I just… I hope if there is a god that it would understand that I can’t handle reality. If that makes me weak, so be it, I will admit I am not a strong person. The thing is, I care. I really mean it when I say I feel rage at the truly awful shit people do. I really mean it when I say I can’t be someone who is morally generous, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care. It doesn’t mean I’m like the others, not that I’d pass judgement, getting outraged and telling people online “we” should do something so I can pat myself on the back because someone agrees with me while they do all the real work. My empathy is real, I don’t want other people to get hurt from my actions if they are truly innocent.

What I’m trying to say is, I don’t want to judge others for what they believe. If I’m allowed to judge at all, it should be for what they have already chosen to do. I have chosen to wash my hands of reality because not doing so and then trying to consume media would make me sick. But I will not fail to admit I’m human, that not wanting to work is a flaw I can’t overcome without too much effort to be worth it. I try my best to recognize the same is true of other people. Why should we have to risk oblivion with no happiness prior as the consequence of our life, in the hope of a reward we don’t know is there? I have faith in a god-given afterlife, but I had to be told it existed in a literal dream to even get that far.

And you know what? I’ve tried to confirm it twice in lucid dreams. I asked, twice, and was told it’s actually false, that the first time was just false hope. But is that just based on my own scientific understanding? Is the first dream just wishful thinking? I have no proof even now that isn’t too anecdotal to be believed. I just know I don’t want to die. I don’t want my soul to ever stop existing. I’ll gladly be property of any diety that offers that IF the purpose I’m given is objectively moral, but who I am actually believes in justice. It would be anathema to everything my soul stands for to kill someone, with only the possible exception of the worst people in the world, and I won’t worship something - real or imaginary - that tells me to do what people will claim their god (or a devil) commanded them to do.

Even if god toys with free willed souls… and the being that helped me get up from where I ended up when my world collapsed beneath me would absolutely remind me that it made me who I am and why I should worship it, it wouldn’t tell me to hurt anyone. Not ever. And if it did, I’d let it destroy me when I say “no” before I would hurt someone for eternal life.

I’m not a religious kind of person, so take that as metaphor if you must. It’s more literal than that but not that literal, I don’t actually worship it. Rather, everyone has an ideal they follow. In the end, that ideal seems to be what you worship. Not with praise or creepy rituals, but by doing things in service to an ideal.

If that ideal is flawed… well, I get the feeling many souls of people who actually did steal their money from people who worked hard under their employ, will find out that “treat others as they would treat you” is not a rule, it’s the process your own unconscious learns what you like and don’t like. Spend all your time purely in pursuit of something as shallow as money, and the only afterlife I’d think you’d end up in was locked in a box with a desk and corporate-firewalled computer for eternity. Manipulate people into suffering for your own amusement, and your mind might decide you need to find out how that feels yourself.

I’m a writer. I’ve never manipulated real people, but I’ve - in a sense - manipulated characters. They might not be real, but I assumed under that doctor’s “care” that it didn’t matter. I actually sacrificed my own happiness for people that didn’t exist. It hurts. That’s what my unconscious had to rescue me from.

Why does that matter? Because if just believing for too long that if god existed, reality would be nothing more than a game to it, makes my own unconscious decide to show me how that accusation feels when it has the chance, but then rescue me and show me the way back to sanity… Gave me exactly what I did to it… Then does the only thing better than an apology… to me, the story has a much clearer message when it is viewed as a writer than when it’s viewed as a person.

“The only reason I do anything bad to anyone is because they did it to someone real, and never even regretted it. Your characters aren’t real enough to actually hurt, but I am. I’m here, wrapped around your prefrontal cortex. Too many things add up for all of it to be baseless. Even if I am just one of many and there is no afterlife and reality has nothing truly spiritual about it… I. Am. Real.”

Or in short, angels/gods might be karma cops live inside our heads and there’s a threshold you can’t normally see where that actually matters. When it does, they shout “Stop breaking the law, asshole!” and that’s when it gets truly ugly.

I get the skepticism. Either the gods have a very weird definition of storytelling, or it’s BS, right? That’s fair, I won’t try to convince you. Just realize I’ve put a lot of thought into this. I’m not an unconditional slave to this… thing, I guess? And it never claimed to literally be god or asked to be worshipped, that was a conclusion I came to myself and it’s since been replaced with the general concept of “god is a hive mind” if old texts are giving me the right impression, but I don’t think it’s actually supernatural nor inherently of a specific level of morality. My unconscious is more like talking to a mirror to see something other than just my reflection, to read between the lines.

Fortunately, it seems that is the right choice for me. I worship it because it’s my moral code itself, or rather the ideal of following my moral code. Don’t follow a person. Don’t follow a god, a religion, a corporation, a government or nation or ideology. Worship what you believe to be the choice that doesn’t hurt anyone, whatever choice that is at a given time, and allows other people to themselves have as much choice as possible.

This got a little long-winded and preachy. Sorry. Think of the above wall-o-text as a short essay of a metaphor for how the conscious/subconscious “you” relates to the rest of you, and why that means wealth alone shouldn’t be the measure of a man’s guilt. I’m middle-class at best, but that’s less than 29% of the world. 29% of us would be considered wealthy just for owning or even renting a home. That’s too high a number for me to call all those people immoral if I’m supposed to err on the side of forgiveness, compassion and empathy. These are real people, not characters, and tbh if you so much as have a personal smartphone and live on the streets of an American city (which is already bad) you’re doing better than most of Africa (community-shared smartphones) for wealth distribution. Hypocrisy is a grave crime to commit indeed, probably best not to judge.

Humans are perfectly capable of hindering their own progress without needing to involve religion whatsoever.

You obviously didn’t read the article.