You know how it feels like the world is specifically designed to torture people and cause as much suffering as possible, i.e., hellworld?

That's because it is.

Assume for the sake of argument that we live in a simulation within a simulation with in a simulation, etc. because a sufficiently advanced civilization will eventually produce a simulation of civilization, which will produce its own simulations, and so on. Basically, we are Sims in somebody's hyper-advanced computer.

The particular simulation we're in was designed as a torture world, exactly like season 1 of The Good Place. In the same way that some people who play the actual Sims game kill their Sims by making them swim in a pool and then deleting the ladder out of the pool, this world we live in is literally designed to cause suffering. Some of the people in it -- the ghouls, the most powerful people -- literally aren't real and are part of the simulation (just like the demons in The Good Place), but most of the people are real and their suffering is real (insofar as anything that's nested within layers of simulation can be "real").

The challenge is not to kill yourself. If you die of natural causes, maybe that's how you get out and finally can rest. But if you kill yourself -- which the world is designed to make you want to do -- you get entered back into the simulation and you live again, over and over and over, in a flat circle.

    • Sarcasm24 [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      ah, that makes sense. i was raised catholic so i really have no conception of what protestants are like or what they believe or how to differentiate between them. i guess a tradition that began in part to allow people to re-interpret scripture in their own way inevitably splinters into a million different interpretations, all of which are extremely similar but are perceived as very different

        • Sarcasm24 [none/use name]
          ·
          4 years ago

          I suppose the descendants of the original Protestants basically think they've found the correct interpretation of scripture, and that discussing other interpretations is inherently a waste of time. Like, they perceive the process of interpretation as one that has already finished, whereas Catholics (and maybe Orthodox as well although I know next to nothing about Orthodoxy) see it as never-ending and therefore worth discussing.

          I'm not Catholic at all anymore, except in the subconscious way that the religion you're raised with sticks with you and impacts you for the rest of your life. We went to Mass every week and I went to 13 years of Catholic school so I'm still pretty steeped in the Catholic worldview, but I don't believe any of their theological or ontological arguments. Frankly I find the idea of having a personal relationship with the omnipotent creator of the universe a bit strange -- why would he care about us?