"Um... yeah.
Wouldn't it be easier to say "all is one", and stop the conversation right there?"
Not really, since all isn't one. That's silly.
All can be represented by a point traveling through phase space, but the sheer number of dimensions needed to do so is insane.
One needs position, momentum, charge, mass, strong & weak nuclear force, etc. So at least 10 dimensions for each of the 10^80 particles in the universe.
So all is 1/(10^82) and that one keeps jumping around constantly. And it's actually a lot bigger than that.
Let's give religion 4 paramaters:
A, B, C, and dT.
A = Number of Gods believed in.
B = Number of Commandments
C = Average number of small children molested by the clergy, per week.
dT = 0.03 because that's a good number, and it makes what I'm doing next look nice, though that won't change the point in any way whatsoever.
We'll plot points with X, Y, Z co-ordinates as follows:
x'=x+ad(y-x)
y'=y+d(bx-y-zx)
z'=z+d(xy-cz)
We start with 0, then take the output of that and set it to the input, plot it in 3D space, and get a picture of the state of the "religion" as time progresses. Each X, Y, and Z point indicates a different state of theological discussion, the more spread out the graph gets the more the discussion is varying, the more condensed it is the stricter things are.
Polytheism is fun, so let's have 9 gods and 20 major rules. These can vary, of course, but it's simpler to understand if we only vary C.
Now, this is a simple religious structure. Real religions have a LOT more variables. But let's see what a small change can do!
This week an average of 1 kids were molested. Let's take a picture of that plot, shall we? Hue changes based on how fast the point moves, Value based on angle from the viewing plane:
What happens if, instead, 2 kids were molested, on average, per week?
3:
4:
5:
Interesting! The religion has become rather orderly!
6:
Even more so, but look at how different the order is from before!
11:
It goes to a circle until 19....
19:
At which point discussion is all over the place, on so many subjects that we can't keep track of it, it's too dispersed.
At 79 or more kids the religion falls apart due to over-molestation. At 0 kids molested it falls apart due to the inability of the priesthood to get off. Without that they all quit and without priests there is no religion anymore.
Now, if this were real the equation would be a LOT bigger with a LOT more variables, but I do believe that the sensitive dependence to initial conditions displayed here would exist, and there's a lot of evidence for that, eg Jesus and Buddha both preached peace, enlightenment, and nonviolence, but Jesus got himself nailed to some over-sized toothpicks and the Christians that followed him eventually started the Crusades.
(A note to math geeks: Yes, that's a Lorenz attractor. I needed a chaotic system with a small number of parameters. I COULD have used a 5th order 3-dimensional quadratic map with 168 parameters, but that would have taken too long.)
So all is one point moving through a very, very high dimensional phase space, in a very chaotic manner. Which really means it's a hell of a lot of different things, just that it's possible to see it as one if you can imagine 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 dimensions or so. Probably more.
So if someone tells you they are seeing that the universe is truly One and that they are One with everything, they are lying.
So, yeah. Discordianism one particular path through the set of all beliefs in the phase space of all beliefs, and unlike most religions our path hits every point in the phase space, though not all with equal frequency.
