Quantum Theory of Reality & Religion
Time is Tricky, But Life is Trickier
EDITED & UPDATED:
This is going to be a little heretical, a little preachy, and a little silly.
Kind of like me.
As goofily as he was presenting it, Louis C. K. was not wrong here. (Plenty of other times and places, sure, but not here.)
Christians “won time”, or more accurately, Christ beat time when he conquered death with the resurrection. However, the ongoing and unresolved conflicts between faith, beliefs, truth, lies, skepticisms, technology, and intellectual certitude has created this messy paradigm in which we find ourselves.
Deep spiritual concepts like justice and mercy both feel like they lose significant amounts of their potency when the water’s this murky, which makes it understandably difficult to put faith in a divine entity defined equally by both. But, God IS realer than real, and demonstrated it through Christ. (EDIT: And an even bigger but: God is bigger than religion.)
I understand as well as anyone could how excruciatingly impossible faith can feel. For most of the years of my adolescence, and into my early 20’s, I was a petulant atheist. I reveled in blasphemous jokes, mocked God, and bonded with my fellow heathens through being hypercritical of the Bible and those who believed in it, as well as our parallel addictions and toxicities. Not shaming them for their participation in it any more than I hold myself accountable. But, I paid dearly for my mouthiness.
While on probation for marijuana possession, I delved into more serious psychedelic substances and in the process, I experienced what I can only pray no one else should ever have to, or that I ever should experience anything like it again... I certainly wouldn’t wish the encounter with metaphysical reality I had on anyone for all eternity.
At the same time, I can acknowledge that there are those of us who may need to go through some version or another to shake their surety in materiality before they’re really willing to accept that faith does matter. No pun intended.
The “win” of Christianity is held within its simplicity: GOD is GOOD, Jesus was the perfect son of God, humanity had him crucified, but He still beat Death. Faith and acceptance of this sacrifice on our behalf is the only requirement for God’s forgiveness of sins.
The problems arise from life not being quite so simple.
Religions impose seemingly arbitrary rules on humanity because we tend towards entropic self-destruction without purpose and ethics, but at the same time, humans + “divinely instructed” rules often tends toward corruption and abuse.
This is not a dig at any particular religion or denomination — nobody’s hands are clean (Romans 3:23) and our attempts at washing each others...well… yeesh. (See: The Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India, Sikhs murdering Hindus, even the Buddhists!)
Christ wanted NOBODY to end up in Hell, buuut Hell ended up on Earth.
When Jesus spoke those words before His final breath, the perfect Son of God had suffered enough to afford all of the sins humanity would, or could, ever commit — if they accept His signature for their bill. (Romans 6:23) Unfortunately, plenty of us (myself included, extra unfortunately) wanted to be little smarty-pantses, and didn’t want to accept that signature without a more detailed explanation of “how that works”.
Personally, I don’t believe Jesus intended for His martyrdom to mean absorbing all religions into an abusive, hyper-ritualistic Roman cult. (Admittedly, that was kind of a dig at Catholicism) When in John 10:16, Christ says: “I have other sheep, too, that are not in this sheepfold. I must bring them also. They will listen to my voice, and there will be one flock with one shepherd...” I don’t think the intention was to abolish all other religious practices necessarily. I’ve been in synagogues, mosques, and Hindu temples alike in which the reverence for divinity and the Creator of all that exists is far more evident than in some churches that hyper-fixate on the violence and suffering of the crucifixion. I also don’t think He was referring to a pope (or me!) as the ‘one shepherd’, I think He was referring to God the Father. Or Himself. Either way, a Rome-based economic political superpower born from Mussolini’s tyranny makes for a pretty ironic dispenser of Christ’s forgiveness, in my humble opinion. (Sorry Catholics!)
Anyway, enough preaching and denominational mud-slinging — get to the quantum point, right?
Animism, the belief that God, or a spiritual awareness of some sort, is present in all matter, does have some scientific legitimacy in the sense that everything probably has some consciousness, as evidenced by particles behaving differently when observed.
Some of them like it when you watch, the little freaks.
Human consciousness is supposed to be higher than animal consciousness, though. Animals are more conscious than vegetables and minerals. There is supposed to be a proper order. We should respect animals, but we don’t need to confuse ourselves by dehumanizing people to anthropomorphize animals.
Meat-eating =/= cannibalism.
Killing in self-defense =/= murder.
Consensual sex =/= r*pe.
If humanity was truly capable of self-governance, I think we’d have figured it out by now.
EDIT:
Muslim teaching seems defiantly in opposition to the possibility of Christ being divine, resurrecting, or even being crucified in the first place.
In the Quran, verse 4:157–158 states, “And they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; but [another] was made to resemble him to them”. Might (and I know this is quite a mental hurdle, but emphasis on the might) it be possible that both could be true? In one timeline, Christ was crucified per the Father’s plan for absolution, and in another, the Muslim interpretation is accurate as well? And at this distance, we exist in a convergence of these possible realities?
Rationally, these ideas seem completely incongruous and incompatible, but then again, so does the double-slit experiment. How can observing something change its outcome? Well…it does. *shrugs*
Hate it all you want, but I think it could be pretty widely agreed upon at this point that when the white Evangelicals overwhelmingly helped Donald Trump rise to political authority is when Christians overwhelmingly lost their credibility on the global stage. This is an observation from someone who ironically regained his faith during that period, so don’t take it too harshly. Trump introduced the world to “alternative facts”, “fake news”, and creating one’s own narrative and running with it in spite of all evidence the contrary to “success”…if you could call his winning the presidency that.
Doing so alongside promoting the Bible and denying his public friendship with Jeffrey Epstein has not done that waning global Christian credibility any favors.
Maybe I’m completely off-base (it’s the only way I’ve managed to make sense of this mess) but I believe things have been allowed to play out this far so that the maximum amount of self-discovery could take place, so that individuals could become fully themselves, whatever that means for them, and, hopefully, become their best selves.
Personally, I wouldn’t have expected my best self to be so bald, but I’m doing alright, all things considered. (The joke here is I’m not my best self, or else I wouldn’t be here in this aforementioned mess)
We make choices and, one way or another, have to experience the repercussions of those decisions.
Christ says to humanity, and now I am admittedly paraphrasing: “Choose Me and follow Life, or don’t and stay dead.”
Even so, God always knew that some would interpret the Gospel as a “Get Out of Hell Free” card and abuse the gift granted us. (See: pedophile priests, grifter preachers, and malicious missionaries)
The concept that everyone else goes to Hell for eternity, and only those who say the magic words: “I accept Jesus as my personal savior” will ever get to experience Heaven rubbed me the wrong way as a child, to say the least. As believers, we don’t need to understand the “how’s” and “why’s” of other religions, but we do have to accept that God is equal parts Just AND Merciful — not just one or the other.
EDIT:
To further my point of Christ’s sacrifice as the karmic scapegoat for all sins for all time being profoundly misused and abused, we can turn to slightly more recent historical events, specifically in American history.
In Howard Zinn’s masterfully compiled book , The People’s History of the United States, which sheds light on our own appalling revisionist national history, Zinn records that Arawak natives were rounded up like chattel, put into pens, and sold like nothing more than appliances. “Columbus later wrote: ‘Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.’”
I would confidently argue that this is, by no small margin, a greater violation of the commandment: ““You must not misuse the name of the LORD your God. The LORD will not let you go unpunished if you misuse his name.” than saying “Oh my God” in shock.
Frederick Douglass would say much later: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference — so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
I unwittingly echoed this sentiment in my Medium article An Indictment of American Christianity.
We are God’s sick kitties in His Schrödinger's Box of choices. The crucifix is that box unfolded.
EDIT:
I know, multiple concurrent timelines converging seems like an awfully convenient explanation for biblical and religious contradictions — entirely unobservable, untestable, and unscientific, but so does a virgin birth and bodily resurrection. Call it quackery, pseudoscience, woo-woo, or whatever you will.
“I don’t need to believe, I know.”
-Carl Jung, when asked if he believed in God
