I generally declare myself to be an agnostic, but I sometimes waver between quantum animism and straight-up meat and potatoes atheism.

I find myself very lax to accept the idea of a god creating the universe… and yet I am quick to agree that our universe could indeed be a simulation run inside some kind of futuristic computer.

In the end… what is the difference between those two viewpoints, that our universe was created by a divine being or a computer programmer? What makes one of these concepts more palatable than the other?

It could be that one is a scientific explanation and the other is not. Also, if the universe was a program created by a programmer (Will Wright, perhaps?) there really wouldn’t be any need to worship this entity as he would have no special powers in the world outside our faux reality.

But what if this programmer, or a just some entity that just simply bought the program from someone else and is just running it for amusement, is not above fiddling with reality or outright changing things for fun or experimentation? Then would it not make sense to try to get the attention of said being to perhaps be granted special favor?

So here I am suddenly finding myself in a position where I might find praying to the creator of the universe a plausible idea.

Or would it be praying? Perhaps whining is a better term for it:

“Hey, dude playing this game, could you do something about increasing my life span?”

“I’m bored, make a giant dinosaur appear in the middle of Ohio.”

“Yeah, could you get my local sports team beat some other sports team so that I could be happier while you make them sadder?”

I just hope he/she/it doesn’t get bored and decide to get a life, never running any new iterations of our virtual domain again.

Hmm…. maybe I’ll never play The Sims again.

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