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Oh my god...I mean oh no god...fuck now I am completely confused

I kind of adhere to the Buddhist philosophy of why waste your time asking questions that have no answers. Of course, I suppose you have to pose the question at least once to realize that there is no certain answer.

I think I prefer the questions. Mostly, they're more important than the answers, in my opinion.

One last question, Plook, do you believe that this "spiritual" or otherwise described natural force that you are attempting to quantify gives guidance, or has a moral base, or passes judgment on people for their actions?

No, not as a single being as religion would have you believe, but there is Cause and Effect. Which is part of the force of nature and therefore would be a rule or law of nature. Just as a comet passing to close to Jupiter has its orbit gravitationally affected. This is why we hear sayings such as; “you reap what you sow”, “karma got them”, “I was so lucky I, it was like fate”. This explains a lot of those so called chance events and also apparently fate driven events. This force permeates the Universe (seen and unseen), it is what people are referring to when they say “interconnected” when explaining existence. This also covers your Yin and Yang of Eastern Philosophy.

As the Hermetic Principles state: “Every cause has its effect, every effect has its cause, everything happens according to law. Chance is just a name for law not recognized, there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the law”.

In all physical scientific study there is cause and effect, but not in the continuum parts of our lives, that is because no one studies this and leaves it to the religious hacks that spin tales.

Don’t even get me started on “The Divine Paradox” or “Planes of Correspondence”. I never really realized how difficult this stuff is to explain until I actual started working this thread. I hope I am getting better at it, sometimes it seems extremely complicated, when it seems so easy in thought.

There are obvious physical effects such as the moon's gravitational effect on tides. There is also the idea of Karma that I believe in a real sense but not a spiritual sense (i.e. if you treat people badly they will treat you like in return). The Universe will not punish you if you are an asshole but your fellow humans will if they get a chance (in many cases people will even punish themselves). There is also how people react to coincidence. From "Why People Believe Weird Things" by Michael Shermer: "...the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot machines are based on...intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional payoff to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest."