I'm not a religious person, at least I wasn't for most of my life. As a rational person who likes logical and scientific approach to finding answers, religion seemed weird to me.

"Why did my parents take me to church? Why is this so awkward? I don't know what to do in this place. Why do you restrict yourself so much to obey these strange rules?" - I had a lot of questions as a kid and religion just seemed alien to me. As I grew older, I defined myself as either atheist or agnostic. And I kept learning new things about this world, while still not thinking about religion much. Until more and more strange things kept happening to me. And I couldn't explain them.
I needed an updated world model, as it is very uncomfortable to not understand the rules of the world you live in. Our brains (well, any brains) want to have this internal understanding of the signals that come in. When unexpected signals come in, it causes great discomfort.

So I started thinking. And I read a great book, which is fictional, but it helped me a lot. It's "Reality Transurfing" by "Vadim Zeland". It provided me with a seed that I could grow into a better understanding. A beginning of an interface to reality. Say I want to change something about me or about my surroundings. How do I do that? As a programmer, I need some sort of an API. Some abstraction that would let me change the parameters of my life. Transurfing became such an abstraction. I don't HAVE to understand how it works, but I can try it and see if and how well it works, if works at all. It might work in completely unexpected ways, no magic, just affecting my own perception and subconscious state.

Did I expect it to work? No, not at all. This all seemed like a bunch of bullshit to me, honestly. But I gave it an honest try, trusting the process fully. And it worked. Maybe not with 100% success rate, but I could put way less effort, and still reach my goals. I was able to change my perception somehow. Heck, I could stay super calm and not care about small things that used to drive me nuts. And this all made me think about the world differently. That analogy to an API, I didn't have it at the time. I developed it way later in life.

I started thinking about the world and how it works. Maybe there are imperceivable connections that we just don't notice. Maybe there is more to this world than what we see and feel everyday. Science, sadly, can't currently explain everything. So I have to come up with something to help me live. Something that could answer all the weird questions I have in a satisfactory way. And at this point no religion provided a satisfactory answer. A miracle, a book, a dream... not to offend anyone, I can't even find a reason to believe.

Maybe I should make my own religion? And then I did. It's unlikely to be something completely new, and I still haven't put my thought into writing after many years. So it's time.
From my observations and feelings, the world is more interconnected than we think. It's like a big complex system with new behaviors emerging from its simpler parts. It's like a brain. Your thoughts affect not just you, they affect people around you. They consciously or subconsciously notice changes in your behavior and in information you share. They might even know what bothers you precisely and share that with others. They might change their own behavior and behavior of their neighbors...
What I'm trying to say is that we are very much interconnected, like neurons in someones brain. Individual neurons (we) cannot perceive the whole brain, they cannot directly communicate with it or even know it exists. Yet they can make new connections, they can change whole areas of it, they can affect the whole brain quite a bit if the effort exists.
So in my imagination the "God" is this imperceivable system, that brain, if I were to use the analogy.
And it helps me answer a lot of questions. What happens after death? Well, neuron's functions spread onto the neighboring neurons. There are no irreplaceable people.
What should you do? Live and gain experience. Try to connect with people and make your part of the world better. Find yourself and inherit your functions onto others, so when you die, you still exist as an imprint in others.
Is there heaven? No. Is there hell? No. Is there something? Yes, something bigger that you are a part of. It is the world you live in. And you can affect it, and it can affect you. You can't communicate directly, but you can find obscure ways to learn more or change something.

But you might notice some similarities with other religions. And you might notice some differences.
It's similar in the purpose: provide an abstraction. An interface to the world. An answer to unanswered questions. A helping hand in bad situation. Praying doesn't help me, it's not the interface that works for me, but it works for some people.
And yet it's different... It's not restrictive, it doesn't punish anyone, it doesn't promise anything, it doesn't encourage anyone to join, nor does it have explicit rules. You are the one who have to learn the rules! The idea is only there to plant a seed, to help you find your rules, your purpose and your "interface" (your rituals, as an analogy to other religions).

I understand this doesn't exist. But I argue that it doesn't have to exist. It's just an easy to understand abstraction over something hard to grasp. It doesn't always work, but it helps. A hardware abstraction layer doesn't exist as something physical, something you could observe or touch. It exists as information and you can measure it's effects. This is my religion.


4 Comments latest

  • Ilya_MZP Author

    I want to be clear - I'm not claiming this is something new, I'd be glad to find an existing name for this. But its something that I came to during my life in search of answers. Say, it's my coping mechanism.

  • JQZ

    Why the fuck is your about picture so fucking disgusting like genuinely AWFUL to look at

  • Ilya_MZP Author Reply

    JQZ:
    Why the fuck is your about picture so fucking disgusting like genuinely AWFUL to look at

    LMAO

  • man

    he aint wrong