Forums → WEPR → Time's Fabrication, or the Argument Burrito Supreme

I was watching Lucy the other day, and through the disappointment at the movie, came something surprising. At one point, Lucy said "Time is the only true unit of measure, it gives proof to the existence of matter, without time, we donât exist."
For an attempted cerebral movie, I found this to be shockingly ignorant and Van Voorhis-esque. Before you flip your table in outrage, let me outline the facts. Please understand I am making a case against probably everything you believe in this thread. Bear with me here.

Throughout mankind's history, we have saught to understand, or at least account for what we cannot explain. Some of the best examples are magic, and in a somewhat directed format, religion. Since we're talking about time's validity, let's start from the beginning.
Artifacts from the Paleolithic suggest that the moon was used to reckon time as early as 6,000 years ago. This information was generally used to track crop cycles to know when to plant seeds. Basic survival stuff. But as villages formed, so did society diversify. There was more free time to sit around and think, "What in the actual **** is going on?" So came about leaders, philosophers, laws, mathematics, and measurements of time. We'll come back to this in a bit.

There are many measures of time, from a jiffy to a million years, the terms all vary. But what IS time? Most people agree that time is the flow of events, from past to present, stems from the beginning of time and disappears to the end. Here is where it gets sticky. We all know know time is going somewhere, but according to what some guy said, it all has to be recycled. That leads us to one of two conclusions:

Time is on a loop like a round treadmill, with a wall somewhere in the middle (wait, in the middle of a circular track? But where does it start and end?) That light you see at the end of the tunnel? That's the big bang. All matter and energy start to pile up, then finally pop through the wall, rearrange their ruffled feathers, and continue the cycle. Think fast, evolution.

Or:

Time is as much an illusion as color. Just another label for a reflection of something we barely understand. The thing we call "time" is simply a measure of points of events. Everything we invented to tell "time" is just based off of cycle reading. There is no time in a cycle. A cell does not know what hour or day it is. It splits on a cycle based on how many nutrients are available. The moon's cycle is based on an orbit induced by gravitational pull. We based our months off of the moon's cycle. We based our days off of the months, the weeks and hours off of days, the minutes off the hours, the seconds off the minutes, and so on. A cycle continues regardless of "time", and is only stopped by wear and tear or an outside influence. This means that "time" is neither linear nor circular, it is vast emptiness of nonexistence, and the great dates and deadlines we set are little more than buoys in the bay of reality. Once we escape the illusion of age and lack of time, we become free to be who we truly are. But doesn't that mean certain religions are...? No. In fact, I have a cute little tie-in argument.

Take a trip in imagination with me; it's 38,000 BCE, and we see a rudimentary ancestor of modern humans carving away at a little statue of a half-man half-lion. Is it a deity, or has our friendly whittler been making fire with the wrong plants?
Fast forward about 8000 years. the San peoples in northwestern Botswana are painting pictures on the walls of Tsodilo hills, believing that it was the sight of creation, and that disturbances or death near the hills would stir up some bad juju spirits.
By 9130 BC, early peoples had constructed Göbekli Tepe as a permanent place of worship over an ancestral holy site. Many archealogists believe the actual structure could actually be from as far back as 11,000 BCE, which predates the so-called Neolithic revolution. Go figure.
Now after all this history, at around 3750 BCE, proto-semitic peoples appeared in the Arabian people and moved around.

So, by the time abrahamic christianity showed up, religion had been around for something like twenty thousand years. These old pre-civilization deities predate modern religion by a bunch. So how do people still believe their religion is true?

Well, as I went from going back and forth in the earth, and from walking up and down in it, I came upon two Christians discussing with each-other what it means to be a Christian, or some such. I barged in, quite uninvited, and asked them about the concept of "faith". Well, being but followers, not actually knowing anything, they stumbled around verbally, preaching to me and condescendingly quoting bible verses about doubt and temptation to each-other. The conversation went on until I explained to them this:

Religion is a social construct. Way back in history, some leader of a tribe of cavemen (don't take that too literal) got wise and realized with a large group of people, you can't just let everyone do whatever they want. So he thought to himself, "Hey, if I tell people if they hurt or steal or are disrespectful to deities, when they die they're go to place full of dead people and fire. Dead people and fire are scary." And so the afterlife was born. If you notice, most religions have a guideline of being a better person to other people and just in general. Ceremonies were the earliest form of organization and rules. And that's where religion comes from, and what it does.

How does this tie in? Well, here goes!

So, if time never ends, there is no religion, what's the point of all of it?
Short answer: Reproduction. Making sticky. Doing wang chung.
Long answer: The point of life is whatever you make it about. With modern technology you don't have to worry too much about starvation, or dying of a small cut on our hand. You can make babies, or be an artist, or make art and paint babies. Hell, you could pretend to be crazy, or kill someone and be fed and taken care of for the rest of your life. It's up to you.

What SHOULD you do with your life?
You realize we live on the most biologically challenging planet in the known universe? We beat the Neanderthals out, even though they were smarter, faster, stronger, and grew faster than us. The Denisovans probably got smart enough to realize out they were screwed anyways and just sat there waiting to die. (Romeo, it's just that the time was wrong. Tear, tear.) We lived through floods, starvation, the host of venomous critters, ravenous beasts, our local apex predators. We conquered everything. All with under 10% of our brain's functioning capacity. For a long period worshiped deities that controlled the crops, fertility, the sun, the moon, sickness and health. We worshiped the gods of war and their ability to sunder armies. For our entire history, we have worshiped power. We have always had the idea that there is some powerful thing behind our success.

The human race has become like a race of demigods. We control the whole world. There is nothing we can't change, if we put our minds to it. We are the ultimate beings on this planet. I think everyone should try to further their own perfection. We may not become perfect in one or two generations, but in a few hundred years, we will be close.

Around the world, people are being discriminated against because of their color, their beliefs, their social status. And it will always be that way until we realize that we are the highest power. We are all equally capable of becoming perfect, through genetic research. Our grandchildren could have twice our lifespan, due to recent discoveries. I'm not saying immortality will be pretty, but I know the humans have already written their destinies across the stars. With understanding and discipline, we could spread across the universe infinitely.

In conclusion, mankind is bound by chains of dogma and imagined limits. Our weakness is ignorance, the fear of the unknown, insecurity in what is new. Our strength is in numbers, in our resilience, in our intellect, in our capacity for discovery.

I don't expect any more than to be ridiculed by some, and thought of as crazy by the rest. But there's always the low probability that someone will put the pieces together, and that's why I decided to post this. I will try to be timely in my responses, so give me your best shot, lurkers and skeptics alike. I apologize in advance for any errors in grammar or verbiage.