I agree. Though I still think if God is real hes kind of an asshole lmao. Like why butthole cancer, man? Couldn't you have just not created that?

Disagree, depending on how you define higher being. If it's just an ineffable force, that's just a metaphor for random big bang bullshit. Sure maybe antimatter-matter reactions are the face of god, whatever.

But if you imply there is some sort of intelligence making choices? No that requires not just tremendous faith but magical thinking. It requires not just inventing a deity for which no evidence exists, but means which all experience tells us aren't real.

It's like if you believe Uri Gellar can bend spoons with his mind, you're not just believing in that but you're also believing in a force that would allow him to do so, and a brain section or something that enables tapping into that force, and that it's impossible to detect or manipulate that force in any other way.

Magical thinking is exponential, because the more questions you ask, the more magic is required to explain it. Or, vastly more likely, none of it is true.

RespectfulIy, I don't think it does, and I'm a monotheist. It takes no faith to disregard any notion of the Divine, it takes no "stepping out of the comfort zone" of the material, the seen, but it does take faith and courage to believe in the unseen. And I'm not saying the existence of God is incompatible with a reasonable understanding of the universe, just that it cannot be encapsulated by it. Through reason you can make a regression until the beginning of the universe, but after that it's all faith.

Then it takes twice as much faith to believe a higher being existed before anything else...

It's a chicken/egg.

If you want to be the most scientific these days it's bubbles of reality getting created when two dimensional planes intersect or just come close to bumping up together. Which forms a bubble dimension which would have essentially random physics every time.

Which is pretty fucking far down the line to "nothing" but at the end of the day, what created the planar dimensions?

All adding a higher power does is add an extra step. Maybe it's there, maybe it's not.

It changes nothing. Because something created that first.

There's energy/matter and no matter what we come up with to rationalize that (even the Matrix) it doesn't explain it the whole way through, all of this is fundamentally impossible and we just have to accept that.

And also even if there's an afterlife, were unlikely to get all the answers, because it almost certainly be some sort of middle management higher being who is just as ignorant of what made it, till maybe if/when it dies in which case our "ever after" has an end date.

Like, everyone just has to eventually reach the point they stop caring and settle for a personal "good enough". Organized religion just gives everyone a set playbook which makes it easier to accept.