Hello, World

Welcome to The Church of the First Simulation. For now it’s a blog where I’ll discuss the concept of living in a simulation, but over time I’d love to transition into a real-world organization where people come together to learn how to be better humans.

Being a human in the modern world is difficult. We’re evolved animals who desperately try to pretend we’re somehow different from the other living creatures we share a planet with. We attempt to reason our way out of emotional reactions to difficult situations, but that doesn’t tend to work well. We all have trauma of one sort or another. We all handle it in different ways. Sometimes it’s overeating. Sometime’s it’s drugs. Alcohol. Sex. Etc. If something can provide pleasure, a human will utilize it in order to escape their pain.

Note that not everything people do to respond to emotional pain is an unhealthy reaction. Exercise, for example, is extremely healthy and is known for its mood-boosting benefits. When our bodies are healthy, our minds tend to follow suit. We tend to view our bodies as separate from our minds (thanks, gnostics!), but we’re bundles of muscle and bone and nerve fibers that have feelings and feel sad and wonder why no one understands us.

We never asked to be here. Unless, of course, we live in a simulation. Which likely means that we did ask to be here. On the other hand, though, we could be test subjects bred for some ineffable higher purpose. But no one wants to think of themselves as mice in cruel experiments, so we’re going to discount that very real, very scary possibility in its entirety.

Modern human existence is dedicated to the idea that humanity is separate from nature. We’ve evolved and no longer need it. We’re in the Age of Enlightenment! We have civil rights and equality and Taylor Swift and police brutality and white supremacy and unchecked spread of deadly disease and possibly a mass extinction event. We’re so much better than the people of a hundred years ago, who also thought they were in the Age of Enlightenment, with slavery in the rear view mirror of the cars that had just been invented. And then they, themselves, thought they had come so much further than their ancestors of a hundred years ago. Age of Enlightenment! Et cetera.

When really we’re just dumb monkeys. Monkeys who fail to learn the obvious lessons in front of them. Repeatedly. Stubbornly. At the cost of our own lives. And then, narrowly, we as a species avoid disaster. And the world continues. For a while, anyway.

But that’s the good news, too. We’re smart monkeys in addition to being dumb monkeys. We figured out how to trick rocks into thinking. Our existence seems to be pass/fail, because we keep scraping by by the skin of our teeth. And humanity overall has had a pretty good run. We’re far from perfect, but we are, by far, the most successful species this planet has ever known. It’s just a shame that we’re about to kill the planet due to the greed of the brain-damaged emotionally stunted sociopathic monkeys at the top of the immensely unfair system of commerce they’ve invented for themselves.

Religion, for all of its many faults and failures and atrocities, always begins with a good intention. It provides a framework for understanding the world. It provides community. Safety. Values. Eventually it becomes twisted and exists as a cruel inversion of its original intention. Christ’s followers, for example, have been manipulated into forgetting that he was a man who prostitutes adored. Which implies that Jesus always tipped generously.

So why not make another one? It’s a thing that humans do in a time of crisis, and in case you haven’t noticed it, crisis abounds. The ecosystem is collapsing. Mass death is on the way within decades unless we change things.

This is going to be a religion for people who value logic as well as faith. It’s for people who believe that living authentically means thinking critically. It’s for the people who always felt misunderstood by a culture that wasn’t designed for them. In most religions you’re discouraged from asking questions. This one is starting around the concept that questions are healthy and lead us to truth.

We believe in justice and logic and fairness. We strive for objectivity and truth, and we wonder why the world around us is a madhouse of subjectivity and perspective. We’ve felt like outcasts, but we’re going to find each other, and we’re going to save the world from itself.

Religions have beliefs, so what do we believe?

• We live in an extremely sophisticated computer simulation that follows rules, not in a random universe. It’s modeled after a random universe, and we can likely infer that the world we live in is patterned after the real world.
• We believe that life has no inherent purpose, and the best use of our limited time on Earth is to pursue happiness. We believe that pleasure is good and experiencing it helps us to be better humans.
• We believe that all humans deserve to have their basic needs met by the society in which they live.
• We believe that abuse and other forms of manipulation are inherently evil and have no place in modern life.
  • While abuse itself is evil, the people who abuse others are often not evil themselves. They’re usually deeply damaged humans in profound need of love and acceptance who need to unlearn negative patterns that have helped them to survive in a cruel, random universe.
• We believe that everyone has a right to live a life free of disease and pain.
• We believe that capitalism has led the world to the brink of destruction and a new economic system is needed that is based on sustainability rather than exploitation.
• We believe that we all carry the power of creation within us, and we can use this power to make the world a better place.
• We believe that the religions that have come before us all have something valuable to say about the human experience and should be honored for the truths they contain and criticized for the evils they have unleashed on the world.

Much of this is aspirational. I have no idea how we’re going to get from this blog post to actually saving the world, but writing something down is in itself an act of faith. An act of creation.

Fortunately, I don’t have to know. I simply have to believe. I have to take one step at a time. One step leads to the next step. As you assert your creative power, the world bends itself to accommodate.