When you have an extreme wide-screen lens that can distort everything to a big and strange mass, you can end up with an idea that you need just one explanation to explain that extremely blurred image.
This explanation just might be that some ‘god’ designed and created all this. This is the simplest possible explanation there is on offer, and it is not surprising that it is so popular and widespread.

However, when you start moving the zoom forward and you start discerning more and more details. Things do also become more and more complex with every single new step of the zoom. During this process, the simple single solution that just a moment ago seemed so plausible just does become more and more implausible.
The level of complexity rises with every single step that we move the zoom closer and closer, and the individual objects start to be seen more clearly.

At every single new step of the zoom, we can see more. However, with our added knowledge we can also make better and better guesses of what goes on in the inside also in the things that have just become visible.
All visible thing do, in the end, hide away a mind-boggling complexity of a natural-born machinery that we did not know at first at all. However, often we must use our imagination to see how this machinery really is. We must often do it based on very small hints, the more so, as we often do not have methods for peering inside all new things that the rise into view when the level of zoom increases.

Best results are obtained when our imagination is fired by the singular glimpses of the delicate inner structure of matter that we do gain at times. Happily we can very often build our ideas on real observations. The best and strongest theories are made just in this way.
However, often only the imaginative powers of the human mind do allow us to peer outside also inside of the visible world. Nearly boundless human ability for reasoning with the aid of imagination does allow us to understand and create theories about the structure of these minuscule and and boundless worlds, parts of which can remain forever invisible for humans with their limited viewing capabilities.

The human mind that is using the scientific method can act like an auxiliary lens that helps us reveal more detail from each of the new levels of zoom we do reach when we improve our techniques for seeing things.
New and better lenses do help us to create new and better explanations. We can still find new ways to increase the level of the zoom that we have at our disposal. This explanation will never be final and complete, as it will develop and improve as long as humans put their minds into it.

However, the sad fact is that the highly evolved and extremely fine-tuned explanation still has to compete with the simplest possible explanation that was born in the days when we had no real knowledge of how our world is really built and how it really works.

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Men have always created gods as their own images and every god will inevitably look extraordinarily like the person and persons who have created it. This creation of gods as idealized images of men has been going on as long as there has been gods.
Of course, for example, the Greek family of gods was simply an idealized Greek portrait of a ruling elite with endless competition and rivalry for the top spots.

Similarly, the new Jewish monotheistic god was an idealized mirror image of the new kings, when the Jewish nation was subdued into the power of single man on the top. This new god was all that these new leaders wanted to be; all-powerful, all-knowing and all-merciless.
This god was vengeful and sadistic, as were often the new kings too, when the absolute power perverted their mind as it will always pervert the minds of all absolute rulers. This god was the one who did give his blessings for the destruction of the cities of the enemies and the killing and enslaving of their people.

When a new and struggling sect emerged from the Jewish religion 2000 years ago, their god was again an extremely different creature, when this emerging new religion was at the very beginning the religion of the downtrodden and emerging classes.
Their god was a mirror image of them; it was helpful, supportive and merciful, as the people who were stuck in the lowest ladders of the Roman society where people who needed mercy, help and support to survive.

However, the new and emerging Christian god was a malleable beast, as when Christianity succeeded in gaining the upper hand in Roman society, the image of god did again change.
Their god regained some of more vicious properties of the Jewish god. Now the god namely needed to be the upholder of the existing social order and a protector of the holy borders of the Roman empire, which was soon forcibly totally Christianized.

So, the official god is always the mirror image of the ideas of the leaders of a religion. It does reflect their hopes and ideas, but this process does not stop here.
The lower ranking members will also quite inevitably give their own vision of their god their own properties. They will simply pick from the official party line only those parts that will support their idea of a god, which of course is an idealized mirror image of themselves.
So, a terrorist's god will be bloodthirsty and vengeful and the god of a peaceful peasant will be a very peaceful god.

God is after all just the person himself in an idealized form; the things he would like to be and achieve in life are the qualities that they give to their own version of gad.
As Salman Rushdie said about a writer; that when you start writing, you kind of dress up to be your better self. Your writing will often reflect the ideas of the noble and good person who you would like to be. Similarly, your idea of god is a reflection the idealized vision of what you would like yourself to be.

And yes, deep inside everybody who believes in any god has his own private version of this god in deep inside of his own mind, as long as humans differ from other humans.
Of course in some societies it is better just to keep mum about your own private ideas to simply stay alive in the midst of religious fanatics, who are all too often deluded to think that their own idea can be the only possible one.

In the level of an individual this kind idealized idea of human as a goal to strive for can be a valuable psychological tool, that can be used to forward one's success as a human being.
However, religion has always also another, often much more valuable tool as a source of social cohesion.
This task is, however, quite independent of the role of a religion as a tool for self-reflection and self-betterment. This role as a source of uniformity and blind obedience can even become a significant source of trouble in a world where uniformity and blind obedience are not things that would benefit the society anymore.

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If any result of any kind of sexual intercourse is seen as a sacred and protected thing after the very moment of conception, how should we think of a woman who refuses to have sexual intercourse with a male at all?
Is she not guilty of preventing new life that would been born out of that sexual encounter she denied? We can fantasize endlessly about all the great things that this theoretical child could have had, if the sexual intercourse would just have been allowed to take place.
We could do this fantasizing just well as some religious people are so fond of fantasizing about the future of the fetuses that get aborted. They do this, even if they do not know if this fetus would have been still-born in just a few weeks later of would have died of a lethal disease in a few weeks after being born.

If we worry so much about the ‘rights’ of a fetus, how about the rights of the child that would have been conceived, if a woman would not have said 'no' to a man?
If we really think that a woman should not have any right to control what happens in her body after any act of sexual intercourse, because the 'sacredness' of a fetus consisting of a few cells at first, how depraved must we see a women who refuses even the possibility of this new and 'sacred' life from ever emerging?
At which point does a woman lose her right to decide by herself of her own fate anymore? Does this happen on the moment of sperm and egg cells merging or when the first division of the cells, the second division of the cells or the third, or does it even happen at the moment of male ejaculation?

On the other hand, I think that biggest responsibility for unwanted pregnancies that lead to abortions lies on the people who don’t want to give children sex-education and most of all who make the easy access to contraceptives difficult in countries like the United States.
However, the real blame falls on the people who continue stubbornly to make sex seem so dirty that many ordinary people just cannot talk about, for example, the use of contraceptives at all.

It seems that for many it is much easier to just act than speak about the things they are doing, when you have been scared stiff about even mentioning the thing for all of your life.
However, as humans just are what they are, some of them will always have sex out of wedlock. If they do not have the equipment and knowledge to prevent pregnancies, the unwanted, unneeded and decidedly extremely harmful pregnancies will inevitably happen. They will often harm the lives of all of the people involved a and most of all the life of the future, unexpected and unwanted child. On most cases the whole drama would have been quite easily avoided with the proper use of contraceptives in the first place.
However, if you have been taught all your life that sex is something disgusting and dirty, you will be at a definite disadvantage to people who can handle the thing in a rational way.

Of course, basically sex is just as natural for humans as eating and drinking. Because of this the control of the human sexuality to the degree that many modern cultures still try to do it, is one or the most difficult tasks a society can face. The sorry fact is that most of this trouble is gone into because of just because of some kind of cultural heritage and baggage.
All societies throughout the human history have controlled the sexual desires and impulses of their members to a certain degree. However, the exact nature of these limitations is decided by the nature and state of economic development in the society.
For example, a typical Polynesian society with a common source of resources simply has no similar sexual stigmas and limitations that the societies based on private ownership do have.

Most of these limitations for sexuality that we have now have to do with the rise of the agricultural society and its needs, but in a post-industrial society they are often just cultural remnants from an age when there were no modern tools for controlling the results of sexual activity.
On the other hand, very often the most staunch opponents of abortion are paradoxically the most staunch supporters of the death penalty and aggressive foreign policies and military actions. Still, one just has to ask them: how you think about killing in a war which justification you are not personally convinced at all?

The sorry fact is that very many opponents of abortion do not in reality care at all for people who would be born against the will of their parents if abortion would be made impossible. All too often they don’t want to give a single thought for the poverty and the environment already full of crime that many of these unwanted children would so often be thrown into.
No, they are blinded by dogma, which of course is mostly of a religious nature, that come from the time when contraceptives and abortion were not real options. A sorry fact is that people who are blinded by dogma cannot be argued with rationally.

However, I would still like to point out that here in Finland there are very many reasonable Christians, who see abortion or the use of contraceptives as a practical issue, as these things simply do help our society to remain a better place to live for all members of the society.
There just are less of the unwanted, uncared and unloved children who would be here without the use of contraceptives and in some cases, an early and medically safe abortion.

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Law of complexity in abstract ideas: If an abstract idea can get more complex, it will.

Second corollary: The time an abstract idea has been around correlates positively with its complexity

Third corollary: The less an abstract idea has contact points with reality, the more complex it can get.

Fourth corollary: The more public attention an purely abstract idea gets, the more complex it will eventually get.

Fifth corollary: An abstract idea that does not tickle the imagination will remain simple.

Sixth corollary: The more complex an abstract idea gets, the more easily it is accepted, as complexity aids to hide the problems in the original idea. (*see footnote)

Seventh corollary: Adding more complexity to an abstract idea will not normally increase its truth-value.

Eight corollary: The popularity of a purely abstract idea does not often depend on its truth-value, but on its utility-value.

Ninth corollary: A complex abstract idea will never get less complex with time.

Tenth corollary: The complexity of an idea protects it from criticism, as the more difficult an idea is to understand, the less people will even try to tackle it.

* Footnote to sixth corollary: Adding complexity to an abstract idea will evoke the "I should understand this, but I do not. I will pretend that I do"-effect." The complexity of an idea is often mistakenly seen as proof of its deepness and strength, even if it can be evidence of the opposite.

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I have been thinking about fairness a lot lately. Studies show that people have an inborn instinct for fairness, and even a three-year old knows intuitively what is fair and what not. Why is it that we lose so much of that intuitive instinct of fairness in adult life and accept quite unfair things as a norm?
Many people have no trouble in accepting the fact that CEO of a firm can be paid 150 or 200 times more than a person doing manual work in that company, even if the later can, in fact, face much greater hardship and at times even put more real continuous effort to his work.

Could it be that we have been carefully trained not to notice the lack of fairness in matters that do concern the economy anymore? Of course, there is also the undeniable fact that all more advanced human societies have always been and will always be fundamentally based on inequality,
All people just do not just have similar capabilities and human societies do also always need leaders, who have some power over others and are more equal than others, to paraphrase the famous sentence from George Orwell.
I have always hated the idea of ‘slippery slope’, but I do think that it can well be applied here. When we are forced to accept the inevitability of inequality in human societies, we can end up accepting even ultimate and cruel forms on inequality and extreme forms of unfairness, if we are not careful.

Of course, there is also the factor that makes the British aristocracy despise and hate all those who have not inherited their money, but who have earned it by themselves. They are, in fact, just making a virtue out of a vice.
Their example, however, does amply show how this strategy of just turning things upside down can work extremely well. There really are a lot of people, who really quite honestly do think that just inheriting wealth or a position because of the simple accident of birth can make some people more worthy than others.

A simple fact of life is that we have different scales for fairness for different situations. We will not tolerate a situation when our own peers get paid more than us for the same work. However, quite naturally we have often have very little problem in accepting that our superiors do get paid a lot more, as this is seen a quite natural way of how things do work.
As this is the case, we have in the end often only little more trouble in accepting the fact that our superiors do get paid twice as much as we and ultimately even 150 or 200 times more.

In a modern society, one factor is that the extremely well paid jobs are such that it is really difficult to even understand what these people do, and what are their real responsibilities. So the fact, that people who did cook up the housing bubble and the economic disaster following it were, in fact, rewarded handsomely for their troubles.
The people who really paid the cost of the downturn of the economy were the ordinary workers, who had nothing to do with creating the problems in the first place. We can easily see the unfairness of this situation, but we have been carefully trained to accept it just as an inevitable fact of life.

On the other hand, even if complete equality is impossible, I do believe that at least aiming for greater equality will always produce more equality than striving for greater inequality.
I do believe that the role of society in capitalism should be to alleviate the inequality that is always inevitably created by capitalism. I do not believe that it would be ever possible or even wise to stamp inequality completely out of a society. However, a realistic goal just could be to keep it on reasonable limits.

The fact that billionaire Warren Buffet can demand more taxes on the rich tells how a person can have the instinct for fairness intact, even if he makes billions. The sad fact, however, normally is that the idea of fairness is a thing that people with great incomes think they need to obliterate from their minds..
Great incomes just are generally not acquired with only pleasant means, but also by using other people to one’s own advantage or by acquiring inherited property that can have been originally acquired by somewhat unpleasant and even quite unfair means.

As the economist Nouriel Roubini has so eloquently shown, there is the distinct possibility that capitalism will die of self-inflicted wounds, when the extremely well-paid upper class spends their days finding ways to cut costs and to expand their profits endlessly.
Nowadays, all too often this will mean exporting the lower level of work to countries where work is less expensive. They just do not realize that by hiring less and less people in their own society, they will eventually erase their very own customer-base, as there will be less and less buying power in their own society, as there simply is less and less work on offer.

This is, of course, a very central problem in capitalism. When every single individual is aiming at maximizing their own profits in the short term, their common actions can eat up their own markets in the long term, but no single individual will bear responsibility for it.
Of course, the far-away countries where work is shipped will benefit from this shift and new markets will be created there. As the business is more and more global the extremely well paid upper class will never see any reason to worry about this trend, as in a globalized world they will simply earn their profits and bonuses from these new and emerging markets.

There is just one thing wrong here. They do themselves still live in the society that will be in decline because of their own actions. In this society there is an ever-increasing lack of fairness, when more and more people lose the ability to earn a decent living with the work of their hands.
Meanwhile, some people will earn more and more from running the ever-more globalized companies, for which the well-being and success of the society of their origins does mean less and less.

The saddest part is that even the last remnants of idea of fairness seems to have been obliterated among all too many of the really rich. One reason for this just might be that the zeitgeist of our time is just now so much in their favor, with the ideas like the of trickle-down effect making even outrageous levels of income acceptable.
The rich just seem to be less and less willing to pay taxes and share even small part of their good fortune with the less fortunate ones. I also suspect that one reason for this is that when their production was in their own home-country, the rich were willing to pay for education and health-service of their own future workers, but with the globalization even this incentive for ‘charity’ has vanished.
Of course, the really rich just have always had the need to develop a way of thinking that can make it possible for them to live with a complete peace of mind in luxury in a society, where some people are desperate and destitute. They just need to develop a way of seeing that poor are poor just because they are losers and rich are rich because they deserve it.

However, the real danger is, that when the rich take more and more of the production of goods to cheaper countries to maximize their own profits, the amount of people that are able to pay taxes will be diminishing rapidly.
If even the people who are growing rich because of this development are at the same less and less willing to take part in the upkeep of society, this will lead to big trouble indeed.

There will be more and more urban poor in the developing world, when the manual jobs they held previously are being transferred to cheaper countries, but at the same time the society has less and less ability to help them, when the income-base of the society keeps being eroded.
The recent riots in England have many kinds of causes, but the frustration in front of an extremely bleak economic future for the poor just may be one of the reasons why things flared up just now.

I do not believe in any kind of socialization of the economy, but I do believe in increasing the level of fairness in our society and even fostering solidarity between all members of it.
I believe that I do not need even to harbor any dogmas in this respect, The only thing that really is required from me personally is just the willingness to advocate the things that I understand to be able to increase the level of fairness in a society, and oppose the things that will in my own mind increase the level of unfairness.

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"Science is one of the very few human activities - perhaps the only one - in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there." - Karl Popper

It may sound quite paradoxical, but accepting the lack of final and unmovable answers does not, in fact, make a person more insecure, but it can make one’s life much more secure. Of course, one can not forget the sorry fact of life that humans are as species prone to seek absolute truths even in places where absolute truths cannot exist.
However, if I base my life-stance on any kind of prophesied or revealed 'absolute truths', my life will be quite inevitably badly shaken if I some day do find out that they are not in fact the absolutely truths.
On the other hand, a person who has from the beginning been expecting to find better and better answers as he or she goes along, as so typically happens in science, does not generally have to face such disappointments.

Even a very strong inner conviction about an ‘absolute truth’ needs not to have any truth-value at all, if it is based on some kind of prophecy or inner revelation and it does not get any better with time.
On the other hand just an educated guess that is formed by using the scientific method that is based on even partially known facts does just become the better, the more facts are to be known later on, even if a final and unmovable answer may probably often never be available.
So, a bit paradoxically one could even say that a life-view which is based on set of non-moving and absolute truths is on much shakier foundations than a life-view that is based on movable and changeable sets of ‘truths’ and ideas.

In the latter case, one can expect new truths to surpass even the most established old ones, if new knowledge really does require doing it. Facing the quite inevitable vast changes in the world and knowledge of it do not leave a person gasping for air, as is often the case if a thing that has been seen to be an ‘absolute truth’ is surpassed by new and better knowledge.
Of course, just learning a simple set of unmovable ‘truths’ and living trusting in them, no matter what, is always the easy way out, but the easiest and cheapest things are not necessarily the best ones here as they are not in the life in general.

However, there does exist a wide set of ‘good enough truths’ in science, which are on the surface as unmoving and stable as some of the ‘absolute truths’ that are offered by religions. For example, the theory of gravity or the theory of nature of light have not been changed for a very long time.
However, the real modern scientific method is very deep down based on the assumption that we can never know even these things for sure.

All facts and new ideas that are presented in the realm of science are always, in the end, just the best possible approximations and even educated guesses that we can make at any given moment. A real scientific guess is, however, always based on the best possible currently available evidence.
It is also always subject to change, if compelling and widely enough accepted new evidence does become available.
Of course, some of scientific theories have achieved such levels of accuracy, that there has not been any need to change them for a very long time. We can, in practice, even treat them very similar to ‘absolute truths’ in everyday life.
It is possible to base other theories on them in the full knowledge that there is currently no reason whatsoever to doubt them. That does not mean that there would not always also remain the possibility, that they need to be changed on a later date, and the theories that were derived from them need just to be adjusted as well.

This is, of course, the real big difference in science, when it is compared with religions. In them an awfully lot of things are commonly presented as unmovable truths, that need and can never to be questioned, as they just are assumed as given from the beginning.
However, if I put my trust in science, I do not, if fact, have to trust in any kind of unmoving model of ideas and universe, but in fact I put my trust in the idea that we can improve our knowledge of our universe constantly.

Of course, dogmatic beliefs can and have arisen also in the realm of science, as for example the Aristotelian ideas that held sway for centuries. However, when the basic ideas of change and improvement are accepted in the core of the system, change and improvement really do occur much more easily than in any truly dogmatic system of thought.

(the following ideas on absolutes are from my earlier posting in this blog, but I think I need to bring these ideas up here also)

In fact, come to think of it, most things in the world really do not have any definite, final answers; contrary to what many people would like to think. Of course, final-sounding answers are often very cozy and comforting.
As Bertrand Russell famously said, claiming to have certainty when there is, in fact, none available is a very common human vice, but it is still a vice.

Realizing this does not stop us from striving to have the best possible knowledge it is possible to acquire; in fact, just this realization can be the driving force that will constantly increase knowledge of humans, our societies and of the universe.
History already does amply show that the love of comfortable, unmovable truths can slow or even stop altogether human progress, if we just allow these unmoving truths to accumulate deep enough.

One of the deepest human emotions is the desire for security and certainty. Humans have after all lived for millions of years in unpredictable, often hostile environments, where danger can lurk anywhere and a sanctuary offered by any kind of certainty has always been welcome.
The feeling of knowing for certain where one really stands just is an extremely satisfying feeling for all humans. This is of course one of the main reasons why the religions have been so successful, as they do offer absolutes in areas where absolutes cannot exist.

This very desire for certainty could also be one of the reasons why it could be very hard for some to swallow the things that I want to say next. Namely the more I have thought about it, the more I have become convinced that no unequivocally unchanging or in other words ‘absolute’ truths do exist in the real world in which we do exist.
I claim that absolute truths do exist only in the shadow world of theory and ideas, which is basically a mental reflection of the real world that the human mind can and will create.

In this world of ideas and theory things can be processed in a quite different way than in a real world and often quite independent of it. This world of ideas and theory is of course mostly based on the perceptions we have of the real world.
However, as it is not constrained by the limits imposed by the real world, the things that we do create in the world of ideas and theory do not need to have any connections with the real world in the end, as so often happens in religions.

On the other hand, especially in the world of science some kind of connection to the real world is always required even from the most far-fetched ideas and theories for them to be seen as part of science.
Science can reveal patterns and connections which are hidden from the naked eye and which do exist between many kinds of real world objects and phenomena, but in real science they are always derived from the properties of real-world objects and phenomena.

This idea is of course also a complete reversal of the Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, in which ordinary people see just the shadows of universal ideas that can be seen only by ‘philosophers’ or people with exceptional capabilities and the real-world objects we see are just imperfect copies of some kind of perfect, ideal models of things that do exist in some kind of higher level of existence.
Of course, Plato is just plain wrong and the reverse is true; humans can (and do) create perfect ideas of things that do all exist so imperfectly (and with great variations) in the real world.

The more I think of it the more I do become convinced that the things and phenomena that do seem to be held as absolutely true on the surface are that mostly just because of how we interpret and observe things as humans with a set of certain very restricted capabilities.
I do even think now that unequivocally absolute and unchanging truths can in practice exist only in an abstract universe, which is not bound by the laws of nature.

Of course, even this claim cannot be an absolute truth; it is true even for me only as far as I do not gain knowledge of any absolute truths that exist in the real world and which cannot ever be changed by anything.
At this point ,it is good to remember that even the sun will rise on Earth for over 5 billion more times, but one day the red giant that once was our sun will swallow the planet Earth and the sun will never rise again.

So, the fact that the sun always rises on Earth is not an absolute and unchanging truth. It is just an undisputed fact that has the value of a ‘absolute truth’ only for a limited duration of time.
The following idea may seem even outrageous for some people, but I do think that also logic can be absolutely true only when it is applied to things where also the premises used are always absolutely true and will never change.
As far as I know such things do exist only in the abstract world, not in the real world in which we do live in, as all the things that we deal in a real world can change with time. Only abstract ideas and abstract thoughts can remain unchanged forever.
Of course, logic can be an extremely valuable tool, even if it is not absolutely true, but just true enough to serve our practical purposes.

In the end logic just is only as true in our practical world as are the practical premises that are being used, even if in the world of theory an idea can sound and shine like an absolute truth.

So, a chain of logic can appear to be ‘absolutely true’ on the world of ideas, but it does normally become compromised the very moment when it is applied to any kind of real-world problem, as in the real world things do not always remain stable and unchanged.
Any fact or an idea that could be an extremely true and well established fact yesterday just may be false today or after five or five billion years.

In a similar vein, the vast field of metaphysics which just loves to deal with absolutes can producevery absolute-sounding ideas only because it deals with pure abstractions which do not exist in the real world.
In fact, most metaphysics cannot be applied to the real world in any meaningful way. A lot of metaphysics is ,in fact, just built to support some of the real world-ideas that we do already have.

There simply is no right or wrong metaphysics, but there is only currently popular or less popular metaphysics. In the end, there simply is no way of ever showing which of the ideas presented in metaphysics could be the right ones. A sure sign of this is that no major metaphysical idea that has ever been presented is not without its fans today.
So, an idea, which is presented as metaphysical preposition is already beyond any real evaluation when it is presented as metaphysics. This is of course a tactic that has been used extremely successfully by many kinds of religious apologists, but also by Marx and many of his followers.
The hardest thing to swallow for many could be that in my mind even mathematics is absolute only as long as it is used theoretically. It might be hard to accept that all mathematical equations that do not concern real world objects or their properties are theoretical in nature.

The equation 2 + 2 = 4 is just a mathematical theory of how things can be added up. Counting first two fungus and adding two fungus to it can produce a result of four fungus, but as in the real world it is often quite impossible to say where one fungus starts and a second stops, the result is always just ‘about four’ and not any kind of absolute.
As soon one starts to count a real objects with the 2 + 2 = 4 equation this equation becomes an approximation and the real result depends how one defines the things that are being counted.

So, even the equation of “2 + 2 = 4” is absolutely true only as long as it is not applied to the real world, and do not of what are the things that are to be counted. The moment we apply it to real world objects there is an element of sudden change and surprise that do make the exact result less than absolute.
There are of course other things that seem to be absolutes; for example the speed of light or many of the properties of sub-atomic particles.

However, they are absolutes only in our own version of the universe, but if any of the multiverse-theories does really hold water, the constants that we see as unmoving and final just could be one version of the thing and the same values could anything in a different parallel or even serial version of the universe.
Of course, we have no real way (at the moment at least) for finding out if the multiverse-theory is true, but as there is a real chance of it being true, even the most absolute-sounding things can be less than absolute.

All this does not mean that I would claim that there could not be any absolute truths. I am just saying that I do not know of things that would be always true without any kind of change making them possibly untrue some day.
The time-frames required for these changes can be of course be beyond the real capabilities of the human mind.
Of course, in practical terms there are very many things that can be treated as being ‘absolutely true’ in real life, even if we know that also they can change on some extremely distant day.

(The beginning of this piece was completely rewritten and the headline was changed at 14th of August)

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I was reading Niall Ferguson’s excellent book “Civilization; The West and The Rest” when an idea I have been tentatively examining for a while finally did become sharp and clear in my mind.
Niall Ferguson explains in his book how religiosity in America has remained in a quite different level than in any other country in the industrialized world. This has happened largely because of the immense competition that was and is going on in the religious world in the United States. I suddenly realized that the same idea does apply well to the Islamic world.

This may sound a bit far-fetched at first, I freely admit, but let me explain a bit deeper before dismissing this idea. The immense diversity American in the religious field is a result of the policy of strict separation of state and religion. So the American churches have had to learn to fend for themselves and they have had to develop way s that can make people want to come there and also pay for the fun.
In the European state-churches with their rights of taxation such need has not emerged, and the net result is that the real religious fervor is a thing that is seen only in the independent Christian fringe-movements.

On the other hand in the Islamic world there is basically no separation of state and religion at all. In fact, Islam is all too often used as a very basic building block for the whole society. In many Islamic countries the whole direction of policies is on the surface at least decided solely on the basis of religion.
The important thing, however, is that in Islam (outside the mostly Iranian Shite faction) there is very little formal organization in the religion itself, even if there are great varieties even in this and is some Islamic countries state has a stronger hold on the running of religious life than in others.

However, in the end, in general every individual Iman is on just as a shaky footing as his American counterpart is. They compete for followers and money in the form of donations on a daily basis with other Imans and only the really successful ones are respected and get good crowds.
This development has brought about a situation where the “purity” of the message is one of the major tools used to bolster one’s own standing in this hard religious competition.

When any apparent lack of strong convictions can and will be used against a competitor, it is very difficult to succeed by running any kind of liberal ministry. In the hard competition, one just can not challenge any of the basic teachings of Islam, even if the preachers privately would well know how their suitability to the modern world is fast diminishing by the day.
A very similar process of unrelenting religious competition is going on in the United States also and has created a class of ultra-conservative preachers for whom the “purity” and even extremism of their message is one of their most important marketing tools.

Of course, there are immense varieties in the relationship of state and religion in the diverse Islamic world. There is a direct Islamic theocracy of Iran and the medieval feudal state of Saudi-Arabia where Islam is used to justify a cruel and feudal, even medieval system of monarchy.
On the other hand there are Islamic countries like Lebanon or Algeria, where religion is not at the forefront at all, but current governments are fighting the Islamic movements to the end. There in between are possible variations of the theme.

On the other hand, the degree of how the relationship between religion and state stands in Islamic societies could largely be a result of how big impact the short period of rule by the western colonial powers did have in them.
The Algerian or Lebanonian societies were influenced to a far greater degree than many others by the European ideas of equality of the sexes, independent, secular law-based legal system and many other humanistic European innovations.

The easily discernible differences in between Pakistan and Algeria are according to also Niall Ferguson in part because of the differences in the type of colonial rule that was used in them.
The French did have a mission of spreading their (often also quite modern and humanistic) ideas to their holdings. On the other hand the British were often quite content to rule by proxy and use the local elites to help them rule.
The British just were all too often happy to collect the taxes and sell their wares to locals. That is a reason why the effect of their colonial rule was in some indirectly ruled countries much smaller in everyday-life and most of all legislation than of the French.

However, Iran and Saudi-Arabia who did never lose their formal independence had no such direct humanistic influences, as they were never under the direct colonial rule.
On the other hand, the Shite version of Islam is often compared with Catholic Church, as it has differs vastly from the mainstream Sunni Islam even in this respect. The Shia Islam is based on a rigid and formal hierarchy that is quite unknown in most parts of Sunni Islam.
Niall Ferguson reminds in his book how Sunni world lost a long-standing central source of leadership, when the new republic of Turkey did put on and on the caliphate in 1924. The Osman caliphs had up this point been also the de facto religious leaders of the Sunni world.

The development of religion in Iran has always been quite separate from the developments in the Sunni world. This process was intensified after the Persian Shahs did for political and tactical reasons choose the Shia faith as their own state-religion.
Shia faith has really developed like the Catholic Church, when the Sunni world has developed more like the American Evangelical scene.
The end result has been strong conservatism in both cases, when the countries that were under the Protestant state churches have given birth to modern secular states.

The unchanging and day-by-day more old-fashioned nature of mainstream Islam just might be a bit paradoxically to a large degree be a result of lack of formal organization, as a tightly led centralize organization can be steered to new directions by just a few people with new ideas.
On the other hand, a disorganized system of thought that relies solely on the power of tradition and draws its whole legitimacy form ancient teachings can resist change much, much more effectively than any state-lead formal religious organization.

So, both the extreme openness and extreme closeness can lead to similar end results, when the development in Western Europe does show what can happen when a monolithic faith is splintered into national entities.
Most of what it does show can happen if these local churches are changed with time by the strong humanistic tendencies that took hold of these societies. In the meantime, the monolithic Catholic Church could fight these tendencies with far greater success, as on the other hand could the leaderless Sunni Islam too.

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There are all kinds of ‘alternative realities’ in which many even quite sane people do often believe in. However, when I listen to their ideas, one question springs often to my mind: Have you considered the possibility that there is just one reality that would ever be knowable to us, but people just can have extremely different perceptions of it?
In fact, I am afraid that those differences in perception can be so strong that some people do believe that they do exist in a different kind of reality than others.

This state of affairs is of course proof of how humans are able to alter their minds to an extraordinary degree; it is not any kind of proof of that there would exist different ‘realities’.
One can develop an endless amount of different alternative realities in one's mind or develop old, earlier made-up realities even further, but these creations do exist only in the mind of a person who believes in them.
They can feel even very real, if belief just is strong enough. However, the true reality is the one that does not go away when you stop believing in it.

Of course, the reality of a bacteria is quite different to the reality of an ant and the reality of an ant is extremely different from ours. However, they do share the same basic reality, even if they can perceive it very differently.
Similarly the reality probably looks extremely different on the level of a quark or a galaxy, but they still do exist as parts of the same reality.

If the multiverse-theory is correct it is possible that there is an endless amount of other universes, but according to what we know now we just might never find out if these ideas are true or not. In any case they are part of the same reality in which we do live, they are only in different parts of it, and they can be formed differently.
The current theory goes that the multiple universes do not overlap. Pondering about their existence or nonexistence is in the end just a purely mental exercise for us, as the other possible universes have no practical way of affecting (or even to be observed in any way) from our own bubble of a universe.
However, if I claim that there is only one reality, nothing in this statement implies that I would claim to know any kind of final truth about its true nature or structure.

If we assume that there is an alternative reality, but it cannot be observed in any way in reality in which we do live in, how could we become truly convinced of its existence in the first place?
If this alternative reality cannot cause anything observable in the reality in which we do live in, what difference would its existence or nonexistence make to anybody?
If there would be any real-world effects caused by some kind of ‘alternative reality’, we should be able to verify their existence easily, and if there is none, there is no real reason to believe in their existence.

An alternative reality could, of course, be like the other universes in the multiverse theory - then their existence or nonexistence would not make any real difference to us, as we can probably never observe them and they do not affect our own reality in any way.
Of course we can well still think about all kinds of alternative realities endlessly and even imagine their existence in minute detail in theory. After all we have the ability to make up an endless amount of alternative realities in our minds, if we just have the will and enough spare time.

On the other hand, if there is no real evidence and if we base our belief in existence of an 'alternative reality" on writings of 'sages', hearsay and old stories, there is no real difference to the more formal kinds of religions, I'm afraid.
One should not forget that if there would be any even the tiniest observable fact, any single testable hypothesis the theories of 'alternative realities' would be instantly part of the mainstream science.

Alas, sadly that is not the case and all 'alternative realities' are still in the class of religious beliefs, where people do accept all kinds of ideas without any kind of real, hard evidence.
The existence of 'alternative reality' would soon be taught in every class and every university, if there just would be any kind of evidence of their existence to be had. One must just think about the glory and fame which such a revolutionary finding would bring to any scientist.
There is no real reason why scientists all over the world would not seek to prove the existence of alternative realities, but just the lack for any means of verifying the existence of things that do not exist.

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