Christianity and Augmented reality

We all live in the same physical world, but we overlay what our senses and logic tell us with ideas that fundamentally change our experience of it. The result is that many of us (most of us?) live in impermeable bubbles where logic and persuasion cannot penetrate. It is important to realize this basic fact about human beings. It is impossible to "disprove" Christianity to a true believer. They experience a different world. They speak a different language. For them, "Christ died for your sins" is an intelligible sentence - absolutely "true" - although what the word "true" means in their world is very different from what we find in the dictionary. For me, this claim opens the door to a labyrinth of fantasy that could not withstand the questions of a five-year-old. It's just silly. Really? That's the way God set things up?

As George Orwell pointed out in 1984, "Augmentation" is mostly accomplished with language - Scientific or otherwise. We cannot experience what we cannot describe.

For example, a modern person will "see" something quite different from a citizen of ancient Greece when he looks up at the moon or contemplates the night sky. Even when we breathe, we know we are breathing air, which was not discovered until the beginning of the enlightenment. We "know" we need oxygen, unknown until 1774.

On the other hand, many "modern" people wander the Earth under the impression that the "self" they feel can be separated from their body and go on to eternal life (for good or ill). Thus, the most basic experience we have of being in the world is overlaid with an interpretation - motivated reasoning - nothing but a veil of words. The same people would inhabit a world where a powerful spirit - the one who created the entire Universe - concerns Himself with what is taught in school rooms--worried that He will not get proper credit for 13 billion years of effort leading up to the Jesus. Any day now, the entire project is soon to be wrapped up. Presidents of the United States, including the younger George Bush, believed this. The project of the entire Universe was to be settled in the "clash of civilizations" in the Gulf War.  You need to have lived your life in a society of people who talk this way to say things like this with a straight face. They know what you "mean". According to Wittgenstein, you are "playing the language game" according to their rules. To these people, it makes no sense to ask if there is some physical, tangible, provable connection between such words and the world the rest of us live in.

"True" Christians are not the only ones living in such bubbles. "True Believers" of every sort suffer the same disconnect with what some of us experience as physical reality. In every case, there is a wall between their lived experience and ours. In every case, that wall is built with words: motivated reasoning, fallacy, and outright lies. 

My dad would simply call it bullshit.