into humongous statues of Jesus much like the Egyptian temples!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_the_Redeemer_(statue)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_the_King_(Almada)
https://www.worldhistory.org/Abu_Simbel/

"While Protestants and Catholics could agree that constructing religious statues has biblical precedent, the issue of bowing down before statues of kissing them still remains – isn’t this a form of idolatry?
Catholics hold that such acts are in no way akin to worship; kneeling down while holding a Bible doesn’t mean that one is worshipping it. In reality all of these religious images are used as theological devices to improve one’s spiritual life.
Faithful do not pray to statues, but use them as aesthetic tools to better pray to God. Any sacred art can help us venerate the saints and motivate us to ask for intercessory prayers."
https://www.irishcatholic.com/do-catholics-worship-statues/

It might be possible to view the brain as correlative in a fundamental way. Perhaps each thinking neuron is chaotic in the sense of being non-repeatable rather than just complex. So while the sensory and motor neurons might be more formalised perhaps the cognitive part of the brain is unknowable despite being deterministic. We'd only be able to access a small part of our perception. The role of an individual neuron would change fuction so often that perhaps the brain always has a "plastic" section to it. Viewing the brain as just being complex often fails to satisfy people when non-conscious computers are also complex. Perhaps we could say that if a neuron functions as a rational thought one minute where the same neuron equates to an emotion the next minute then the reduction is scrambed across their immanent sensory perception. Each individual neuron could be multi-purpose where unrelated qualia are superimposed. Pain and anxiety often aren't detectable in brain scans. Yet pain is the most intense of any emotions. Hence it's unlikely we'll fully work out milder emotions like curiosity and hope in the brain either. In other words there's almost no proportionality in the intensity of an emotion in a brain scan.

Sometimes a lesser evil when dealing with an unending mystery is to use abhorrent analogies. If we not only think about the mind of an animal but a really creepy one then we might infer some basics about the physical brain. A snake often has slit eyes to suggest that external light is a fundamental part of its residual being. A dualistic theory of snake's unawareness might account for no more than a single pansychist photon. We also know that a snake is irrational such that any sentient aspect of its nervous system is undefinable seeing as irrationality creates deeper layers of exponential irrationality over time. For example the irrational memory trace of a snake trying to understand its irrational environment would be incomprehensibly irrational. Thus there'll never be a repeatable, rational pattern in the snake's brain to signify any awareness. An individual snake is often a symbol of pure evil such that it's motivated only by its reward system and not by the members of its fellow species. I've a feeling God Himself will strike me dead any day soon for failing to consult Him on the mentality of animal species! The creepiness of snakes lies in their infinitesimal emptiness whereas spiders are the opposite form of creepiness in being infinitelely complex with so many contradictory eyes.

Western Diamondback Rattlesnake - Ready to Strike

Anti-realism might sound megalomaniacal from the standpoint of a materialism. Yet consciousness has been a mystery for so long that it might be tolerable to consider lesser evils. If you were God of your own perception then how would you relate your senses to your locus of awareness?

A material benefit of anti-realism could be an enhanced interpretation of art. So many people fail to appreciate modern art even though we often love postmodern music. We simply lack the means to dissociate our visual perception in the same way music can do so for emotions. Perhaps an artist could also be more consistent in using a visual effect through the scientific themes in anti-realism. Even religious people might enjoy more immanent and possessive stained windows!

So much techno music defies the repetiveness of materialism and yet is instantly understandable:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ymNFyxvIdaM
Bomfunk MC's - Freestyler

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5rAOyh7YmEc
Basement Jaxx - Where's Your Head At ( Official Video ) Rooty

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FQlAEiCb8m0
Stardust - Music Sounds Better With You

By contrast modern art frequently gets huge criticism from pundits. Perhaps one way to connect to modern artists is by viewing each of their worldviews as foreign such that you'd have to learn the background languages before looking at their works.

If every Christian became a pantheist then Christianity itself would become a mystical folk religion!

"Folk religion is the religion of the “folk” — real people struggling with the realities of life. Folk Christianity emphasizes the experiences of Christian folk as they seek to connect their religious experience, as expressed in the Bible and the church, to the reality of their lives. In the process, people tend to rely on their understanding of who God is and what God can do for them. This produces an appreciation of the practical effects of what Christianity claims to be on the one hand (formal/institutional religion), and personal experience on the other (informal/personalized religion)." Wiley

No wonder medieval England didn't like the Celtic strand of Catholicism:
The Wicker Man Not the Bees

Pantheism might become too self-critical and growth-oriented if we all got into the habit of thinking there'll be more of God in future generations than the past. Yet we might also be able to say a system of God is conserved through time by recognising that historical people were too divided to appreciate each other. For example Buddhism might not have interacted at all with Christianity in the early stages AD. Nonetheless the fact that each religion may have been more isolated and insecure in their faith may have forced them to compensate by being more emotionally loving to their fellow congregates. Thus pantheism can be open-ended beyond belief!

An irony of being obsessed about dreaming and lucid dreaming is that it's sometimes possible to infer that someone else might have a dreamy appearence too. Yet amoral or evil people might resemble a dream in an absurd way where they're not actually interested in dreaming. Thus the violent themes in lucid dreaming runs the risk of exposing you to temperamental strangers that you befriend as you find them interesting. In other words a lot of evil-minded people are actually moral in their behaviour because of the justice system rather than spirituality. An evil experience can be so intense that even trying to be humble can be inadequate in concealing it. Perhaps an evil person could tentatively identify evil in someone else if it takes one to know one! It's a long shot but when we look at countries that have had immoral periods in their past and are currently moral that they've accidentally inherited a residual bit more adrenaline. By extension a former moral individual who became evil might be identifiable to a different heavenly soul from a similar background. So even if we view God as limited and immanent in the world that it's still slightly possible for us to guess someone's demeanour. For example an evil stereotype is often too diverse to define but often shares a certain baseline of vague intensity:

Luscius Malfoy - Chamber of Secrets - Dobby is a Free Elf

Every race is equal but is separate by hundreds or thousands of years. So if I re-incarnate I don't expect to wake up in Japan but somewhere a bit different from my home country of Ireland for a change. Yet Ireland inter-married for so long with English settlers that the idea we're genetically distinct seems a bit absurd. Truth be told an upper class Irish person who became really evil for a while and then repented may very well concoct a natural English accent! So maybe Christianity works that way where our next life will be unconsciously connected to our previous life somehow.

What if Christianity became a victim of its own success by being burdened with such a large section of the globe? We don't tend to view Jesus as being ancient even though He lived under the occupation of Ancient Rome. We only ever use the word historical when we think of early Christianity. It's safe to say Christianity would look heroic if it was practiced in only one country. We could say the same about loving America if only it remained the demure 13 colonies that it started out with. The trouble is that the earliest Christians never envisioned wars between rival Christian countries. Jesus' message of forgiveness might not look as appealing now when we're dealing with the Ukrainian war or past war crimes WW2. Perhaps modern Christians could feel more liberated in interpreting their faith relative to their regional interaction with the world. Perhaps Christianity needs innovators just like a capitalist system would while remaining committed to core Christian values like self-sacrifice, forgiveness, humility and charity. If we viewed religions by landmass rather than population then Christianity could look obscenely important to the world if everyone took their faith seriously.

It might be possible to re-interpret God the Father in Christianity as God of the physical universe while Jesus would appear to be a relative God of humans. It's a subjective and unscientific statement and yet it'd allow more Christians to embrace science. Win-win! Viewing God the Father as a 100 year-old-man might no longer relate to some Christian scientists when Jesus would already be 1000s of years old in heaven.

Pantheism might be able to cater for war veterans who demand sadistic rewards in an afterlife only if they actually defend against an evil woman who strikes first! However there'd be dramatic limitations where the sound of a head punch has to be quietened:

John Wick (5/10) Movie CLIP - Ms. Perkins Attacks (2014)

Furthermore you must leave some of the militant women alive with a word of consolation:
John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017) - Hall of Mirrors Scene (9/10)

Afterwards your soul would disappear in evil to the next life where you too would have to be killed off!

A simple way to think of an afterlife is simply of a guided prayer showing the scenery of a religion rather than just the worshippers. So perhaps we'd be guided along by a prayer that reflects the mood of certain religious sites and natural scenery. We'd obviously take prayers more seriously in an afterlife when the remainder of our consciousness depends on it! Pantheism is a bit blasphemous in being a brute force search for God. Yet pantheism is scientifically skeptical of religion in the sense of being critical rather than being dismissive. An eternity in heaven makes sense to the elderly generation but younger people tend to be less optimistic. For many young adults an eternity of happiness after death implies an endless supply of sex which doesn't seem too profound as a transcendent religion! I imagine there comes a point where you're just too happy in heaven and you've to move on to your next life! A pantheist can have faith in a transcendent God but often not an absolute faith.

The Angelus on RTÉ - 3rd June 2010 - Tomás Éire

It's hard to visualise another mind as physically existing in their brain with the same level of confidence as our sense of touch. Somehow we know that a unified homunculus in the brain isn't logically feasible. Yet a scattered homunculus over interconnected brain regions is only less illogical at best. A religious metaphor for describing the brain is as a halo of light where everyone has their own luminal perception. No matter how close we look at a person's head we can't detect a dark mini-blackhole of an altered timeline. Yet a sci-fi analogy is to think of another's mind is as another wormhole of time. The absoluteness of the physical world means we'd almost need to be devoutly spiritual to reconcile the mind with physics. I find it ironic that I write so much about lucid dreaming and yet I'd be a bit mystified by anyone else's account of their lucid dreams. Their unconscious mind is almost like an alien relative to my own unconscious! Perhaps I could re-interpret another's dreams relative to my own beliefs in free will even if they present the metaphysical function of dreaming to be different!

Anti-realism isn't at a stage to compete with science. Yet if anti-realism were collectively adopted in some form by a large group of people then anti-realism could invert science. Essentially our perception knows every single force already even if we don't understand it. For example we perceive light and gravity even though we don't consciously understand it. If we believed that a deistic God created our mind then our unconscious perception of the world isn't passive to an infinite degree. Maybe if we understood our perception better then who knows if we'd understand the external forces better. Perhaps if we resolved the neurology of touch then we'd be able to infer more about the atomic solidity of objects around us. This form of anti-realism would resemble my lucid dreaming thread about working backwards from a lack of free will in sleep to an inference that this might be ironic and clandestine. Perhaps the brain is so deterministic that actually the mind is totally independent of the body and even a residual interaction between mind and body is sufficient relative to a hysterical level of energy in the mind. However an individual would struggle to form a thorough academic subject of anti-realism without an international alliance! If we viewed God as a mystery then we could almost say that quantum mechanics is itself God! Perhaps God doesn't play dice when God is the dice itself! Then classical mechanics would really just be our own minds!

If people truly adored the concept of oblivion after death where they didn't want to reincarnate for a 100 years then it's possible that the physical universe actually needs to create collective evil for people to consider philosphical nihilism. So the creator of the physical world might have tolerated evil for more than mere biological or economic competition. It's possible that some people hate the world so much that oblivion is actually viewed as a desirable state rather than as a punishment. So we can view oblivion as a being amoral rather than as an immoral lesser evil on behalf of divine judgement. However the physical universe is eternally beyond our comprehension and so we shouldn't endorse it blindly when countless victims are killed in wars. Religions claim they dislike super-rich people in an afterlife even though their lay people tolerate capitalism in the material world. Perhaps we could say certain rich people are already in a form of heaven through conspicuous consumption in this world and simply no longer require an extension of their earthly heaven in an afterlife. So we don't necessarily have to feel bad about religion needing strict rules from the perspective of pantheism.

The mildest version of scientific anti-realism is that parrallax is a metaphorical basis of consciousness. So we could say that the basic movement of the observer in relation to the angle of the close objects to the distant objects is a theory of consciousness. However if we took it too literally then you'd have to go along with lots of other visually non-real ideas like perspective as being physical or the ground slanting upwards as a gravitational Euler force. So if we didn't want to destabilise the perception of too many people in society we could compromise on a poetically scientific form of anti-realism rather than just a mystical form of antirealism. Looking at a tree with flowery petals at night-time is a meditative way to think about anti-realism. The origin of a beautiful tree looks strange when you're not as focused on the daytime colours. Technically any single feature of the mind could be dubbed non-real when viewed from the perspective of idealism and panpsychism.

Even if divine judgement didn't exist we'd still need to control some of our angry thoughts. Personally I don't try to stop all of my flimsy aggressive thoughts in case I get analysis paralysis or some obsessive thoughtline related to my own personality. Nonetheless being privately hateful to a collective group can often betray itself in unrelated social interactions. Let's take an extreme example where if you were unloving or hateful towards Holocaust victims but never told anyone about it then you'd likely be temperamental towards your own social circle. Any instance of hate towards your friends would unconsciously seem irrelevant relative to the sheer amount of hatred you'd be holding back towards the much larger number of Holocaust victims. Thus any supernatural spirit that knew your behaviour towards others could easily infer that you must have been collectively unloving to say the very least. Anyone who was truly grateful towards every Christian country would never have the energy nor the time to be consistently rude towards friends and family. For example we can't technically judge someone who says they hate Israel relative to the complexity of their war with Palestine. Yet if someone was being deceptive and reserved a sense of apathy towards millions of Jewish WW2 victims then it will eventually show over a long period of time. If I've a rude thought then it'd likely be passive and fade over a few minutes. Although if you kept it in your unconscious belief system then you'd be hard-pressed to hide your hostility over the decades you've left in your life. That is to say an actual neo-nazi would always be expected to be cross towards many random strangers simply because of the intensity of hatred they've stored internally. They might be angry towards you only to relieve themselves from a greater amount stressful anger towards entire groups. So if we're not conforming to the demeanour of a religion then it's possible some of our private thoughts have affected our subconscious in a way we don't always understand due to the mystery of the mind. I've noticed that while I'm able to form grudges I'd be mentally exhausted if I maintained it intensely over a long period of time. Perhaps my genetic ancestry just never practiced emotional extremes of anger. So it's theoretically possible for me to infer that high levels of immediate stress from angry personal relationships could also apply to unnaturally high levels of gradual stress towards large group relations though in an unconscious way. Another strange feature of Christian genetics is that many of our ancestors were active heterosexual paedophiles simply because a 15 year old male who married a 15 year old female in 200AD was actually very unequal in education level. This intensity is an impossible standard in the modern day and so perhaps we are limited in how much we can even rebel against metaphysical belief systems.

Interpreting our visual perception as being at the back of our brain in the visual cortex might be too counterintuitive for reconciling it with our tactile perception. So a shortcut for altering our visual locus of consciosness is placing ourselves slightly behind our foreheads. Then we could be better prepared to detach our vision from our non-conscious physical eyes. When we're asleep we could almost view ourselves as being lifted upwards from the rear of our eyelids. This idea came to me in a lucid dream where my half-aware dream character tried to open his eyes and mentioned where he thought he was. After I woke up I partially closed my eyes to see if there were any remnants of the lucid dream. I saw vague outlines of a lot of dancing figurines on a kitchen table which further underscores the random cryptography of sleep.

PS This is an update over a year later on 28/12/23. It’s possible that the lucid dream might also be a warning about collective evil in history not appearing evil in the context of absurdity. For example an individual might not appear too violent just to have been angry a lot during their life where as a nation that descended into evil might not physically appear evil individually in spite of expressing far more anger indirectly through a collective.

Revisualising your country as a larger group might have serious consequences for how we view God as existing in the material world. For example if a truly federal version of the European Union was formed we might not only have better economies of scale for industries but also for collective spiritualities. Each EU country is too separate from each other for anyone to truly transcend themselves into a wider unconscious realm. Yet a European person might never be able to fully empathise with an American by failing to appreciate the differences in energy vibes. I walked by a nightclub and heard loud eurodance songs blaring only to think what would it ever be like if we took the rhythm seriously where Europe was itself a multicultural trance!

Pitbull - International Love ft. Chris Brown

It might sound very difficult for a man to reincarnate as a woman or vice versa! It's easy for a pantheist to rationalise off the existence of other countries and religions as being temporally distinct. Yet the spirituality of women is often beyond the masculine notion of pantheism! There's too much mystery to how men and women communicate each other's inner soul and unconscious self-awareness. I've just discovered that despite years of being hetersexual my knowledge of female realist perception is actually still very limited! Perhaps they're more suited to less immanent belief systems like panentheism rather than the hysterical mindset of pantheism! We cannot view a woman as a sexier version ourselves!

It's a miracle I put the past 3 posts in the anti-realism thread accidentally as they were too extreme for the pantheism thread!

If we removed hell from the equation then the only consolation of divine judgement would be if you were informed why you were declined from heaven as if you'd a right to a fair trial!

"Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, means you cannot recognise people's faces. Face blindness often affects people from birth and is usually a problem a person has for most or all of their life." -nhs

Oftentimes some faces are more memorable to us than other faces we meet in life. So it's theoretically possible the more ethically similar a person is to us the more our unconscious mind pays attention to their existence. If we were to imagine a dreamy version of an afterlife then who knows if we'd encounter those we remember the most. We often feel guilty for finding some people more attractive than others when we don't want to discriminate on a person's physicality. Yet mind and body are subliminally connected and so our ethical decisions could leave traces on our facial features if only we knew so many people as to make relative assessments. A scientific way to assess the existence of an afterlife would be if evil people could recognise variations of good people in the same way good people can rarely recognise the creepiness of evil people.

If we tried to form a purely materialistic version of Christianity we could say that the faith worked through perverted natural evil in terms of overpopulation. In the ancient world there were so few people that everyone could afford to live a life of metaphysical evil. So we could almost say that early Christians opted to increase the population size so as to make the Europe of Ancient Rome almost resemble India. A self-fulfilling prophecy occured over two thousands years seeing as everyone acted relative to their unconscious Christians beliefs even if they weren't fully self-aware. However the Christian ideal of forgiveness ensured an economically diverse world where a lot of people wouldn't be too poor. The huge size of the poor population meant that there'd be so much natural evil that an individual doing good or evil almost became irrelevant relative to the size of the Christian world. A plateau between good, amoral and evil people meant that the only way a pantheistic version of Christianity could be thoroughly benevolent would be through offering a wide diversity of lives in terms of reincarnation. Even evil people would be compelled to be negligibly charitable relative to the sheer amount of natural evil from deprivation. Combining fictional paedophilia and sadism in a masturbation session as a metaphysical experiment was going to send you to absolute hell by forcing you to reconcile materialism with Christianity in an absurd way. The only consolation of mass would be to transcend your existence.

Asian people don't report perceptual differences to Europeans when it comes to dreaming and perception. Yet it's possible that they're much better able to transcend themselves into a collective group. This might be relative to how much larger their populations are and how they often lack a belief in a traditional monotheistic afterlife. So someone interested in perceptual anti-realism could still learn a lot from the emotional anti-realism of collective moods in Asian countries. I'm often amazed at the uniqueness of Asian-influenced music:

Galantis & Hook N Sling - Love On Me

Being religious and subscribing to evolutionary theory could be very challenging because they're the moral inverse of each other. In some sense not only could evil people perform better due to the higher incentives but also because a lot of them really are better skilled. Yet we don't need to view this as a scathing criticism of religion from an evolutionary perspective. For example we don't have to worry about accidentally being reincarnated as an animal because evil people will always try to survive. We don't have to worry about the end of the human race to natural evil. It's beyond our scale of awareness where even if we weren't punished by God our souls would be compelled to reincarnate as animals due to a physical environment free of humans. So one less absurd way to square evolution and religion is that evil people are actually forced to be hysterical as an amoral form of mild punishment. We could say that the a historical king of France might have been so much more vigilant than any other citizen even if he wasn't innately focused. So even though he wasn't a real divine representation of God he might still have been compelled to be a great orator. Another way to think of it is that his subjects were so extorted that the king might have been neurologically greatly talented solely as a consolation to the greater levels of natural evil the rest of the citizenry had to endure. As such we shouldn't always see talent as representative of someone's inner soul and rather of their current being. Seeing a murder victim's last breath is always going to violently mind-expanding irrespective of the context. If we ever look at aristocratic paintings in posh hotels it's always apparent that the lords really were fierce in their demeanour in a way that was both sincere and superficial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Louis_XIV

The most hysterical, megalomaniacal way possible to perceive God as fully existing in the material world is if everyone viewed themselves as being both angelic and demonic. The problem is that benevolent pantheism could always be outcompeted by evil versions of pantheism if everyone went too extreme into the belief system. Thus Americanised tolerance is critical for any version of pantheism. Furthermore the far future of each religion's attitude to their faith might be incomprehensible to us. So pantheists can't burden ourselves to solve every problem with a particular religion in order to join it in our finite lifetime. That is to say we don't need to view every single belief in a faith system in a way that's compatible with pure pantheistic ethics in order to agree with the religion. For example if we disagree with the Christian notion of forgiveness in an afterlife then we could possibly say that evil people can't be objectively punished anyway. Thus forgiving a less repentant evil person might be tolerable if they'd be just as happy being unrepentant in purgatory as they would being sorry in heaven. An amoral system can always beat an immoral system by outnumbering it. So if we viewed each religion as being amoral then we still need to be moral relative to a physical environment where most people are already religious.

LOTR The Return of the King - Oaths Fulfilled - Army of the Dead

If we were anatomists handling a dead person's removed brain then our sense of touch of their neurons on our hands are internal to ourselves. As such if we viewed the redness of their brain as being visually internal to us then we could have the same attitude to their tactile existence. So we'd be left to conclude that their formor sentience existed in a completely different spatio-temporal realm to our own perception of them. If we viewed invisible light as having been their consciousness then the visual neurons in the very back of their brain are looking out on neuronal sensory systems in the front of the brain that don't reflect a unified 3D environment. Then we'd be forced to conclude their sense of time wasn't real for the visual neurons to have reconnected in real time with the other isolated neuronal sensory patterns.

"Excerebration is an ancient Egyptian mummification procedure of removal of the brain from corpses prior to actual embalming." wiki

If we don't take our life too seriously then it might be easier to deal with death. Yet to do that means we couldn't be very loving to our friends and family either seeing as we'd miss them too much. Perhaps expecting to continue your marriage in heaven could make it harder to ever leave heaven. Maybe we'd have to pick a different romantic partner in heaven to prepare us for reincarnation if we were only expecting a brief afterlife. After all many people are already struggling to stay in their marriage until death do them part besides having an eternal marriage!

One way to think of your vision as existing in your brain is like a rainbow. A rainbow refracts white light into the coloured spectrum. However it primarily works through reflection seeing as the Sun is behind us when we look at a rainbow. I remember going to a physics interview in Imperial College London where I made a mistake about the sun being behind the rainbow. I was very quiet with an extroverted professor after failing another university's confrontational interview. These contrasting interviews create hysteria beyond hysteria where to pass you've to be ready for mathematical death stares and light-hearted humour! So when we see coloured objects we could view them as being reflected behind our eyes and into our locus of consciousness.

"A rainbow does not have a back side. If you were to walk completely to the other side of the mist cloud that is creating the rainbow and turn around, you would not see a rainbow. You have to realize that a rainbow is not a stationary physical object. Instead, it is a pattern of light that becomes a stable image only when you look at it from the right angle. You may not have noticed it, but every time you look directly at the center of a rainbow, the sun is directly behind your head."
https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2016/07/03/does-the-back-of-a-rainbow-look-the-same-as-its-front-side/

Anyone worried about death can rehearse with Sean Bean; the self-righteous actor everyone wants to kill!

Sean Bean Death Scene Compilation 1986-2016

I think if there is a true afterlife it is akin to some sort of great unveiling/revelation - a profound and all encompassing dramatic change in perspective, a regression to some fundamental "dreamy" immaterial state that puts ones life into direct relationship/full perspective - all things considered. — Benj96

Most people these days probably woudn't consider being dragged by a horse-drawn chariot along a tranquil Mediterranean beach to be a shameful funeral. After all you'd already be dead where the alternatives are to be naturally decomposed or artificially cremated! The irony is the more painful the death the greater the martyrdom!

Achilles' preface: "There are no pacts between lions and men... You won't have eyes tonight. You won't have ears nor a tongue. You will wonder the afterlife blind, deaf and dumb and all the dead will know this is Hector; the fool who thought he killed Achilles."
Troy Achilles vs Hector Fight Scene

The minute they did of course they fulfilled his prophecy of martyrdom. And instilled the belief that indeed he could, supposedly inhumanly, see the future and was omniscient. He was after death legacied as god incarnate. — Benj96

If there is an afterlife my initial guess would be as a shared mental realm where every soul would be dreamy. Some people believe in a more physical version of an afterlife where it'd have perfect schools and homes. I'd never dispute another person's spiritual beliefs seeing as death is scary enough as it already is. Yet I'd personally struggle with a solidified version of heaven seeing as it might require a parallel universe which some may find a bit disorienting.

But adults do not have all the answers, while childhood does not require answers in the first place. The change between the two is arguable in most need of spiritual support but at the same time is the most difficult stage to apply such support. — Benj96

One way to view a prophet like Jesus or Buddha is that they were democratically elected as God. For example early Christians voted for Jesus simply by converting to Christianity. When we view Jesus as a spirit rather than a human then it can be harder to visualise Him because the physical universe is almost incomprehensible. If Jesus was God in the sense of a creator of the natural world then it implies that our understanding of Jesus would have to be expanded exponentially in an afterlife. So calling Jesus the Son of God might be a self-fulfilling prophecy in relation to your own sphere of the world. After all each democracy can vote in a different president much like each major religion espouses a different God. Applying Christian values to a democracy can be challenging when there are simultaneous problems confronting society as a whole. For example it's rewarding to be forgiving individually. Yet when a court gives a suspended sentence it can be tempting to feel aggrieved simply because we often don't trust the government on other issues like poor infrastructure. In other words all judges are doomed to have some conflicts of interests simply by having a residual level of emotionality. Thus we are effectively multitasking in dealing with lots of harms where stress can be compounded.

A secular interpretation of religion is as a realpolitik version of spirituality. So people with unique metaphysical beliefs can compromise some of their principles in the name of pragmatism and deference to the group. A trouble is that religious people can be so passionate in their faith that they can disagree quite strongly with one another. So pantheism could also be viewed as a temporary religion for those who still want to return to their faith in the distant future. For example Catholicism makes a great effort in sermons for children and adults but tends to overlook the adolescent years. Perhaps teenagers are seen as too temperamental. However our teenage years can be very fundamental in how we view ourselves later in life. Consequently relying on parents to bring teens to mass rather than to appeal to them directly might be too much of a gamble if they don't return to their faith when they're elderly.

If you didn't believe in a shared afterlife then perhaps it's still possible to hope for a memory reel of your past life at death. Or perhaps if your soul hears prayers after death then the more you agree to them the more you'll see a symbolic representation of an afterlife.

Reeling In The Years Add | RTÉ

A physicalist interpretation of the Christian doctrine of total forgiveness is that in forgiving a repentant person you're also helping to reassure those who've forgiven others. So there'll invariably be lots of people who can't afford to be retaliatory simply because they're deprived. Thus some people have no choice but to be forgiving simply because they can't physically act on a grudge even if they wanted to. So trying to help other forgiving people by being forgiving yourself might be imperfect if you're not forgiving the repentant person directly.

We could say that poor people who are under far more pressure than middle-class people can be viewed as more virtuous simply be resisting the temptations of evil. Christianity implies that wealth is a sin but this can also be reversed to say poor people who withstood natural and human evil can simply be rewarded more than rich people in an afterlife.

An alternative way to view dualism is that our skeletal system is unfeeling and that our sense of body exists only in the muscles. This bodily dualism contrasts with brain dualism in that if we felt the skeleton directly we'd feel much heavier.

One way to view lucid dreaming is that the light we see during the day has slowed down considerable. Then our mind moves faster than a slowed down speed of light when we flick past visual scenes during sleep. The speed of light is variable relative to our own dreaming mind but not between people in the physical world. The speed of light is the speed of gravity. Yet we don't feel gravity when we're asleep since we're paralysed. Thus if gravity is reduced then perhaps the speed of light is reduced internally.

"We consider the special case in which there is no interaction inside the closed timelike curve, referred to as an open timelike curve (OTC), for which the only local effect is to increase the time elapsed by a clock carried by the system. Remarkably, circuits with access to OTCs are shown to violate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, allowing perfect state discrimination and perfect cloning of coherent states. The model is extended to wave packets and smoothly recovers standard quantum mechanics in an appropriate physical limit. The analogy with general relativistic time dilation suggests that OTCs provide a novel alternative to existing proposals for the behavior of quantum systems under gravity."
journals aps org