1) The atheists have always been 100% correct
It's time for most people to admit that all current religions are the made-up results of wishful thinking by imagination-limited prophets and patriarchs.
Reality is much more interesting than that. We live at the bottom of a boundless mystery. Phenomena like the anthropic principle, entangled quantum states, and infinity itself can't be adequately described, let alone explained. The number of questions will only increase with time.
The problem is that most religious persons don't know and don't care.
Faith can only be justified by vague feelings that may not mean anything.
People 'know' that a broken cup won't jump up and reassemble itself, even if they don't know anything about entropy. In the same way, they 'know' that the whole of reality eventually, inevitably has to be organized in some orderly hierarchy.
Then again, they may be 100% wrong.
With nothing but crudely improvised false answers, it should be easy to start over from first principles. As all current religions become hopelessly obsolete, almost everyone capable of such thoughts will have to consider the atheist viewpoint at least briefly.
As the simplest solution, it can't always work. Faith exists because reality is fundamentally unbearable, the difference between false hope and no hope at all.
Which brings us to:
2) The universe is absurd
Sartre may have been right when he claimed existence has no deeper meaning. There is no objective reason to perform any action. The only reason to do anything is because it feels good. At some other point in the endless maze of reality, some opposite effect will inevitably cause exactly as much pain as the amount of pleasure created here.
This can't be avoided, unless there's a fundamental imbalance inside math or logic itself.
Future minds may have to adapt to this truth by giving up all emotions.
3) The universe is infinite
Existence is stranger than humans can imagine.
Human-level minds are an exceedingly common side effect of infinite processes. Humans can't hope to understand them any better than a rock could understand Stonehenge.
These processes include minds and stories too incredible to comprehend, and other phenomena grander still, and so on forever. The number of possible patterns increases much faster than their size. Human awareness can have no meaningful relationship with reality as a whole.
4) Human awareness is still infinite
Why are we here, and not somewhere else?
In fact, we're not really here. We're everywhere. The reason is that human minds are not a representative sample of the set of all minds.
Infinite minds have far more possible states. There should be infinitely more of them than the number of finite minds.
Instead, humans find themselves at the very bottom of the possible IQ-scale, the ultimate losers in the metaphysical lottery.
The only explanation is that there are countless copies of each human-level mind, endlessly repeated throughout reality, more than all other minds combined. The reason is that human-level minds are statistically just about the easiest to generate by random and semi-random processes (the second category is known as the laws of physics). Still higher categories generate most higher minds.
Human-level minds pop in and out of existence like virtual particles. We're mostly irrelevant but omnipresent background noise.
All the truly important and meaningful stories happen at much higher levels.
The basic principle was first described by Hugh Everett in 1957. The theory of Many Worlds assumes an infinite number of other universes that contain similar or (especially) identical versions of everyone alive.
Each mind's awareness is spread out, through every universe containing at least one copy of its mind pattern, no matter how well hidden. Minds can be in many places at once.
Extending the theory, even the laws of physics don't have to be fixed. Objects are not necessarily made of atoms, but of patterns and probability distributions.
5) Life after death
Atheists will be profoundly surprised after they take their last breath: according to the theory of quantum immortality, no one can really die.
In theory, the computers of the 2040s will be powerful enough to recreate the brain patterns responsible for human thought, though the software will be rather hard to write (it will have to write itself). Long after everyone alive today has died, some future civilization will eventually decide to resurrect the primitive minds of its lost ancestors, as a research simulation or even a game.
Will our loved ones also be there? Not necessarily. They're as arbitrary as anything else in reality. Any combination of circumstances is meaningful in some possible universe.
Every mind and perception cluster that ever existed or could have existed will be restored, if not in this universe then in some other.
According to the minimum complexity argument (see the previous list item), we'll most likely find ourselves simulated in the near future, but in a parallel timestream.
Every evil person will also be recreated, including serial killers and dictators. Some of them will inevitably be punished for their crimes.
Other minds, if they're lucky enough, will find themselves in simulations they would have chosen and created themselves.
The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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