Reality: The Taboo Against Truth -- Chapter 4: The War on Reality

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | TOC | The Binary Circumstance Blog | Contact

Reality

and The Taboo Against Truth

The War on Reality

Evidence is Education

What is an ugagaga? What does it look like? What color is it? Is it alive or inanimate? If it is alive, how does it reproduce and what it its lifespan? How much does an ugagaga weigh? What are its dimensions? What is its shape? Nobody knows the answer to these questions because there is no evidence of the existence of ugagagas.

There can be no knowledge of things that do not exist. There is no evidence to be studied and no facts to be learned, analyzed, and weighed against other evidence. It is impossible to draw rational conclusions without real evidence to support the conclusions. There can be no education about ugagagas because there is no evidence.

Mysticism is the belief in things that are not supported by evidence and often in spite of evidence. There is religious mysticism and nonreligious mysticism. In the most general terms, mysticism is a reliance on faith, emotion, intuition or unsubstantiated claims as a basis for knowledge rather than the rational analysis of evidence. Mysticism is a rejection of education from existing evidence in favor of orthodoxy, dogma, pseudoscience, folklore, or wishful thinking which cannot be validated with objective evidence. It is always a belief in unsubstantiated ideas and the premise that the ultimate truth about existence is achieved by rejecting what exists for what does not exist.

Education, the acquisition of knowledge and truth, is totally dependent upon evidence. If there is no evidence, there can be no knowledge and no education. There is nothing to know about things that do not exist, except for the fact that they don’t exist. Once the mind, which is designed by evolution to learn about what exists, begins to reject evidence in favor of mysticism, it has divorced itself from reality and can no longer find the truth, knowledge or values.

Once the mind has rejected evidence, it can no longer reason. It can only think in terms of pictures and concepts in its head which are not related to concretes, things that exist in the real world. Science fiction writers spend a lot of time thinking about things that don’t exist. This is often the source of invention and creativity, yet it is also the basis for all delusions. The difference is that the science fiction writers knows that he’s thinking and writing about things that don’t exist; he has not lost his frame around Universal Reality. The individual who is lost in mental illness confuses the fiction of his thinking with reality; he has lost his frame around reality.

When an individual does not use his mind to its full ability, when he does not get his education from evidence but instead from mystical notions of reality, he can no longer reason. He has denied himself the opportunity to face and accept the reality in which he lives. Avoidance of Universal Reality must always take a detour down a street called denial and end up in a place called delusion. Delusion is the foundation of all craziness.

Mysticism, the denial of evidence, is a form of irrationality as it inevitably divorces the mind from Universal Reality. Unfortunately, it is a socially acceptable and encouraged form of irrationality. There are many forces in society that encourage mysticism and discourage earnest inquiry; the context is inevitably the effort of one individual or group to maintain power over others. Any institutionalized power that one individual has over another is inevitably based on mystical premises; there is no evidence support the idea that one has a right to control the life of another. It follows that any power rooted in mysticism will need to encourage and support mysticism and discourage reason and thought in order to preserve its power.

Thinking and reason are subversive and taboo because they are effective antidotes against the mental poison of mysticism. Because reason and science require evidence, they are by definition in conflict with any power that is rooted in mysticism. History is full of examples of mystics attempting to frustrate Man’s capacity for reason: the Church’s centuries-long opposition to scientific enquiry, the Inquisition and the Dark Ages and the laws that prohibited the education of slaves in the American south are just a few examples. Any power structure that is rooted in mysticism must stand in fierce opposition to reason and scientific inquiry in order to preserve its power.

Education, the acquisition of knowledge and truth, is the inherent outcome of the rational study of evidence. There can be no education without evidence. Mysticism, because of its natural opposition to evidence can not educate, it can only indoctrinate. It frustrates education based on the study of evidence and substitutes orthodoxy for genuine knowledge.

There are many forms of mysticism which fall into several broad categories: religion, astrology, ESP, belief in aliens from outer space, ghosts, pseudoscience, witchcraft, voodoo, superstition, romanticism, heterosexism, racism, sexism and collectivism to name a few. Since mysticism is the denial or outright rejection of evidence, it requires an individual consciousness. There can be no denial or rejection without a mind to do the denying or rejecting. Just as every unique consciousness has a unique view of Universal Reality, each mind can have its own unique version of mysticism to facilitate its rejection of Universal Reality; there is potentially a different variant of mysticism for every human being that ever lived.

Religious mysticism is possibly the most damaging because it is the most ubiquitous, popular, and well-funded. Throughout history is has been directly responsible for all manner of torture, suppression of scientific research, mayhem and death. Mysticism is mysticism, however, and to the extent that all forms of mysticism divorce the human mind from reality, they are equally dangerous and destructive. Once a mind no longer regards existence and evidence as the basis for truth and knowledge, it really doesn’t matter what form of mysticism is employed, the end result will be the same: a confusion of truth and lies and an inability to distinguish between knowledge and ignorance.

Religion is Doing God’s Work

It is a premise of most theistic religions that God created the universe. By implication, any supreme being with the power to create the universe would be God. Every individual consciousness that rejects Universal Reality is by default creating a different reality; substituting his own universe for the one that exists. He is playing God; rejecting the creation that he claims to believe is God’s creation in favor of the unique, unverifiable version of reality that he creates in his own head. To the extent that a religion divorces itself from scientifically verifiable evidence, it is rejecting the universe which it teaches was created by God. Such religions claim to worship God, but instead reject evidence and information about His creation, His handiwork.

God either exists or He doesn't. This question is a binary circumstance. He's either real or a delusion. If God exists then he is a part of Universal Reality not something outside of it. There would be evidence of His existence. His creation would provide evidence and knowledge of His nature and His identity.

Since the beginning of time, no man has been able to prove or disprove the existence of God. Theories abound and every religion has its own explanation of what God is like, but none of these theories are supported by scientifically verifiable evidence. Because there is evidence of the existence of God, belief in His existence is inevitably based on mysticism, faith or some kind of revelation.

In The Age of Reason published in 1794, Thomas Paine, a Deist and one of the founding fathers of the United States said of revelation:

Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately by God to man.

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if He pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing.[i]

It is a sad commentary on the state of the human intellect, and evidence of a wide-spread lack of self-esteem, that more that 200 years after one of our founding fathers wrote those words, a great majority of individuals are more likely to believe religious hearsay and reject the objective, scientific evidence that exists right in front of their own eyes. The real, daily, individual revelation of existence is rejected in favor of folklore that has been passed from one generation to the next over thousands of years.

In spite of clear evidence to the contrary in his writing, Paine was accused by the religious leaders of his time of being an atheist, simply because he pointed out some the many contradictions in the Bible. Paine stated clearly, “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.”[ii]

Deists, like Paine, believe that God reveals Himself in His creation, the universe. A contemporary analogue to Deism would be the belief in Intelligent Design. While they differ on some points, both believe firmly that the universe was created by a Creator and that knowledge of the Creator is acquired through scientific study of the creation.

There are major problems, however, with the belief that the universe had a beginning and was created by an intelligent creator. First, there is no evidence. The existence of the universe by itself is not evidence of a creator; it is only evidence of the existence of the universe. We know when we see a house that it was created by men because we have all seen men build houses and we have never seen anything other than men build houses. We can conclude based on our experience and the lack of contradictory evidence that any house we see was built by men. There is not a single human being, however, who witnessed the birth of the universe, however; we have no first-hand knowledge of how it came to be.

Second, if a supreme intelligence created the universe wouldn’t that imply that an even greater intelligence created that supreme intelligence and an even greater intelligence created that creator? Accepting the existence of an intelligent creator inevitably becomes infinitely recursive.

Mystics believe that God always existed and has no beginning or end. For many, it is clearly a comforting theory, but how can they know that without any evidence? What can you say about people who insist that they know things which cannot be known, but refuse to accept things that can be known? What kind of person can profess to know everything about God but when confronted with a science class or a course in logic, is terrified by the intellectual challenge?

Isn’t a rejection of all opportunities to study and understand the workings of the universe a rejection of the Creator of the universe? Isn’t a rejection of the potential of Man’s mind a rejection of the Creator’s most important achievement? How can people who claim to love the Creator reject the study of what He has created? How can they reject evidence that exists while claiming to worship the Creator of the evidence and the human mind’s capacity to analyze it?

The answer lies in the fact that religion speculates about the nature of existence, by focusing on nonexistence. It defines existence by rejecting existing evidence in favor of nonexistent evidence. It is not possible to understand existence by rejecting existing evidence, nor is it possible to understand nonexistence because there is nothing there to understand. There is no evidence of things that don’t exist and nothing can be known about them. Religion blurs the line between existence and nonexistence; to destroy the mind’s instinct for judging.

Once a human being has been convinced that nonexistence has more value than existence, he will blissfully give up his life in exchange for death or willingly become a slave to others. Thomas Paine put it well: “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."[iii]

More than 200 years ago, Paine saw a direct connection between religion, terror, slavery, and the control of people and markets. Not much has changed since he wrote those words at the time the United States was being born. The Age of Reason seems a more distant possibility than ever before. On September 11, 2001, terrorist Muslim religious fanatics flew jumbo jets into the World Trade Center as part of a “holy jihad” against the United States. In the resulting inferno, they sacrificed their own lives and the lives of approximately 3,000 others to the unsubstantiated belief that death would bring a better life.

President George W. Bush, a self-proclaimed born-again Christian, is terrorizing the people of the Middle East by preparing to attack Iraq as part of his “War on Terror.” Since Iraq also has the second largest supply of oil reserves in the world, and the president and vice-president are both former oil executives, it is not unreasonable to believe that the real motivation is the desire to control the oil markets. Many young men and women will sacrifice their lives willingly in the belief that it will make the world free or that a better life awaits them in Heaven.

Both sides believe they are doing God’s work and that they will be rewarded for their efforts. They were taught since they were little children that the desire for knowledge, which requires the study of evidence and existence, is Man’s original sin and that obedience and self-sacrifice are the greatest good. There is no evidence that there is freedom or life after death; there is only evidence that both religion and governments want humans to believe that there is.

Once a human mind accepts that there is a greater value in nonexistence (death) than in existence (life) it has become completely divorced from Universal Reality. Things that do not exist do not have value; they are not there. A mind that values nonexistence over existence is insane and a danger to itself and others.

The Genesis of Irrationality

The book of Genesis tells us that Eve, after prodding from the serpent, ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She and Adam then realized that they were naked and felt ashamed. They hid from God who could not find Adam in the garden that he created. God condemned them to die and to a life of suffering. He also condemned the serpent to crawl on its belly for eternity and to eat dirt. (footnote)

This is the message of the first two or three pages of The Bible: Man was given everything that he needed by God but told he would lose it if he disobeyed God and acquired the knowledge of good and evil. In other words, if he learned how to judge, he would pay a hefty price for it.

Since judgment is necessary for the acquisition of knowledge and as such is a primary function of the human mind, it is clear that the authors of the Bible did not want Man to be able to think, to know, to judge. History has taught us over and over again, however, that it is a failure to think, and a lack of knowledge and judgment that cause Man to suffer and die unnecessarily.

Genesis tells us that two specific penalties for acquiring knowledge and judgment are increased pain in childbirth and heavy labor the fields to feed ourselves.(footnote) The reality is that science has made childbearing safer and less painful and also allowed man to design machines that make producing his food less labor intensive.

But to reach this conclusion, a person must first of all observe and then pass judgment, something that God, according to Genesis, had reportedly forbidden him to do in the beginning.

So what is a rational person to make of this? A rational person can't make anything out of something that is so obviously contrary to reality. He would have to give up his ability to judge and acquire knowledge in order to regard the Bible as truth. He must ignore the fact that there is no evidence that God exists or that he talks directly to Man. He must ignore the fact that snakes don’t talk and that there is no tree in existence whose fruit will convey the knowledge of good and evil. He would have to ignore all the evidence that acquiring knowledge and the capacity to make rational judgments about good and evil have greatly lessened Man’s suffering.

If the Bible is true, Man has eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and presumably now knows the difference between good and evil. But he has not paid a high price for it; the only people who are paying the high price are the people who still haven't eaten from the tree of knowledge and judgment. It is true that Man dies, but that is true for all living organisms. By using his mind, Man has greatly lengthened his lifespan on earth, self-sacrifice inevitably shortens life.

Snakes do not eat dirt. They eat rats and other small rodents. The snakes of the world haven't paid the price that Genesis tells us they would pay either. Neither man nor snakes have served the terrible sentences for original sin that we are told they were condemned to serve. Therefore, Genesis is a lie and a fraud or it serves as evidence that the angry God of Genesis is impotent to exercise his wrath, just as he was unable to find Adam in the garden when he wanted to.

It is only reasonable to conclude that Genesis is designed to frighten humans into a state of blind obedience and to instill guilt for using the mind in the quest for knowledge and the ability to judge what is good and what is evil. It doesn't take a particularly keen instinct for judgment to see that Genesis is illogical and inconsistent with the evidence, but vast numbers of our species have been terrorized since childhood into believing that they will spend an eternity burning in Hell, if they, like Adam and Eve, disobey God and desire the knowledge of good and evil.

These ideas are planted in children’s minds while their brains, which are designed to learn the difference between existence and nonexistence, are feverishly wiring new connections between neurons. At the time when the frame around Universal Reality should be refined and sharpened, the line is being blurred. A lifelong confusion between truth and lies, knowledge and ignorance is the inevitable consequence.

It is clearly possible that the genesis of Man’s suffering and his desire to destroy his own life and the lives of others lies in the teaching of mystical beliefs to young children. It is at this early stage of development that the human instincts for survival, pleasure and judgment can be deformed into a need to self-sacrifice, seek suffering, and reject reality by a failure to judge. It is not possible to test this hypothesis, however, since all children are raised in mystical environments of one type or another.

Mystical beliefs do not have to be religious beliefs. Any belief that cannot be supported by evidence is a mystical belief. Any form of mystical orthodoxy will seek to frustrate the acquisition of knowledge through experimentation. After all, Adam and Eve were conducting an experiment and seeking evidence about consequences when they ate of the forbidden fruit. The story of Genesis is useful not only as an example of religious mysticism but as a more general myth: authority figures coerce blind obedience with the falsehood that seeking knowledge and acquiring the ability to judge will bring harsh consequences. The obedient are required to suspend their innate capacity for critical thinking and judgment in order to remain in the mythical Garden of Eden.

Personification and Perversion

Personification is the process of assigning human characteristics to entities which are not human or do not exist. It is an adulteration of reality and a perversion of man’s place in the Universe. A human being is a human being with certain properties and characteristics. Things which do not exist do not possess the properties or characteristics of Man; they have no properties or characteristics because they do not exist.

Whether individuals use personification to bestow human qualities on God, governments, nature, or collections of individuals such as society, races, or sexes, the function is the same. Characteristics and capabilities that are unique to individuals are mystically embodied into a concept that is always super-human and in possession of power, needs, desires, emotions and thoughts which take precedence over the lives of real human beings.

Individuals who personify nonexistent entities are projecting their own personalities, emotional needs and values onto the blank screen of nothingness. The super-human is like a parent who is always present but not seen, something to be admired, loved, feared and subject to. The personified super-human exists to encourage obedience and conformity.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud described the relationship of religious individuals to a super-human, parent-like Providence:

In my Future of an Illusion [1927c] I was concerned much less with the deepest sources of the religious feeling than with what the common man understands by his religion—with the system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and compensate him in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here. The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of men and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.[iv]

The same can be said of the view that many individuals have of the state. Patriotism or unquestioning allegiance to a state is a sentiment that elevates the state to the level of a father figure; an entity that has compassion for its citizens, will discipline and punish them when they do wrong, and protect them from harm. All that is required is for the citizens to do the government‑god’s will.

One of the most insidious personifications of a non-existent entity occurs when people attribute human characteristics to “the public” which is not a human being but a collection of human beings. It is an example of the logical Fallacy of Composition to conclude that a collection inherits the properties of the parts that make up the collection. For example: individuals have minds and the capacity to think, therefore, a group of individuals has a mind and can think.

Thinking is a function that can only be performed by an individual brain and therefore thinking is always an individual process. While individuals can share thoughts and trade ideas, the reality is that the process of thinking itself is purely individual and unique to each person. Even when people are working together to solve a problem, each individual is processing any relevant information in his own head, not in the head of another individual.

In a similar fashion, the term “public interest” creates the illusion of a super-human interest belonging to a super-human called “the public” that takes precedence over individual interests. Yet, there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that a collection of human beings is organically equipped by nature to have an interest in anything. The collection does not inherit the capacity for thought, for creating values, for desire, ambition, emotion, compassion or sex. It does not possess a mind or a nervous system, nor does it have a body, a birthday, or a time-of-death. It does not have parents, children, friends, lovers or spouses. These properties belong only to individuals, not to a collection of individuals. In spite of the fact that individual interests actually exist, individuals are inevitably expected to sacrifice their interests and sometimes their lives to the mystical, personified, super-human “public interest” which does not exist.

What can be more absurd that teaching children that their lives are less valuable than something that does not even exist? If something does not exist, it cannot be rationally described or measured and it has no value. To teach a child that his or her life is less valuable than something which has no value is not only a lie, it is child abuse. Yet it is common for parents to believe that they build self-esteem and character by teaching their children to sacrifice their interests and even their lives to any number of inanimate, irrational entities. Whether the indefinable entity is God, the public, the public interest, the common good, or a government the effect is the same: it is a perversion of Man’s place in the universe when the greatest natural resource is enslaved to non-existent entities that possess no characteristics or value.

It is the nature of mysticism to devalue existence in favor of nonexistence; subjective faith and intuition are valued over objective, scientific evidence and as an extension of that death and fantasies of eternal life are valued over life. Throughout history huge numbers of human beings have been duped into believing that sacrificing this life for an eternal life, for the public interest or for the common good is the highest good, a perfect morality. Such people will readily accept that their lives which have tremendous value as the greatest natural resource should be sacrificed for things that cannot possibly have any value because they do not exist.

By comparison, sacrificing a human life for a block of concrete, a few dollars, a new car or a worthless collection of stock certificates would be an excellent trade. With these items it is at least possible to calculate some value because there is evidence to support their existence; they have characteristics and therefore can have some value.

Personified, super-human entities do not have real value because there is no evidence to support their existence; they have no characteristics. They are a perversion of Man’s relationship to existence and to borrow Thomas Paine’s words, “no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”[v]

The Divisiveness of Delusion

Delusions are a function of individual minds; they are completely dependent upon an individual mind for their existence. They are the result of a mind that is divorced from the evidence about existence either by choice, circumstance or malfunction.

Universal Reality exists independently of any consciousness. All the evidence that we currently have suggests that if every single human being died, the solar system would still exist and the universe would still exist. They are a Universal Reality. The existed before Man, are independent of Man’s consciousness, and will continue to exist even if Man blows himself off the face of the earth.

In contrast, if every single human being ceased to exist, the belief in God would cease to exist, because religion is a function of the human mind. Religion is not a Universal Reality. As long as there is no objective evidence of the existence of God, religion will never be anything but a system of unsubstantiated beliefs. Without evidence, God can never be a part of existence; a Supreme Being can never be a Universal Reality.

The same is true for the many other forms of mysticism; they are dependent upon at least one human consciousness for their existence. Even if several or many individuals share the same belief, the agreement does not make the belief a Universal Reality. In fact, if every human being shared the same belief, the belief is not automatically a Universal Reality. In order to be a Universal Reality, something must exist independently of the human consciousness.

The possibility that a consciousness can be out of sync with Universal Reality is a Universal Reality. In other words, the existence of delusional and misinformed minds is a Universal Reality. Even if the human species ceased to exist, the possibility that another form of consciousness might evolve is there. Once a new form of consciousness exists, that consciousness will either be in sync with Universal Reality or it will not be in sync with it. The phenomenon of delusion implies the existence of some consciousness to be deluded; it is a function of the existence of some species of consciousness and the relationship that consciousness has with Universal Reality.

Whether a consciousness exists or not is a binary circumstance. Whether it is conscious of Universal Reality or is unconscious of it is also a binary circumstance. The latter is related to the functioning and the efficacy of the consciousness. Whether the consciousness is delusional or not is a binary circumstance; depending on whether it rejects evidence of reality or considers it.

Conflicts between men result because every man has a unique consciousness that has evolved to grasp Universal Reality, the universe shared by all men and not dependent upon the existence of any man. Rejecting Universal Reality destroys the possibility of Man living in harmony with his universe and with his fellow man. The only thing that individuals really have in common is the universe that created them and sustains them; as such it is their common ground, the common source of their being, and the basis for any common language.

If Universal Reality is the common language of all things that exist, then religion and mysticism are the Tower of Babel because they frustrate Man’s scientific understanding of the physical world. Without objective, scientifically verifiable evidence, there can be no agreement between men; there can be no common language. There can only be conflict as each unique consciousness attempts to universalize its own subjective view of the universe on every other mind.

The physical world is a world of matter, energy, and relationships. People don't fight wars over the existence of a mountain or an ocean. They fight wars over what the mountain should be called, or who owns it, but they don't fight wars over its physical existence. The mountain exists, however, in spite of what people call it or who owns it, or what people feel it should be used for; its existence is independent of any unique consciousness of it. The physical world is part of Universal Reality; it existed before mankind and will exist after he is gone. Because Universal Reality transcends man’s consciousness, and because all men are subject to its rules, it is the only thing that can serve as a basis for agreement and unity.

It is much harder to get agreement in the world of ideas. Ideas are not physical objects and not all people have the ability to think at the same level. Ideas occur in brains and every person has his own brain. Ideas can only create unity if there are rooted in Universal Reality, the facts, matter and energy of the universe that are shared by everything that exists.

Ideas are a function of intelligence and while most people can see well enough to perceive something as big as a mountain and agree that it's there, the biggest ideas require genius, which few men possess.

While a sheep herder in the Alps will get nothing but agreement when he tells people that he's surrounded by mountains, a nuclear physicist will have a much more difficult time finding people who can understand or agree with him on the realities of sub-atomic particles. But experience tells us that nuclear physicists understand atoms because they built the atom bomb and nuclear power plants. There is evidence that they know about nuclear particles because they are able to manipulate them so successfully. So even though the great majority of people don’t have the intelligence or the background to understand nuclear physics, the work of nuclear scientists is scientifically verifiable. If their experiments can be independently repeated and validated over and over again, they can be the basis for agreement.

When it comes to mysticism, however, there is no evidence required and in fact, evidence is often rejected as a worldly illusion. Mystics tell us to rely on faith and intuition and reject the physical evidence that science and reason can provide about existence. Since there is no objective evidence to support mystical ideas, each individual mystic is free to create his own view of the Universe. He doesn’t have to prove anything, conduct experiments or wait for others to independently verify the results. He just has to sell his point of view and if he can’t sell it peacefully, the use of some kind of coercive force is often the next step. During the 300 years of witch-hunting from 1450-1750 C.E., the Catholic Church invented the concept of devil worship to force individuals, specifically women, to submit to its control.[vi]

Unlike a mountain or a planet or the fact that the sun is in the sky, there is no objective evidence to support any purely subjective view of the Universe. There can be no common ground for agreement in the realm of mysticism which rejects objective evidence and is totally reliant on faith, intuition and emotion. There is no way to test if two people really believe in the same thing if the thing they believe is not supported by evidence and does not have an existence outside their individual minds. There is nothing to measure the accuracy of their beliefs against. If one says that ugagagas are blue because blah, blah, blah and the other says that they’re red because blah, blah, blah, there is no way to ever determine who is correct. Nobody has ever seen a ugagaga and nobody ever will. They don’t exist. The two believers will spend the rest of their lives fighting unless one or both of them give up their beliefs either voluntarily or by force. If one believer kills the others, there will be no more conflict at least until another man comes along with a different, unsupported belief.

Without evidence rooted in Universal Reality, people who think they believe the same thing can suddenly decide that they don’t believe the same thing. This is why churches experience one schism after another. During the Protestant Reformation (1500-1700 C.E.) the Catholic Church launched its own Counter Reformation. The resulting religious conflict between people who all professed a love of the same Christian faith fueled civil wars and the Thirty Years War. On one day in France in 1572, 10,000 Protestants where slaughtered in the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day.[vii]

A basic tenet of the Christian faith is that God made man in his own image. But which man is made in God’s image? Every individual who subscribes to this belief wants to be the man who was made in the image of God. But if every man is unique and there is only one God, it is impossible for all men to be made in the image of God. Only one man can wear the label, “Made in God’s Image.” This belief can only lead to conflict as every man competes for the same title.

The same problem occurs if two men want wear the label “Made in Ugagagas Image.” Nobody knows what an ugagaga looks like, so it is impossible to determine who, if anybody, is made in the image of one. The dispute will only be put to rest when one of them is silenced. As new mystics attempt to claim the title, they must be put in their place. The conflict can never end until mysticism and the delusions that inevitably result from it end.

The Changing Scope of Man’s Perceptions

Evolution has given human beings five senses and a brain to incorporate and analyze the incoming data. Through science and technology, Man has greatly expanded the range of his senses; microscopes allow him to see small detail previously out of the range of the naked eye and telescopes allow him to see far into the universe. Microscopes have evolved from the earliest ocular models to electron microscopes and Galileo’s simple telescope has evolved into the Hubble Space telescope that is allowing us to look back toward the beginning of time.

While religions stay focused on books that were written and edited thousands of years ago in the belief that there is nothing new to learn about the universe, science marches progressively forward, continually revising and building upon what was learned in the past. In this way, science provides a process of escaping delusions; as the view of reality continues to expand, the mind can adjust to incorporate the new evidence. There is no guarantee that the mystical mind, if it is willing to change at all, will ever give up its delusions. As long as it remains dependent upon faith, intuition and emotion and stays hostile to evidence, it can only replace one kind of delusion with another.

The size and complexity of the Universe is so great that it is nothing short of preposterous for any one individual to think that he can comprehend it all. To know and love God, which the stated goal of most religions, it would be necessary to understand His mind and his values. It is not possible to love something unless it can be known. To “love” something that cannot be known because it has no characteristics or attributes is nonsensical, just as it makes no sense to say, “I love ugagagas.” What attributes of ugagagas are lovable and worthy of respect?

The mind of Man would have to be as intelligent as the mind of God in order for man to understand the mind of God. If our minds cannot comprehend the entire Universe, which God created and monitors, it is impossible to understand and to love God.

To make this easier to understand, imagine a frame around a portion of reality. Imagine a museum with lots of objects in it. There are many patrons in the museum who are looking at the objects and trying to understand their significance. The patrons in the museum have relationships to the objects and also have relationships to each other and to the employees of the museum. The employees of the museum have relationships to the object in the museum, the building itself, and, to each other and to the patrons.

There is not a single human mind that can, at any given moment, understand, control, and manipulate everything that is inside the frame of the museum. But there millions of people on earth, who's minds cannot comprehend the universe inside the relatively small frame of the museum or their neighborhood, who sincerely believe that they can define and describe the God who supposedly created and controls everything inside the incomprehensibly enormous frame of Universal Reality.

For humans to believe they can understand a supreme intelligence that created the universe is like a flea believing that it can understand the mind of a man. If a flea set up a little flea church to preach sermons every Sunday describing the human mind and what all the little fleas can do to avoid the judgment of Man, I'm sure that many fleas would attend and try to understand how they could keep from being exterminated. But do the fleas have the intelligence to understand the mind of Man? Even if they thought they could, it doesn’t mean they could. The frame of reality that can be perceived, analyzed, and manipulated by humans is much greater than what the flea can comprehend. If God created the Universe and Man and all the other species of life, it is logical to assume that His frame of reality is much larger than anything that Man can fully understand given the current limitations of our perceptions and intelligence.

Fleas, and all living things, can't begin to understand anything that is outside the boundaries of their perceptions and their mental facilities. Just has a flea cannot understand anything greater than itself, it is totally arrogant and self-serving to think that Man can understand any intelligence greater than himself. If man could understand God, then he would have to be as intelligent as God. For any individual to understand Einstein's work, wouldn't he have to be at least as smart as Einstein? If most people can’t understand Einstein or how Beethoven composed his symphonies, what makes them think they can understand God? Wouldn’t the intelligence that created Einstein, Beethoven and the entire universe be smarter than them?

There is no universal range and scope to Man’s view of the universe. It is unique to each individual. While information gathered by technological improvements might become universally available, it must be processed and interpreted by individual minds. The continually improving scope of Man’s perceptions and the new evidence that it provides is not understood by all individuals in the same way. There are those who will reject the new evidence as they have always rejected all scientific evidence.

Man has demonstrated throughout history that he has the capacity to learn about the physical universe and use that information to extend his life and improve its quality. As the scope of Man’s perceptions is extended with technology, new avenues to improve the quality of life are created every day. What we know now is not all there is to know; the process of asking new questions and searching for answers must continue forever. The alternative is orthodoxy, the belief that nothing should ever change and that exploration is therefore unnecessary.

The Cost of Rejecting Reality

Learning about the nature of existence has been very beneficial to mankind, while rejecting the evidence of reality has consistently frustrated progress and produced one bloody conflict after another. Mysticism kills while knowledge extends and improves life.

Human beings can spend their lives in a futile attempt to uncover the truth about ugagagas or they can spend their lives evaluating evidence, learning the truth, and acquiring knowledge about the universe they share. They will never find a lasting, common ground in ugagagas and other entities that can never be described or known; they can only engage in collective delusions.

Rejecting reality comes with a high price—frustration, suffering, insanity, violence and possibly death. What happens when an individual believes that the law of gravity does not exist and jumps off a building without a parachute or a rope to break his fall? He will most likely die or at least be seriously injured. What happens when a driver ignores the law of physics which says that no two objects can occupy the same place at the same time? He will conclude that he can drive his car through a brick wall. The resulting collision will damage the car, the wall and possibly kill the driver and anybody else in the immediate vicinity of the accident.

What happens when one man decides that he has a God-given right to control the lives of his fellow man, when there is no evidence that such a right exists in nature? This is the core belief upon which all religions and governments are founded. History tells us that this rejection of man’s natural state of freedom results in murder, mayhem, Inquisitions, witch-hunts, wars and the total devaluation of human life.

These examples are extreme but they bring the cost of rejecting Reality in favor of delusions into sharp focus. Any rejection of reality, no matter how small, will put the believer in conflict with Universal Reality, a conflict that reality will inevitably win. The laws of the Universal Reality are inherent in the structure and nature of existence; they will not be repealed to accommodate the individual or collective whims of Mankind.

The mind “drives” the individual down the road of the existence. If it doesn’t see the boundaries of the road, tragedy is inevitable. If the mind drives the individual outside the boundaries of the road, or if it does not follow the rules of the road, then the individual will threaten his own survival and often the survival of many others.

The rejection of reality is addictive. The resulting delusions are like the most powerful narcotics known to man; they allow people to avoid reality and create feelings of well-being where they might otherwise only feel loneliness and pain. The more delusions an individual has the more delusions he will need and want to support his existing delusions. As with narcotics, however, the long-term outcome is not good; the addiction makes the individual incapable of dealing with life and willing to do anything to satisfy the addiction. When discussing the capacity that human beings have to deceive themselves, Thomas Paine put it well: "It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."[viii]