Need a plate of generic, insipid platitudes with a giant helping of bad science and misogyny?
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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As an agnostic atheist that favors materialism, I found it to be very fun and exciting to do pretty massive doses of psychedelics, especially ones that frequently spur thoughts of "higher powers." 2C-E, in particular is known for bringing about thoughts about the divine, and that was a lot of fun (I just played around on Universe Sandbox while I came up, put on some good music, then laid on the floor in a blanket and thought about the universe for a few hours).
Dawkins on acid would be a hell of a time
God I gotta trip shrooms this weekend, that one time where I saw myself as a squid outside of my body playing with it and being judged by a stream of squids for refusing to "Stop playing with that thing and move on to embrace your truest self, a being beyond physicality, a being that can take any form or shape it wants, something far great than a human being."
Was awesome...
God I hate being human. I'd demand to be freed from this flesh prison, but I'm not sure there's anything to actually let out... That I may actually BE the flesh prison.
I feel like I'm in this weird camp of "I Don't Want To Be An Atheist!"
Not because I fear Hell or anything, I just find the concept of a cold purely material universe where no greater force than Entropy exists scarier than any interpretation of Tartarus!
Ego death is a hell of a thing...
I don't think it's that unusual. Most people are just pretty good at pretending that they believe in a higher power and repressing that fear that maybe this is all we get.
At least personally there was a period of about a year where I went through every apologetics argument I could find in order to try and hang onto the religion I grew up with, followed by another year where I called myself a deist before I confronted the possibility that there was really no evidence for anything more than materialism. I wound up reaching the conclusion that unless we find more evidence, most religions and supernatural beliefs are just wishful thinking. And given my personality, I couldn't really ignore that conclusion once I got there.
It is a bit overwhelming. I tend to fall back on acknowledging that I am part of the universe rather than in opposition to it as a way of confronting that existential dread. Plus, entropy is actually not as scary as it seems at first since space and time are really, really big compared to the scales we perceive and think in. That leaves lots of places where order can appear without violating the second law of thermodynamics, and our species is very unlikely to ever really reach that point where the heat death of the universe affects us personally.
So I just file "the cold indifference of the universe" away in the same area as knowing the sun will one day expand and consume Earth: it's interesting to know how it all works, a little scary, but very unlikely to ever significantly affect this little pocket of the universe I perceive as my self.
I... I want to hug you, I feel like I've actually found someone who gets it, instead of another edgelord mocking me for "Trying to cling to sky daddy faerie tales"
I'm sorry I can't... I can't accept a world where death is the final answer for us all.. It's it's too much...
Internet hugs Any time, friend. People shouting too loudly about how strongly they disbelieve and mocking others are just covering up their own fears and are still unwilling to give up their own idea of absolute truth, IMO (and I say this as a pretty strong anti-theist, myself). Give them a few years (or decades) to come to grips with their own mortality and they'll be far more open to "live and let live."
It's certainly uncomfortable and very...well, final, I guess. But personally, there are two ideas of materialistic afterlife that really comfort me:
I like the idea of my physical body going on to become other things. There's a growing movement where people more or less have their bodies composted and turned into soil by a service, and the soil is then returned to the family and loved ones. It's comforting to me to think that even when my consciousness is gone, my atoms can return to other living beings. It might seem a bit weird to some, but I love the idea than my great-grandchildren might hang a swing in a tree that grew in the material that was once my body, or that bees might make honey from the pollen of wildflowers that grew in that soil.
I've also always liked the idea of two deaths: the first being the death of a person's physical body and the second being the last time anyone speaks their name or remembers them as a person. It helps me to avoid hopeless nihilism and hedonism to remember that my actions will have consequences that go far beyond my physical lifetime, whether I am able to see them or not. And in that way, anything that you dedicate time to, and anyone that you impact with your words or actions (positively or negatively) carries a piece of you forward.
But hey, at the end of the day, none of us really have the first clue about what awaits us. Plus, there's the old Mark Twain quote: "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." So go out and make the most of the time we've got! I, for one, need to get back to preparing to teach a new batch of students and trying to fix my furnace before fall really sets in. But any time you feel like talking through anything like this, you know where to find me, and clearly, I don't mind the conversation ;)
My discord is hawlsera if you don't mind speaking more one on one on this
Yeah I just worry he might do what I did and find Gaia. Us earth worshippers are annoying enough without Dawkins among us. Though I’ll acknowledge I already had a foot in the door to pantheism at the time
I think Dawkins would simply acknowledge it as a hallucination brought on by cultural concepts.
Eh, I think he's too stubborn and too good at defining his terms to go that route. I love the idea of Spinoza's pantheistic view of the universe, but I would never tell the average person that because I don't want to end up in the same box as Einstein, where just because I use the word "God," people assume I'm religious.
Personally, I think Dawkins would wind up going the same route as Sagan, defining mystical experiences related to the universe as "numinous" rather than "religious" for precisely that reason: because it's really obnoxious when people take your words out of context, so stick to using very specific words that don't carry the baggage of religion.