A Year of Atheism

[Crossposted from my blog, BlueprintingHeaven.] Today, September the first, in the Year of our Lord twenty twenty-six, is my apostasy anniversary. To mark the occasion, I decided to read some of my journal entries and other writing of mine from the time, as well as some relevant posts about the particular feelings I had after my deconversion—a deep sadness, fear, feelings of tragedy feeling my heart, a burning desire and yearning wish to fix all that is wrong with the world, compassion for all sapient beings, desperation... Here are some snippets of things I wrote around that time, plus some commentary of my own. Some of these I typed up from my journal—feel free to picture me sobbing my heart out as I wrote in a brown hardcover notebook with a fancy black ink pen in cursive handwriting if that provides more aesthetic engagement or what have you. Generally, things in italics were underlined in my journal, apart from e.g. book titles. I didn’t include things from my Crisis of Faith sandbox because I already put any I want to share in my Deconversion Has Been a Real Productivity-Booster post. I no longer want to be an astronaut because it is not the most effective way for me to help humanity. Many other people could be fantastic astronauts. There are far fewer people who could play the sort of role you're going to play to save humanity. I've wasted so much time. FUCK RELIGION. A bullet point from notes I took about one of my dreams: People dressed up as scary or apocalyptic things. Not really Halloween, more intellectual than that—existential risk and societal decline I would often dream about people screaming for help, dying of starvation, being tortured... I would wake up after becoming an atheist and the first images to pop into my head would be of a mother and child in a third world country, bones clearly visible, sunken eyes, praying for help to a God that doesn't exist, overlapped with images of people screaming and crying over their dead relatives, lost in war. One of the things that unfailingly makes me cry is the idea of a young child asking their parent for food, saying they're hungry, and the parent has no food to give, and themselves feel pain in their stomach from hunger. What the hell do you say to the child? What the hell do you say? Can you imagine the horror and pain in that parent's heart? Why is God ignoring their desperate prayers? It must have taken at least a month after my apostasy to stop having to fight back tears every time I walked past a homeless person. I would very frequently for perhaps three months get upset about the state of the world to the point of retching from tears. And yet! There are still more important things to work on! It's horrible! My particular focus is on existential risks from advanced AI systems and, incidentally, today is the "official start" of my work supported by BlueDot Impact's Career Transition Grant (there'll be posts about this soon). I wish I had an adult—a real adult—to tell me everything is going to be alright... The thing is, everything is not necessarily going to be alright. I did not think human extinction was possible, because I knew how the world was supposed to end—the Islamic way. When there's no religion, things don't have to follow a nice story. Obviously I knew this on some level, e.g. people dying in very ordinary or even embarrassing ways, but I think I saw myself as somehow immune, and was also just ignoring that knowledge. Of course this is not true, as evidenced by a bird having defecated on my arm as I write this post. I'm very much now at the stage of, there are no adults in the room. In the process of trying to talk to many of my lecturers about AI existential risk and hearing some of their inconsistent responses, I stopped having to tilt my head back so far to look up at them. (I still respect them highly of course! Most of my lecturers have been wonderful in answering my numerous questions, and most of them are brilliant teachers.) I feel totally confident and reasonable when I say there are many people three times my age with "proper", difficult jobs who I think I could run circles round when it comes to changing your actions/beliefs in response to new information. I'm currently reading If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. My respect for policy-makers, journalists etc has skyrocketed. Scientists can't do anything without them! Thank you, economists! Thank you, leaders who are first to say the weird thing! I was thinking in terms of changing the world. Even in those terms, obviously scientists can accomplish a lot. I had just totally not grasped how important non-science things are in getting the benefits of science to people. I had not thought about it much at all. I'm looking at some old ChatGPT rabbit-holes. I miss my divine, artsy astrophysics devotion. 💔︎ My original life plan was, undergraduate integrated master's Astrophysics degree --> Astrophysics PhD --> astronaut for the European Space Agency --> astrophysic