1. Hm…if there were alternate realities, God would probably be in charge of those too, and their existence would probably glorify him as well. God isn’t so fragile that he can’t handle an alternate reality where someone chooses a different job or marries a different person or didn’t say this one little thing they always regretted.

    That said, there are some potential moral issues with chasing time travel and alternate realities. Even if we used it to go back in time and get rid of dictators and whatnot, some results would be bad. Sure, maybe certain genocides wouldn’t happen, but some of the people that exist today are alive because of past tragedies or whatnot. Like, maybe a lot of couples only met because some tragic thing brought them together, so removing that tragedy would mean creating circumstances that would eliminate a lot of people alive today. So, basically, removing one genocide would basically make another. The only difference is that the time travel induced genocide would likely go unnoticed/be painless.

    And when I think about time travel in the sense of reliving my life again and making different choices, or an alternate reality where things were ‘ideal’…I don’t know. I think about how that could set me on a different path that could make things far worse for me further down the road. Like, maybe if I’d continued going to this one other college I liked, who’s to say I wouldn’t have gotten into a car wreck and died or something? An alternate reality or time travel could fix one little issue we were fretting over, but it’s naive to assume it couldn’t lead to more misery or regrets later.

    That said, sometimes dwelling on regrets and whatifs can be a good motivator for keeping ourselves from making the same mistakes in the future. Such things are perfectly alright as long as we don’t let them consume our whole life or pull us into bad decisions.

    • That’s thoughtful.

      Provocative question: What if we’re all just a dream God’s having?

      • I’ve thought about that, and there’s a lot of implications. Either way, we have to make our own choices (even if it is all a dream) and the consequences of those choices still feel very real to us and God holds us accountable for them. Buuuut, if it is all God’s dream, he’s very lucky for being able to dream so vividly and choose what he dreams about 😛

  2. Kathleen J Eavenson says:

    Alternate realities? Hmmm.

    There’s a book I read years ago, it won the Christy in 2003 (?) in what’s now called Visionary. Ever read Nancy Moser’s Time Lottery? They find a way to change the past … or do they, really?
    (Just checked; it’s listed in the Lorehaven library)

What do you think?