There are no divine entities. Nothing to save you. Nothing to help you. Humanity is alone.
There is a kind and loving God.
There is no life after death. Death is complete. Death is all ending.
The things you do in your current life will determine where you go after death.
There are no real rules to follow. They are a social construct. Nature follows no rules.
Follow these rules, and good things will come.
Which of these is more comforting? In a vacuum, with no proof for or against afterlives and divine forces, which would you want to be true? Most would choose to believe in the divine.
To be blunt, we are in that vacuum. The debate between religion and atheism never ends because even if a side hypothetically has proof, it’s weak and easily shown to not have a 100% chance of being true. Both sides stick their head in the wall and get annoyed at the other. What about interreligious debates? Even messier.
Imagine you are robbed at gunpoint. You are told that if you do not tell them the password to your phone so they can wipe and resell it, the wall behind you will be painted red. You’ll probably tell them your phone password. But do you really want to, or are you just forced to? The emotion pushing you into this isn’t desire. It isn’t want. It’s fear. This is why a certain subset of people follow religions. What if you don’t follow Christianity and get sent to hell forever? What if you are punished by the gods for years to come? Or, for those who don’t like the idea of there being no afterlife, what if there is nothing after death? Not a soul, not an afterlife, not a word - once you die, there’s no coming back.
But fear doesn’t make the logical side of someone stop doubting religion.
This is where I’ve found myself. I want to believe in something after life. I want to believe that there is a divine entity looking out for me or that my choices matter. That my soul will persevere after death. But there is no proof.
Instead, I got so desperate that I made something up and willingly make myself believe it. It’s total bullshit. I know it is. But the idea of there being nothing is so terrifying to me that I had to for my own sake:
The universe repeats endlessly. It starts at the Big Bang and ends when the universe runs out of energy. My life will repeat itself over and over, and I will only be living my life, not someone else’s. There would be no afterlife because I would simply live the current life over and over (at least it would feel that way, because the rest of the time I’d never exist) and nothing would ever change. There is only the current.
I would like something real to believe in. I would like to truly know what happens after you die instead of setting for this half-assed comfort theory, but I can’t, and fear has driven me to make something that’s at least a tiny bit more realistic than any religion would actually be.
I wonder if anything has something similar. A thought they can tell themselves so they can sleep at night. A thought that prevents them from fearing death as much as they would otherwise. I know some people settle for being very, very into certain topics (computers, cooking, romance) but does that actually comfort them, or does it just distract them?
