Random Fictional Plots

If you’ve ever had to absorb information mentally for a test, interview, or presentation, and observed and worked with other people who had to as well, then you have likely discovered that people exhibit different ways of learning. Some people are visual learners who learn best by seeing images; others, auditory learners who learn best by listening to orated information; still others, kinesthetic learners that learn best through a hands-on approach.

This principle can be also applied to manners of thinking. Certain people think in words. For other people, images appear in their minds when they think, to varying degrees of clarity. Many “hear” sounds when they think. The remainder experience a combination of the three. Additionally, some people possess internal monologues, whereas others lack such narration. Many of the former think of the latter style as strange, and vice versa.

With regards to myself personally, I think in images and sounds, and oftentimes experience multiple monologues throughout the day. I’d estimate that I have a more active imagination than the average person. Random thoughts appear occasionally in my mind. For quite a while I’ve conceived of a few fictional scenarios, in spite of the fact that I rarely read fictional material.

The first plot involves magic lamps that grant wishes; the second, traveling back in time to remedy errors…with a catch; third, the allegorical Adam and Eve not eating fruit from the Forbidden Tree of Knowledge, and having children, of which only some of the children eat the fruit. These “plots” are more like concepts that aren’t fully fleshed out.

Suppose there exist magic glass lava lamps that enable an owner to grant one wish every 30 days as long as said lamps don’t break. If an owner, say, drops a glass lamp accidentally, then the owner will lose the ability to make a wish.

There are three types of these lamps – lamps with blue lava, lamps with green lava, and lamps with yellow lava. All of them are made of glass. The breaking of any of these lamps disables an owner from making more wishes.

If a lamp with blue lava breaks, then, as stated above, the owner will lose the ability to make any more wishes; but, he will get to keep everything he wished for before the lamp broke, along with the byproducts of said wishes. If he wished for $100,000, invested the money into the stock market, and therefore multiplied the original amount by 10, he’d get to keep the entire $1,000,000. If he wished for an instructor to appear so that he could master a martial art, the master would still exist, and the man would retain the skills he gained.

If a lamp with green lava breaks, then the owner will lose everything he wished for, but be able to keep the derivatives. If he wished for $100,000 and turned it to $1M through the stock market, he’d lose the original $100,000 but get to keep the remaining $900,000. If he wished for a competent instructor to help him learn a martial art, then the master would disappear, but the owner would get to retain the muscle memory he developed during his training.

If a lamp with yellow lava breaks, then the owner will lose everything he wished for, along with anything derived indirectly from those wishes. For the cases above, he’d lose the entire $1,000,000, the instructor, and the skills he gained.

The owner does not get to choose the color of the lamp he receives. He must spin a wheel like the one on the Spin the Wheel television show. The wheel has 100 slots – 1 blue slot, 9 green slots, and 90 yellow slots. The type of lamp the owner will receive will depend on the color of the slot where the pin stops.

The wheel itself is located in a wooden cabin deep in a remote forest. The first person to find the wheel gets to spin it. After the person spins the wheel, a piece of paper will appear magically in his hands. It will instruct the person to go back to his house. By the time the owner arrives back at his house, there will be a lava lamp in his bedroom lying in his bed. The cabin and wheel will be teleported deep into another remote forest for another person to find.

On deathbeds across the world lay mortals taking their final rests on Earth. These same people relay moments of pride and moments of shame. Even if dwelling on the past is pointless, many people nevertheless have experiences they regret. Many wished they spent more time with their family. Some wished they’d gone after the goals they wanted to achieve.

We all know about the two supposed consequences of traveling back in time – either the spacetime continuum is altered, or a new alternate reality is created.

For this plot, the second consequence will occur upon traveling back in time.

Here’s the deal…

The subject is allowed to go back in time and teleport his knowledge and experience into his younger body. He is also allowed to bring any item he wants from the present to the past and has a week to prepare for the trip through the wormhole. However, he will remember the events of the reality he originally came from for only half of the time he skipped. If the subject chooses to travel back 10 years from today, then he will remember the events of the original reality after the split for only 5 years.

In other words, if the subject decides to travel back to April 9th of 2016 in Reality A, Reality B will be created from that point. He is now in Reality B. He will remember everything that happened in his life before April 9th of 2016. He will remember everything that happened in Reality A between April 9th of 2016 and April 9th of 2026 until he reaches April 9th of 2021 of Reality B.

After reaching the midpoint, he will cease to remember the events that occurred during the 10-year range unless he does them again in the new reality – Reality B.

Thus, the subject will forget he even traveled back in time once he reaches the halfway point in relation to the amount of time he traveled back – in this case, again for clarity, April 9, 2021 of Reality B.

This puts additional pressure on the subject to act decisively in the new reality. If he carries out the same choices he made in Reality A, then he will end up developing the same regrets, and not even remember that he had been given the opportunity of time travel. On the flip side, if he makes better decisions, then it will be as if he never made the worse decisions from the original reality after the split.

Just about everyone in the English-speaking world knows the metaphorical tale of Adam and Eve. God tells Adam not to eat from the Forbidden Tree of Knowledge. The serpent tricks Eve into eating said fruit. Eve offers one such fruit to Adam. Adam eats it. God banishes them from the Garden of Eden due to having committed the original sin.

The story explains how our “sin nature” came about. The tree was placed there as an opportunity for the couple to exercise free will. Without the tree, the two could be neither virtuous nor immoral. Analogously, that a quadriplegic does not steal demonstrates not moral character, but only incapacity.

For the purpose of this plot, let us say that Adam and Eve, using the free will granted by God, refused to allow themselves to be deceived by the snake. They then have four children: Cain, Abigel, Abel, and Cassandra.

The first two become a couple and the next two become a couple. The first couple eats from the Forbidden Tree. The second doesn’t. What happens? The first couple are banished from the Garden of Eden. All their descendants end up being born sinners. They are regular human beings like you and me.

The second couple get to come in and leave the Garden as they please. Their descendants lack any sin nature. They will be like the people that are said to inhabit the New Earth as described in the Book of Revelation. There exists plenty of debate among Christian theologians with regards to whether such inhabitants have free will. At the very least, they lack the “flesh” that tempts regular people into committing sin. For the purpose of this post, the descendants of the second couple will be called “celestials.”

It is possible to conceptualize the celestials as having both free will and a sinless nature if we remind ourselves that unwillingness to participate in an activity does not indicate an inability to do so. If someone requested you to drive to the nearest Wal-Mart, go to the public bathroom in said retail store, drink the water from one of the toilets, then lick any potential skid marks, would you fulfill such a request? Likewise, if someone dared you to travel to any rainforest in the tropical region of Earth, kill a monkey, and fornicate with its corpse, would you partake in the endeavor?

If you are of a healthy constitution, then just thinking about the two scenarios above would cause your body to generate feelings of disgust. Similarly, anytime a celestial thinks about committing any act that goes against God’s will, they will be repulsed. That said, it’s not as if they can’t commit sin, they simply will have no inclination to miss the spiritual mark. Remember, they lack the “tainted flesh” us regular people have. This would imply that the architecture of their minds, nervous systems, and bodies starkly contrast with those of ours.

Don’t allow yourself to misconstrue celestials due to the paragraph above. Celestials are not “good” people. They are “whole,” like Jesus was. One of the most wide-sweeping misconceptions about Christ is that he was “good.” No. He was holy (read: whole). He was a perfectly integrated human. He also resisted temptation using free will.

To spice up the plot, pre-Adamites can be added. These beings were hypothesized by some Gnostics to lack the divine spark of celestials and normal humans, even though they look identical to and behave like humans. Pre-Adamites, along with animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, and other non-human organisms have souls, but lack spirits. Souls are energetic fields that keep organisms alive. Spirits are individualized consciousnesses that last for eternity. Thus, pre-Adamites were not made in the image of God and lack any connection with God.

Lacking a high degree of sentience, these human-looking creatures possess a hive mind. They are like the CPU-controlled background players in a video game. They each lack an individualized will. They have no moral agency. Therefore, like animals, they cannot sin. A mountain lion that mauls a group of human campers is not committing any sin, even though its decision is immoral by human standards. The same principle applies to pre-Adamites.

Pre-Adamites never experience spiritual synchronicities. God does not look out for them or rearrange the fabric of reality to their advantage or disadvantage. I’m sure you’ve had an experience similar to this: It’s raining elephants and hippos. You, for once in a lime moon, sleep past your alarm clock. You are running late for an appointment. Traffic is slower than a slug. At this rate, you’ll be 20 minutes late for the meeting. Some yards ahead, you see cones. Traffic is being rerouted due to a landslide from a drenched hill. Had you left earlier, you’d have been buried. This is God looking out for you.

Regular people experience this type of phenomenon to varying degrees depending on their connection to our Savior. Celestials, due to their pristine attunement to God, subjectively perceive their lives almost like fairy tales.

Now that the types of characters of this tale are established, we can move on to world building. Imagine a world with 3 billion regular people, 3 billion celestials, and 2 billion pre-Adamites. How would this world operate?

Most realistically, due to the fundamental differences between these three types of Homo sapiens, they would segregate from each other naturally. Thus, the majority of people would stick to their own kind – celestials with celestials, regular people with regular people, pre-Adamites with pre-Adamites – as acquaintances, friends, lovers, neighbors, etc.

However, on the off chance that one person mates with another of a different kind, what could happen? Perhaps Mendelian inheritance, which involves dominant and recessive alleles, comes into play. Phenotypic celestials would have CC, CN, and CP alleles; phenotypic normal people, NN and NP alleles; pre-Adamites, PP alleles. Nonetheless, an overwhelmingly vast amount of people would be homozygous (CC, NN, PP) due to lacking romantic chemistry with a different kind of human.

Now, suppose that an infant celestial ends up being adopted by two regular people or ends up at an orphanage that is run by regular people. Would the infant grow up to become a person that commits sin? Most likely not, even though he’d definitely be tempted like Jesus was. A significant amount (though not all) of the sins committed by us regular people are committed through the psychological and perceptual distortions we unconsciously develop and hold onto throughout life. For regular people, being brought up in unholy environments leads them to growing up to become unholy.

Here’s an excellent example: A regular baby with abusive, neglectful parents is locked outside of the house every night to sleep. The baby wails every night before falling asleep. Eventually, it gets used to being left alone. Its parasympathetic nervous system goes on override to douse the reactivity of its sympathetic nervous system. If the baby understood language, then the cognitive equivalent of this physiological occurrence would be: “It’s hopeless. I’m unlovable. I don’t deserve to live.” This itself is not sin, but will likely lead to sinful behavior if not later corrected; for example, winning friends over using subterfuge, manipulating a spouse into giving what one wants, etc.

Akin to how the regular person holds onto detrimental belief systems unconsciously that lead to sinful acts, the celestial person dispels them unconsciously. Since both people are making these decisions without conscious consent, it’s not as if one could claim that the celestial has less free will, or vice versa. A celestial baby left out of the house as described above would grow up to abandon faulty thinking before it leads to sin; or, morbidly, simply die of heartbreak and be considered another case of so-called “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.”

As a celestial child grows up, it will be able to commit sin due to having free will. However, its “untainted flesh” would train it not to. If it sins, then its body will produce symptoms similar to those associated with diseases. The worse the sin, the worse the symptoms. If the celestial commits the same sin repeatedly, then he will repeatedly get sick, with the symptoms getting worse with each successive sin.

An adequate example for the occurrence above is stealing. Take three adolescents – a pre-Adamite, a regular adolescent, and a celestial. They decide to go into a retail store and steal some merchandise. They all get caught and are taken to a juvenile detention center. That’s the civilizational consequence.

For the pre-Adamite, there are no “higher” (read: spiritual) consequences, akin to how there are no higher punishments for a black bear that takes a candy bar from a convenience store without paying. Perhaps the bear might be euthanized by animal control or shot by the owner, but those are societal consequences, not spiritual consequences. For the regular adolescent, his relationship to God is weakened, if he continues down the path of wrongdoing, he will go to hell. This ultimate punishment is delayed.

The celestial adolescent will develop mild symptoms immediately such as a sore throat and runny nose after the spiritual transgression. The symptoms will remain until he repents with the Lord. Should he steal again, the symptoms will be worse. After, say, the 20th time stealing? By then, more serious symptoms will occur such as scarlet red, agony-inducing ache all over the body, 101°F fevers, and painful pink eyes that generate sticky crust. He must, again, repent with the Lord to rid the symptoms.

Symptoms of a disease are designed by the immune system to fight pathogens. Likewise, the symptoms the celestial adolescent experiences are designed to purge the “badness” from said celestial’s “untainted flesh.” In this fashion, the punishment for sin for a celestial is more immediate and overt than that for a regular person. The celestial adolescent may think it’s unfair that his normal buddy doesn’t get sick when committing sin, but the latter’s time will come… in the fiery pits underground.

Let’s consider the opposite scenario now – a regular child being adopted by a celestial couple; in other words, as a reminder, a child born with sin nature being brought up by parents without sin nature. One hypothesis of the outcome assumes that the child will struggle to meet the standards set by the parents through example. This interpretation is based on synopses of The Grand Inquisitor, a book written by Ivan, a character in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

(I have not read any of Dostoevsky’s books directly. All the statements posted here are based on second-hand material – summarizes, lectures, etc.)

The Grand Inquisitor takes place in the 16th century. In the story, Jesus comes back to Earth. He is recognized as Christ by the community members but is locked up essentially because the leader of the Church believes that the totality Christ’s demands for humanity is an insurmountable weight for humans to handle. The leader believes that the Church’s watered-down platitudes are more palpable to the congregation members. In the end, Christ kisses the leader and follows the latter’s order to leave.

Similar to how the community was unexpected by the leader to be capable of following Christ’s way of life, the child with “sinners’ flesh” may find it difficult to follow the celestial parents’ model. At the very least, unlike many regular parents, celestial parents would take seriously the task of rearing children. “Spare the rod, spoil the child” – Proverbs 13:24. And no, this has nothing to do with corporal punishment. The rod is a metaphor for a shepherd’s rod, which is used for simple guidance.

Or perhaps, having been raised by celestials from the beginning, the regular person may end up committing very few sins throughout his life. On the flip side, such a person would certainly find it difficult to relate to regular people that were raised by regular people.

With regards to family life and childhood, pre-Adamites are not much different from regular people. This is because regular people either diminish their relationship to God via venial sins or sever said relationship completely via mortal sins. Mortal sins are more serious than venial sins. For a sin to be mortal, the following three requirements must be fulfilled: 1) the act must involve a non-trivial act – murder, sodomy, adultery; 2) the person must know that the behavior is evil; and 3) the person must fully consent to the act without being coerced, threatened, or deceived. If less than three of the requirements are met, then the sin is a venial sin.

The plentiful amount of regular people that act in a degenerate manner renders any attempt to make a distinction between “normal people” and “pre-Adamites,” from the practical standpoint of outward behavior, pointless.

With 2 billion pre-Adamites, 3 billion regular people, and 3 billion celestials sharing the globe, would a war ever break out? More specifically, would a culture of celestials be willing to go to war? Yes, not in spite of being meek, but precisely because they are meek. Being meek is not the same as being docile. Meek people are the warriors in gardens prepared to defend their homelands. Understand that the Bible is written to be followed by spirit, not by the letter. Killing another person because they said something you didn’t like is sinful; but killing someone in self-defense, assuming that your life was legitimately in danger, is not.

That said, celestials will never be the first to initiate a war. Resources would likely be used by celestials efficiently enough as to not be dwindled. The lack of sin would enable such a society to spend time focusing on artistic endeavors and technological advancements. A society full of celestials would surely be prosperous.

After reading all of the above, many would believe that celestials could never have a “true human experience.” On the contrary, celestials would actually be more human than regular people; that is to say, they’d be more in touch with their humanity.

Remember that not only was Christ divine, but he was also fully human. Along with the goal of sacrificing himself, he came down onto Earth to experience being human. He experienced the wrath of a white hot volcano exploding on the mountain top, the sorrow of a storm on a sullenly cold night, and the jubilance of a jaybird singing on a spring day.