Buried Alive: Stories from Inside Solitary Confinement

I temporarily attended a "born-again" church at age 18, whose patrons partook in trying to harass me by being "empowered" with information about what they speculated was my private thought process. In other words, a patron tried to make it seem like they had a connection to "Jesus Christ" or "God" or whatever it's called, and used that against me to demonstrate what was ostensibly a "power" they had over me in reading my mind through their god. They did this by harassing me via looking at me during a sermon, and telling me what they thought was on my mind at the time from the perspective of a reaction by their god to my thought at that time channeled through them. This served absolutely to alienate me from Christianity.

The same church strongly recommended to me that following Jesus Christ was more important than attending University.

I've observed many other anecdotes suggesting there is a strong connection between Christian-empowered "do anything you want, you'll get your eternal golden box", and sitting on one's okole. Of course, the world contains a seemingly never ending series of contradicting beliefs. Observe Pope Francis warning certain groups of assured eternal torture, which is in conflict with the idea of "accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior just prior to death, and you will get into Heaven" belief system.

Regarding Christianity or other belief systems that involve eternal torture for humans: The whole notion of eternal punishment as existing for at least one human being in a future offspring that a human partakes in creating is simply absurd, with logical consequences that go beyond acceptable public rational discussion for the future of humanity. Such discussion would perhaps best occur at the deepest levels of international security as it pertains to both our survival, and our protection from any type of eternal torture that could be possible by a higher intelligence. Although, if a higher intelligence wished to create/simulate life and torture it eternally, even human extinction from our perspective wouldn't serve to stop it. Thus, simulating universes truly does carry eternal responsibility.

What's crazy is that this idea of religions as an underlying truth cannot really be proven or disproven, at least not for the current state of evolution for humanity. For instance, it's simply impossible to differentiate between a reality where Christianity is the truth, and a reality where a higher intelligence has control over reality of humans enough to make it impossible to know the higher intelligence is creating a complete perception of reality where Christianity (as part of this same example) is the truth. The human experiencing this would be unable to tell the difference.

Ultimately, a human, with their limited perception, simply has to formulate their own beliefs about the nature of the reality which they are presented. There is no Trinity nor Morpheus to free your mind -- at least there hasn't been for me, personally. We are limited by our ability to perceive and fill in gaps on our short-term first-person experiences, coupled with whatever programming/information we receive from our parents.

I'd like to believe I am not the only human to have a deep account of a reality containing signs of an enigmatic higher intelligence that seems very clearly to exist in this reality in some form or fashion. The existence of an intricate trail system of religion entrenched throughout our history speaks to this, truly.

To me, the fascination lies in cracking the code via ever-improving scientific understanding of reality in a way that fits with my personal experience in this short life. It's not that I don't believe in Jesus Christ as a personal savior. Rather, I just believe that the reality I am presented is really happening, and I attempt to fill in the gaps to the best of my perceptive abilities, the same as every other human being.

On a side note, I know of Christians that believe that "Jesus Christ stalks you". I find this to be dangerous dogma to spread, as it potentially empowers people or entities to stalk others. It justifies other malicious behaviors. It's extraordinarily dangerous to participate in stalking / harassing someone with the intent of trying to influence their belief system, because some people question the underlying nature of their reality and will easily misperceive any such stalking/harassment as a form of malice. These dangers have clear parallels to our centralized digital age.

Sorry for the free form digression.

People do respond to incentives. Deterrence isn't just about the severity of punishments but also the probability of being caught. The US justice system (I'm not an American) seems to have the worst of both worlds were many people evade justice and others are hit with overly harsh sentences. Countries with effective police forces (e.g. Japan, Singapore) have very low crime rates.

Rehabilitation makes sense for petty criminals and economic criminals, and possibly "crimes of passion". Some individuals are simply beyond redemption, though. I'd say attempting to "rehabilitate" anyone at category 11 or above on the following scale [1] is an injustice to their victims. People like Charles Manson [2] are capable of retreating into a delusional fantasy world and never acknowledge what they've done.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_Evil#Scale_and_criminals (warning: no graphics, but extremely unpleasant content)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-qWLlER1N0 (Manson starts one of his monologues at about 8:20)

Yes, that's what I always say too. And it is a strong argument.

But still, in Brasil take 4 years and murderers 6 years in jail.

I have expressly said that I don't want to "reform" the prison system. I used the word "smash" - I'm not sure how much further from "reform" you can get.

I want prisons gone completely from this land, as they were for most of our history.

Personally, I don't find loneliness a serious problem and I think that is behind a lot of folks idea that solitary confinement wouldn't really be a problem. On my voyage, I was marking the chart with my daily position and could see the distance to destination getting smaller, which gives me a measure of control, of marking the difference between the days.

Those in solitary are just waiting - even if they end up getting out after a month, they have no way of knowing that will happen. Well, in Europe perhaps they do since largely there are finite limits - and where those limits are exceeded, I would hope the treatment is not as the folk in the article claimed they had been treated. Even for Breivik we can treat him humanely even if we cannot let him out.