This is way more that my normal small, two item post, but I’m playing with an idea. I’m trying to articulate what it is that bothers me so much about AI, and it took me to my thoughts on religion. So, I hope you enjoy!

For god so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten (whatever that means) son. So that everyone that believed in him would not perish, but have eternal life. Or at least, that’s how we remember it. In the choppy greek of the day, 

“Οὐχ ὅτι ἀγαπήσας ὁ Θεὸς τὸν κόσμον, ὥστε τὸν Υἱὸν αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν, ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλὰ ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον”

In that is quite a bit, good and bad. Fear not, this isn’t going to veer into a religious website. I’m not religious, but I think religion tells us a TON about ourselves. Shane Parish of Farnum street says that tradition is a set of answers to problems we forgot we had. 

Religion, like it or hate it, seems to pop up all over our history. It is answering some question. We may not know what the question is, but I’m going to try and answer that here. 

For god so loved the world

We are looking for external validation.

The he gave his only son

Love needs to be costly. There is no real love without sacrifice. This actually goes deeper. There are no advantages in life, only trade offs. You don’t get the relationship without the hurt feelings and arguments. You can have the kids, but you also have to change the diapers. 

Genesis starts with us being cursed to have to earn our keep with the sweat of our brow. God’s first response to the fall of man was to make sure we didn’t get a free lunch.

So that everyone that believed in him

We have to set the price. There is a cost to entry. This club, club afterlife, has a cover.

Shall not perish, but shall have everlasting life. 

This is the end goal of 99% of what is happening here. Our disjointed and fragmented minds are continuously aware that we are mortal beings. There is an outside, another world, a world of darkness and death out there. You will someday take your last breath, and be no more, just like all other living beings. And since that realization, we find ways to fight it:

Maybe you will die, but I will be remembered. I have my family. I have my book. I have my works, I donated my money and my name is on this hospital. 

Oliver Burkeman said it better than I ever could in his 4,000 weeks for mortals. “Nothing you have ever said, thought or done matters in any cosmic way. Only your ego makes you think it does, then tortures you for not mattering enough.”

But most people don’t realize this. That is why Jesus is so compelling. Forgiveness. Thank god (pun intended). We carry within ourselves this persistent feeling that we are not enough (at least most of us. If you’re blessed enough to be perfect, skip to the next post). 

The doctrine of original sin is worth looking at here too. We were created in paradise in the genesis story. God put us in a garden with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent (freaking snakes) told us to eat the fruit, for “we would not die, but our eyes would be opened, and we would be like gods.”

We said, “sounds pretty freaking good” and we did it. Our eyes were opened, and we noticed we were naked. So we hid from god. 

Does realizing we are naked come from being like gods. What does it mean. Does realizing that we have problems, and hiding those problems, is that what it means to be human, to be conscious? 

“There’s no such thing as ‘free will’ in the way most people think of it. Our decisions are largely determined by our unconscious mental processes, which we’re unaware of and have little control over”

-Why buddhism is true Robert Wright

People are weird. People don’t really change. Yes, different countries have different feelings. Different things become popular and then drop out of popularity, but no the whole, people are people. There is more commonality in the cannibal and the christian that you might think. 

Why did we hide? Why won’t we walk with God. Why do we lie? Why do we feel shame, and embarrassment?

Here is more of the crucial issue, and what I think we should start looking into: I think we are largely defined and illuminated not by what is best, but what is basest and lowest in us. We are the upright animal, we are the wise man, the homo sapiens, sure. 

We are also the only animal that can murder in cold blood. We are the only animal that will lie, and not only that, but lie and not be aware of it. 

Funny enough, this incongruity and this double think, has somewhere in it the seed of what it is that makes humor humor. 

You can make a bunch of vanilla puns, and a bunch of whitty observations. And true, that can be kind of funny. Witty conversation is, all things equal, interesting and delightful. A sign of education and refinement. 

But humor requires something, well, human. For one thing, we’re not even entirely sure what it is. I mentioned before that signal that things were expected to be worse, and they turned out to be slightly better than feared. That’s part of it. There is also this collective seeing. You point something out. Something that highlights usually how we are all weird. Deceiving ourselves, deluding ourselves, absurd, broken. And sometime it will offend, yes. But often that mirror showing us our darkest parts, our shadow, what we are not aware of, it lightens instead of darkening things. It’s very weird. 

It’s like there is this little dark demon in all of us. And we all know it’s there. And we all know we can summon him, and he’s just there. Waiting. Ready. 

Milton’s Paradise lost: better to rule in hell than serve in heaven. 

And the devil in that story is presented as the usurper, the evil one. But he’s also relatable.

We are, all of us, evil.

Our obsession with redemption only makes sense because we all feel we are broken and evil. We have made mistakes. We didn’t love our mothers enough. We could have woken up on time, but hit the snooze button, and we didn’t study as hard as we could have, and we forgot the deadline, didn’t pay enough attention, weren’t present for our daughters, and we forgot to pay the tax, didn’t get get caught, and will never mention it. 

I don’t believe in god. But I’m obsessed with religion. I’m in the west, so that religion is largely Christianity. 

I believe that Christianity flourished and is powerful because it says something about all of us. Just because I don’t believe it, doesn’t mean that I can’t learn from it. 

If my worldview is correct, there may not be a god. However, I feel like the reality we inhabit is more stark, and more manageable. We all have an ideal in our minds, an image of god (probably from eating from that freaking tree of good and evil). We all carry judgement of ourselves out, 24/7. 

We are all stumbling through life, trying to appease a mental god that we don’t know, rebelling against what is best in us, and coming back. Torn in two, desperate for honor and salvation, a cosmic battle of good and evil. All playing out in our minds. 

Or, at least that’s how my head feels. Does that strike a bell?