Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes

Illusion vs Shoebox

In dealing with religiosity amongst your sentient creations you will soon notice a simple division amongst religions and religiously minded individuals alike. This will take some time to develop, and if you so choose you may retard its development for quite some time but as any race matures it will find the followers of religion dividing into two camps, which we label for simplicity’s sake the Shoeboxers and the Illusionists.These terms are meant to be descriptive of the underlying theories, often never explicitly stated, of these two segments.

Shoeboxers are in many ways the simpler and more predictable of the two. They look upon the universe as if it dwells within a giant shoebox, looked down at by an Almighty creator who arranges things with tweezers. Shoeboxers thus seek to plead their case to god and look about constantly for evidence of god’s interaction with reality. The majority of prayers come from the shoeboxers and if you guide too many of your religions in that direction you may eventually find yourself a bit put out by all the constant hectoring and questioning. “Why did you do this?” and “Can you do that?” can come to grate on the nerves of all but the most patient Deities.

Illusionists are very different, in that they see deity and creation as inseparable, and the divisions between creatures and creation and creator as illusory. They seek not to control the world or call in godly reinforcements but to become attuned to their own essential oneness with creation and thus penetrate the veils of the illusion. Some of this is perfectly lovely of course but too much of it can lead a world down some very strange avenues indeed. The positive side is of course that meditaters are a whole lot quieter than prayors.

Obviously for any deity the distinction between the two is meaningless and both are right, however this knowledge or the lack of it seems to be a large piece of what allows independent self-willed beings to form up in the first place. If any lower order being comes to a deep understanding of the ways in which both sides are right, well… You know what happens.