If you are afraid of death, this article is for you. If you are grieving for the loss of a loved one, this article is for you. If you want to reconcile your belief in God with your scientific worldview, this article is for you. If you are a transhumanist who wants to believe in a transcendent reality, this article is for you.
God? Science? Spacetime? Spirituality? Aliens? Future technology? We will be going through it all.
First lets understand that the idea of atheism is irrational.
God is defined as an absolutely infinite, infinitely far, totally unknowable God - thus is impossible to be ruled out by science.
Perhaps you have been told that science has (or will soon have) all the answers, and religion is a fairy tale.
Not so. Current science is very far from having all the answers, but future science and technology could validate and realize many promises of religion.
Future science and tech will permit playing with the building blocks of space, time, matter, energy, and life, in ways that we could only call magic and supernatural today.
Inconceivably advanced intelligences may be already be out there among the stars and our future technology could allow us to find them.
The message of this writing you can hope to live again with your loved ones, without abandoning the scientific worldview. You can believe in the essential core of your religion without betraying science, and you can contribute to its becoming.
My family was nominally Catholic but when it became my choice at the age of 14 I stopped going to church, and considered religion as something that other people do. So I grew up mostly uninterested in traditional religion and unaffected by it. At the same time, since I can remember I have always been interested in spirituality and the foundations of reality.
My name is Jack. I grew up reading a lot of science and science fiction. By all means my life consisted of being a privileged white male, my family is together, we never worried about finances, I am about 6 foot, healthy, and can eat anything I want and look fine. I should have been at my highest high, having a D1 offer to play Football, Scoring Perfect scores in math and science on my ACT and being named Scholar Athlete of The Year in school. In all senses of reality, I think if life is a video game, I selected easy mode. I don't bring this all up to brag, but to preface the fact that while everything on the outside was perfect, my long term questioning of the nature of reality was catching up to me. As the stress of picking a career and life path came forward, a deep depression started waning over me. Nothing was exciting, it all felt like vain, pointless work towards a pointless future that would pointlessly go into dust.
I recognize that there are a wide range of different ideas that can combat this way of thinking that I came to, by no means do I believe this thinking was correct either, I simply want to give you a candid story of how the beliefs I have continued to formulate and think on originally planted their seed deep into my brain.
These ideas were planted so deep that I have since forgotten the option of ignoring them. I can definitely see how ignorance is bliss. In a sense I feel like I have “red pilled” myself and cannot go back to functioning “normally”. I
And I am very glad that that's the case, why wouldn't I be, I can't change it and now I am not investing in things that are not pure and in line with eternal value.
Beyond that, its somewhat of an escape from normal, as normal does not lead to an interesting life. Some people think this act of pushing away from dopamine and towards a path of influence is far more boring than normal, but it only is if you make it that way. I understand closely the idea that impact and influence stems not from monk-like meditation in a cave my whole life, but a mission and story that is fun and enticing.
Once you recognize the true valuable things in life you begin to have existential crisis’s from things that used to dreams for your younger self.
For example, in the middle of being (sorry for the graphic description) inside of a girl that anyone would consider a 10, my mind would shoot back into the thought of my timeline, the butterfly effect, and what that action I was taking was actually doing in the world. The action of sex, as most actions are, was willed by a craving for more dopamine, backed up by socially as the right path by my college and fraternity culture, and a vast amount of mainstream music.
For many without a role model to guide their look towards a more fitting lifestyle, these bouts of existential crise’s and facing the void of the mystery of life can leads some towards depression or nihilism.
My first realization that acted as a resilient shield toward a Nihilistic view on the world was a realization that even the belief that everything was meaningless was impossible to upheld. The very fact that we could not know, means claiming life was meaningless was false.
I mean it was not that long ago that we attributed lightning to Zeus, sacrificed animals to call for rain, and thought the earth was flat. The idea that my cosmic birth had a bigger meaning was a possibility and even if it didnt I could at least think it did.
On this same note of anti-close mindedness… If someone said how can I be 100% sure that Zeus does create lightning or that the earth was not flat I would say I cannot be.
Yet for this to be the case requires a lot of damning evidence to be wrong, and possibly a grand conspiracy to be underway to hide and give the illusion to all men. While there exists a reality in which this is the case, it is so unlikely to the point that I would say I’m 100% sure only to save myself of all the breath it would take to tell you I’m actually 99.99999999999…% sure.
Speaking of the nature of a peculiarly rare reality, Simulation Theorists believe it is nearly impossible that we are not in one. I most like to explain it as such:
There exists a bag of an uncountable number of marbles. Each one of those marbles is an explanation for your current reality. One of those marbles is what your current belief of reality is. Yet there is an unimaginable amount more that completely disrupts all your worldviews.
While some people recognize and play with ideas about categories which make up the majority of marbles in the bah like simulation theory, others believe the single marble they selected is the only right one, and some have just completely lost their marbles…
For anyone reading this now who only believes in a single or very small number of marbles, I want to bring into question, and have you think about why that set of marbles is the set you believe, and what merit it has over the other sets I will go over here too.
If you have simply selected one marble and cannot fathom the existence or possibility of other realities being truth I at least hope that specific marble causes you to become your best for the world. If that’s the case and you want to keep that marble and not have it challenge, just close this book now. If that’s not the case and you want to study the marbles, lets have a look at some very popular ones.
