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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

"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/

'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

Perhaps Catholic heaven will be where everyone visits Mont St. Michel in France; the Disney Land of Catholicism!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont-Saint-Michel

What would we think of the culpability of Hitler had he simply not being elected into power? So we wouldn't go back in time and kill him as a baby but we'd imagine him only as a thoroughly hateful opposition figure in parliament. Then we couldn't blame him as much for being a ringleader of many other evil people even if he'd the exact same evil intentions. Yet how many evil people are there in society who'd refuse to do what Hitler did had they the same power? Hence it's very difficult to objectively measure evil without reference to chance. What if Hitler was worse than the average murderer but not far off from a mass shooter like Breivik in the whole scheme of things?

We know that medieval people were all so violent that it's hard to think that God gave them a formal judgement at death as if there were deceased judges from a 21st century supreme court on hand. After all so many present day people would dislike the thought of meeting some of their ancient barbarian ancestors at death. When we think of a king decapitated in battle perhaps God just gave him a positive or negative eulogy, "Here lay the king of England who achieved such and such"! Then the dissociated conscious mind might just be reabsorbed back into their soul. We also know from evolution that fear is adaptive in a beneficial though counter-intuitive way. As such any atheistic fear of oblivion felt by a residual conscious mind after their physical death would actually be self-imposed rather than punitive. Perhaps if you were fundamentally amoral an alternative punishment to purgatory could be simply loneliness where your soul wanders around the dark forests and ruins of abbeys until you pass into your next life. Personally I'll have my own third person eulogy prepared for myself before being reabsorbed into the greater unconscious!

"Richard III died in the thick of battle after losing his helmet and coming under a hail of blows from vicious medieval weapons, new research has shown... Richard III, the last English monarch to die fighting, perished at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. It was the last significant battle of the Wars of the Roses, the civil war between the Houses of Lancaster and York, and paved the way for the Tudor dynasty."
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/sep/16/richard-iii-died-battle-losing-helmet-new-research

Maybe one reason we often don't appreciate reincarnation is out of mild amounts of xenophobia. It's natural that we're not fully grateful for the existence of another country when we can't understand them due to the language barrier. Even when they do speak our language we often hear more bad news than good news where every society has its problems. America fails to excite me in the present day with gun crime but who knows if I might truly love America again when they fix their social problems. Perhaps you'd really have to be born in another country to understand it. Maybe a world where everyone spoke the same language makes this life more boring but preserves more excitement for a reincarnated life. This might be more visible if we viewed each language metaphysically as having a distinct spiritual virtue system. Even if were rich I might feel no inclination to visit certain Asian countries because they don't relate to my worldview. Yet we shouldn't think that our reluctance to travel to a country in this life means that they won't be relevant in our next life. Libertarianism is often the coolest political philosophy where everyone is living highly armed in tax free anarchy. Yet it's clear how that would produce lots of poverty and crime in a domestic context. Nonetheless it's possible to interpret the international order as libertarian at heart where every country is fully independent of each other. It's simply because of economic trade, voluntary financial aid and tourism that we don't understand that they've total free will against our own country. After all we can't tax another country where we're all equal partners. Even when it comes to religion we might be amazed at how much more seriously it's taken in another country. I remember being dazzled on holiday by how the scenery in Croatia might have resembled the landscapes early Christians would have admired in Ancient Rome. I'm often amazed by the intense beats of individual foreign singers relative to my limited experience of life. Yet maybe if I actually lived in New York it'd be so much easier for me to relate to how the rhythm of a song was created when you've millions of multi-racial people in the background as a source of inspiration! A love-hate song can be more fanatical than either a love song or hate song in isolation:

Points Of Authority - Linkin Park

I got into the habit of not going to mass for a long time or only turning up for the last few minutes. I decided an easy way to lull me back to religion was to simply sit in a church outside of mass times. The first day I tried it I stayed for 20 minutes and relaxed on the seats. I wasn't energetic enough to pray. Yet meditation can also be passive where the religious art in a chuch can be absorb your attention. You don't even need to focus on the present moment and can let your thoughts wonder. The light from the stained windows guided my nostalgic thoughts about childhood and distant relatives. There were one or two others praying as well which helped to prevent me getting distracted with idle thoughts about getting food in the shop for instance! Standing or kneeling even without praying can still focus the mind in an empty church.

Pantheism is like a meta-perversion; a perversion of a perversion that's no longer physical or emotional and only spiritual!

If we could re-incarnate backwards in time then God could have a natural version of Hell. Any major war criminals might have to spend their next life picking up heavy stones during the Stone Age!

If we took an eternalist view of time where past, present and future all exist then who knows if when we died we could go back in time and see the ancient prophets first-hand instead of them coming to us!

The unconscious mind and our metaphysical sensory perception are very fragile. An evil individual would struggle to fully reconcile themselves with an evil act unless their society had collectively rationalised such evil for centuries. For example immorality is a human interpretation rather than a physical feature and so an immoral or perverted country will eventually descend into bored amorality after centuries. As such it's possible to infer that people who look vaguely rough or somehow fierce need more self-control compared to those who are appear traditionally tough and resilient. The definition of rough can be discriminatory and presumptuous where no one is supernatural enough to infer whether they're contemplating evil. Yet the mere fact that some people look too focused relative to their demeanour is a sign that mental aggression can leave subtle physical hallmarks.

A contradiction with eternal hell is that good people would need to spend a lot of their life helping to de-escalate inter-gang conflicts and to pre-empt anti-social youths with charity in order to reduce the threat that they'd go to hell. That is to say if we viewed good people as reducing the sensation of pain through-out the world then good people would be failing to sufficiently warn evil people of hell if an afterlife was the societal belief.

One interpretation of Jesus is as an arch-pantheist; the Son of God but not actually God the creator. In other words viewing Jesus as a prophet of God doesn't necessitate that the trinity of God be a combined concept. Maybe God the Father, God the Son and the Holy Spirit all exist but are fundamentally separate entities. Maybe socialist critics of Christianity might actually be Christians in disguise when some lay members of Christianity haven't taken the religion seriously. Maybe those who play devil's advocate against Jesus Himself are actually an accidentally defence against infiltrators of Christianity who end up distorting or hijacking the religion. Maybe to glorify Jesus as a creator God could a bit unethical to Jesus Himself by putting words in His mouth. That is to say Jesus not only didn't say He was God but never actually claimed to be the Son of God either. Excessively servile forms of worship to Jesus might even appear like a backhanded compliment to Jesus if they don't take seriously the need to promote their faith. In other words those who don't frequently practice Christianity but nonetheless glorify Jesus more than anyone else when they do attend mass are at risk of creating a sarcastic vibe. For example telling a humble national soccer player that their the best soccer player in the world might be unrealistic and demanding on the player even if it's well-intentioned.

We forget that many other major religions like Islam and Hinduism might not have as many members as Christianity but nonetheless have far fewer lapsed members. Hence Christianity might even be a far smaller faith than other major religions when partial agnostics are excluded from population statistics. A lack of competitiveness between rival religions might lead to complacency if Christians don't take personal responsibility for promoting a sustainable faith. We take history as inevitable even though Islam has never been beset by a Cold War in the way Christian countries have. Nor has Hinduism ever perpetrated the same level of colonialism as Christian hegemons. Perhaps in times of war and economic crises Christians might benefit from more defensive rather than submissive styles of prayers at mass. A really hierarchical version of supernatural Christianity risks complacency towards capitalistic hierarchies in the material world.

If we compare Christian mass to the education system then we'd notice the smaller the mass the greater the one-on-one attention the priest or vicar can give to the congregants. Yet if lay people aren't focused and participating in the rituals then the level of transcendence in mass might appear a bit superficial. Hence there shouldn't be any excuses not to go to mass even for low turnouts! Maybe Catholicism has to learn a small bit from the Quakers to include lay people more often into the conversation during mass!


"What kind of crazy person celebrates Noam Chomsky's birthday like it's some kind of official holiday? Why can't we celebrate Christmas like the rest of the entire world? You would prefer to celebrate a magical fictitious elf instead of a living humanitarian who's done so much to promote human rights and understanding?"

"Corporations have the same rights as people,
so there's no spending limit on candidates. Which means our country is ruled by corporations and their lobbyists who fund candidates and command their fealty by demanding that... Jesus Christ."
-Captain Fantastic

Technically the church building is meant to be irrelevant to the sermon. Yet if anyone is too unfocused then routinely attending mass in a larger cathedral might be an option. Chruch tourism sounds superficial but there's no rules that you can't go to a different church every Sunday to avoid boredom. If people don't believe in a long afterlife then the easiest way to transcend yourself in the material world might be through visiting a truly ancient cathedral or a hegemonic basilica. Maybe to truly enjoy mass in a small church you've already to be fully committed to your faith.

"Be good for goodness sake".
https://www.stillwatermpc.org/dharma-topics/being-good-for-goodness-sake/
"The message in the song is clear. Your goodness must come from an inner desire to do good and not from an appearance of doing good, or you are not good enough to receive a gift!"

Ideally people would do good for no incentives at all. Yet solipsistic pantheism and afterlife beliefs are simply convenient ways to inspire goodness!

Anyone sentenced to hell from a pantheist background will be given a fair shot at escape(!):

Apocalypto (2006): Great Escape Scene

Maybe when we think of Jesus as God Christians could interpret His miracles as telepathic over the mind rather than telekinetic over the physical world. For example Moses didn't split the sea himself and any sense of omnipotence might have been out of prophetic forecasting. Likewise Jesus's healing of paralysed people might have been a form of hyperfocus in the patient's mind rather than Jesus mastering biological evolution. Who knows if the water converted to wine by Jesus was more about forcing people to be more euphoric and meditative about the basic but vital taste of water. Perhaps when Jesus threatened to send evil people to Hell He might have resembled a calm Chinese person during the Cold War to have convinced so many Europeans of His authority!

If the physical world is 100% amoral then maybe for God in the afterlife to explain why evil exists would be to lose the arguments for ethics against a superior being. In other words maybe ethics is relevant only for the human psyche and not biology. As such maybe the more we challenge God the more we'd lose our sense of ethics rather than God punishing us for insubordination!

Absolute forgiveness as a virtue that relates to forgiving absolute evil. I believe relative forgiveness is always virtue because it requires self-sacrifice and humility. After all the problem of evil dictates that evil can never be defeated and only tamed where we must forgive evil people to stop them being eternally evil. Yet the supernatural world is held to a double standard where God could theoretically forgive everything. Yet absolute forgiveness requires absolute transcendence in a way that’s hateful of materialism. The afterlife might still contain a memory of the material world where only an eternity of time could distinguish both perceptual realms. Theoretically Jesus could forgive the nazis in WW2 where we could trust that he wouldn’t fully forgive them. Yet the dilemma is a separation of powers where many Christians might not approve of Jesus having the ability to forgive the nazis even if Jesus voluntarily declined to forgive them. Some might fear that Christians would be too subordinate to Jesus if Jesus forgave literally everyone. Ultimately it’s not individual forgiveness of a serial killer that’s insurmountable but really collective evil under a genocide against non-Christians being forgiven by Christians could lead to accusations against Christians of preferential forgiveness or even racism. That is to say Jewish souls could not be compelled by a Christian afterlife to forgive the nazis because Jewish people didn’t consent to forgiveness being an absolute virtue and only a relative virtue.

Satanism and pantheism are theoretically reconcilable if evil people yearned to be tortured in hell rather than to be the torturer. It seems paradoxical but a belief in hell would actually be ethical to evil victims because it’d force them in life to be a perfectionist at minimising a lesser evil as much as possible. Hell can relate to the potential indulgence of suicidal ideation where they flaw in promoting hell as a doctrine of ethics is that it presents evil people as being so fundamental as to almost be supernatural.

Materialism and pantheism could be more reconcilable if a temporary afterlife were re-envisaged as euthanasia. So if pantheism were taken literally then the way you’d eventually re-incarnate after God removing you from an afterlife would be comparable to suicide if a trace of God were in you. In other words God would be killing a speck of God. Yet an advantage of a temporary afterlife would be that re-incarnation might be less painful. For pantheists a belief in heaven would be a supernatural glorification of suicide in a way that’s sarcastic when we don’t want everyone being suicidal in real life. By contrast immediate re-incarnation after death would lead to a natural and impersonal death. Pantheists aren’t obliged to say they’re suicidal when we don’t have to be extremists in our own faith. Yet if pantheism had to compete against hypothetical systems of evil in the future then pantheism is capable of adapting. A consolation of a suicidal version of pantheism would be that it could easily outcompete lots of evil people for how wild or nihilistic they could appear to others. Unfortunately rebellious personalities can be impressionable not only to good people but also to evil people.

Christianity might always struggle with economic and political problems. Yet when it comes to accepting Jesus as a Son of God perhaps we should just appreciate the fact that we’re not under imperial Roman occupation!