"I reject Christianity. Six-seven!" (and time differences between worlds)

Sync fairies, don't even think about making this [six-seven meme] a recurring theme! I know I've patiently put up with plenty of rannygazoo from you lot, but there are limits.

-- me

Asking Sync Fairies to please stop their relentless persistence?

Nah, that dog don't hunt.

Ask me how I know.:-(((

-- Debbie

I don't know why I still occasionally check the Babylon Bee, which stopped being funny years ago and is rapidly going the way of The Onion, but I guess habits die hard. Anyway, last night I somehow managed to get through all ten of their "10 Powerful Stories From People Who Converted To Atheism," all of which were done-to-death clichés that wouldn't voom if you put four million volts through them. Waiting for me at the very end were those two accursed numbers, which was almost enough to convince me that no all-loving God governs this universe.

Babylon is fallen, is fallen, is fallen. Unless it's meant to be meta and ironic -- since the whole article is the exact Christian equivalent of saying "fairy sky daddy" -- this is just sad. Ha, Babylon Bee humor. Six-seven!

From the Bee I went to YouTube and listened to part of a fringe Mormon podcast, in which someone calling himself Latter-day Chad presents a Mormon theory of reincarnation and host Shane Baldwin plays the normie straight man. The part I quote below begins at the 39:40 mark.

Chad: And literally, it's just here's the problem is that Mormonism has become this weird gross combination of these esoteric doctrines and Protestant Christianity because people would not let go of their traditions because they want the Christians to like them. I'm sorry if you're spending all your time arguing with Christians trying to get them to accept. No, we're not Christians. I'm just going to say it. I don't believe Mormons are Christians as far as what the world calls Christians. And I don't want to be associated with what they call Christians because of all the people that the Christians were massacring for not believing their beliefs.

Baldwin: Um, so what what would you want to be called? Because you obviously believe in Christ. So everybody, everybody thinks that a Christian is somebody who believes in Christ. But what you're saying a Christian is, is not that.

Chad: Well, um, I would say that they believe in Christ and we believe that we are to become as Christ. So, we're not Christians, we're Christs. That's what I would say. Journal of Discourses 6:67.

Baldwin: That's pretty good. We'll clip that.

Chad is introducing the next quote he's going to talk about, but the way he says it, and the way Baldwin immediately jumps in with "That's pretty good. We'll clip that," makes it sound as if he's citing the Journal of Discourses as the source for what he's just said about not being Christian. He also says "six sixty-seven" very quickly, so it sounds as if he's just stuttering on the six, and YouTube's automatically generated transcript just says "Journal of Discourses 67." It's also basically the only time he cites a specific document for the quotes he presents; for everything else he just gives the person's name and the date.

I'm posting about the podcast for sync reasons -- 67 coming at the end of an edgy young person's rejection of Christianity (plus a meme connection via "Chad") -- but the ideas presented are interesting, if not entirely convincing, and may be of interest to people (Bill, Leo, WG) who think within a Mormonism-plus-reincarnation framework. I'll probably listen to the rest of it later, if I still have any time left after doing all these blasted sync posts.

There's also a further sync link to The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik and to some fiction I've been writing.

In the podcast, Chad presents the idea of someone who has already lived, died, and been resurrected in the Celestial Kingdom voluntarily going back down to the Telestial (i.e., our world) to incarnate again, leaving his wife in the Celestial to wait for him. Most Mormons take "a thousand years is as one day with the Lord" very literally, and so Baldwin points out that the difference in the subjective experience of time means the wife won't actually have to wait very long. What I quote below begins at the 29:37 mark.

Baldwin: But you're telling me that a hundred years ago, guys that were Apostles, members of the Quorum of the Twelve, were out telling people about dreams that they had about their wife that was home with them in the Celestial Kingdom while he's down here, and she's just waiting for him?

Chad: Basically, yeah.

Baldwin: Well, you know, if you break it down, this is kind of an interesting thing. Do you know how long 80 Earth years is to Celestial time?

Chad: Like a day?

Baldwin: It's not even a day, dude. It's like it's like a half an hour is 20 years. So 80 years would be 2 hours. You'd be like this. Tell your wife. "Hey, I'm going to go down to the Telestial Kingdom. Uh, can you just have lunch ready for me when I return home here in two hours?"

Chad: Apparently.

Near the end of Noah Hypnotik -- major spoiler alert -- Noah wakes up to discover that the last three months of his life have been lived in a Matrix-style virtual-reality system into which he had been plugged while drunk and hypnotized so that he would not notice the transition from real life to the simulation. He also finds out that it hasn't actually been three months. After asking him what month he thinks it is, the "friend" who hypnotized him explains:

The simulation ratio is roughly one hour to every two weeks. It's been just over six hours.

In the fiction I've been writing (not for publication, just an exploration of ideas), the main character gradually discovers that every time he dreams he re-enters the same other world, lives an entire lifetime there, and wakes up when he dies. Since the longest dreams of a typical night's sleep last 30-40 minutes of objective time, with dreams as long as 60 minutes being possible but extremely rare, I worked out that a minute of dreaming should correspond to two years in the other world, so that 60-80 years is the typical maximum lifespan, with 120 years representing the extreme limit of longevity. And yes, the whole thing is a metaphor for reincarnation, prompted by last year's "Trying to make Christian sense of original sin and reincarnation."