rationalskepticism.org

Keep It Real wrote:The atheist/agnostic labels aren't mutually exclusive you know. I lack belief in gods but it is hypothetically possible one/many exist so I'm an atheist and an agnostic. That leaves the door wide open for a fucked up paranoid trip of Messiah complex, visions of hell, thinking natural sounds are god's communications to you etc.

Are these really the only motifs we can come back to? Are they the most profound ideas to impact us? If so, then I have to give religion its due. They're all in our heads, but that's not such a contemptible place for them.

But I dunno. I think, as materialists, our imaginations can probe greater depths of fear, and Lovecraft and sci-fi get further into my psyche than anything I've encountered in religion. The first time I read Frank Herbert's two words "pain amplifier", a chill ran through me. For another, there's nothing in 1984 more terrifying than "Room 101". With modern surveillance apparatus, we can do far worse than Orwell could have imagined. Google's CEO has said that the mission statement is to build blind and cold machines with near perfect psychological models of their users. For now, the goal is to predict better search results, but it's no stretch at all to see that huge mass of data, siphoned from our habits and interactions, being used to identify our most unbearable horrors, horrors that are so terrible that we ourselves don't realise we have them, horrors in the depths of the subconscious that only a relentless machine can penetrate.

Don't worry. I don't believe a word of this. I'm just thinking of short stories.

Have you heard of the hell of quantum immortality? I say that's a dark idea way beyond the imaginations of the sort of people who wrote all that feeble religious crap. A friend of mine, Roko, once spelled it out for me, though I already had the implications in my head. He went on to develop a thought experiment that sufficiently scared the atheists who run the website LessWrong, that they banned all talk of it.