Once upon a time...

Once upon a time there was a guy who said he was the son of the guy who created the world and everything in it, and though a few people were compelled to listen to him, many people did not like him saying that, so they nailed him to some boards fastened in the shape of a cross, until he died. Then they put him in a small cave and sealed it up. Afterwards, a few days later, some people said they saw him walking around and talking, and concluded he must have escaped from the cave, to live again.

Then, a few days later and for several more years, people talked about this, and wrote down their memories as best they could. Much later still, hundreds and hundreds of years later, a couple billion people believed those stories, give or take a few most likely, although not one of them was actually there. << http://www.adherents.com/rel_pie.gif >> In the law, all this would be called hearsay (they heard the story from someone who heard the story from someone else who...), and hearsay is not allowed as evidence for anything, and for very obvious - once you see it - reasons.

Now, there's a movie about the last 12 hours in the life of that man, before being nailed to the cross and dying, and because of the state of worldwide communications today, tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions of people are thinking about this story, perhaps more than they ever have thought about anything before.

The story is considered to be true, all true, and nothing but all true, and because it is so considered, it is - or at least, that's what is believed.

Funny, though, if you think about it just a little bit, history may be altered by the memories and beliefs of those who follow, and every year that follows the more certain is their belief in the truth of it. Now, very soon, humanity will have an onsite witness to the events of that time so many centuries ago.

Yet, if you could somehow rewind the tape, back a couple thousand years, and experience the unfolding - have a direct experience - you might discover things happened quite a bit differently than people afterwards believed. If you think about it, you can't be sure, you can only >>believe<<. The certainty many millions of people claim to have, is so intertwined with the stories about it, that the certainty is based on the fact, sufficient alone, that the stories exist, not that the events even happened or happened that way.

This is not substantially different that believing the Alice in Wonderland story, not only actually happened, but that the characters in the story actually lived and walked the earth - but, ahem, no one (in their right mind) does of course.

Why? ("Slow down, you move to fast, got to make the moment last.")

Question: if one could control the mechanism of automatic belief in one, that makes this person a christian and that person a jew and the other one an atheist, could one have direct access to alternate futures?

Ok... just kidding, no friggin way!