I searched the Internet for "crocodiles not water lilies," and the first hit was a video of that name that had been uploaded just days earlier, on August 18, 2021. It was Roger, recounting his waking dream of the water lilies and the crocodile.
Doing a bit more searching, I found that Roger died on April 22, 2014. Someone posted it now, more than seven years after his death, and I just happened to find it a few days after that.
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The night after posting this, I had a strange dream in which Roger told me about an experience of his in which God had miraculously "deleted" some time from his life. He even had a YouTube video to prove it. If you watched the video, everything appeared normal, but if you watched the counter at the bottom indicating how many minute and seconds had elapsed, at one point it suddenly jumped several minutes ahead, proving that that time had originally elapsed but had then been retroactively "deleted" by God. "If that time had never elapsed at all, the counter would be normal," Roger explained. "Or if it had been deleted from the video rather than from the world, the counter would be normal."
I have often had the thought that the only possible theodicy or justification for suffering is if God has the power to literally retroactively undo (erase) all the suffering which occurred in the past. Throwing away the ladder of suffering after one has climbed upon it. It does contradicts your learning hypothesis, which I find extremely difficult to accept.
Something like this: “This is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.” (A Grief Observed)
Otto, I don't think any supernatural erasing of the past is necessary or desirable. Pain is only painful when it is present. This is most obvious with physical pain -- when I remember now a serious motorcycle accident I had 11 years ago, I feel no pain at all -- but I think it is also true of psychological suffering. Remembering past suffering can be painful, or painless, or even enjoyable, all depending on our *present* state of mind.
One possible way of "deleting the past" is to literally delete it, as with Steven King's Langoliers (supernatural creatures that literally consume the still existent frozen past).
Another possible way of "deleting the past" is if it is simply always the case that the past literally does not exist, and only apparent memories of the past exist, which memories refer to nothing real (or what might be called Presentism in the philosophy of time).
However, if the past still really exists (in some way independently of memories of the past), then simply having a pleasant memory about past traumatic events, for me is insufficient justification for those events.
(*Langoliers)
By the way, crocodilians mistaken for wood: https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2021/05/linkin-logs.html
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