Quantum Religion

In an era in which all of the easy religions have already been invented... I will walk you through the process of inventing your own religion. What follows is the process of me creating a sample religion. Please feel free to follow the steps and make your own!

The fundamental purpose of religion is to make people feel better about themselves, to explain the inexplicable, to punish the bad, and to protect us against the frightening thought of oblivion after death. There are two exceptions to this rule: the first is Bokononism, a fictional religion in Cat’s Cradle, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut. The second exception is atheism, a real religion (although atheists will never admit it), based on the principle that all religions are inherently impossible to disprove, and so are invalid as theories, and so are therefore proven to be wrong, and so the only logical conclusion is that there is nothing but oblivion after death. Atheism makes most people sad, even practitioners of atheism, so we’re going to overlook the tenets of atheism when we design our religion today.

Let us start with the most important aspect of any religion: explaining the nature of things. The nature of things is inextricably intertwined with the immortality scenario, so we will have to take both concepts at once. Combined, these two make for quite a formidable first step. We can’t use repeated reincarnation seeking, ultimately, to achieve nirvana, that's taken already. And we can’t use the heaven/hell/purgatory concept. We could rename heaven and hell and give them some new characteristics. Perhaps promiscuous sex is ok in our religion, and good people go to “Sexyland” instead of “Heaven.” But it’s important to make people feel like our religion isn’t encouraging unhappy behavior, like adultery. Plus, the "Big Love" Mormons pretty much have the promiscuity thing down, at least from the guy's point of view, and they even thought to wrap it up in marriage so it doesn't seem too indecent. We can't improve on that formula, so we'll have to find another way.

Perhaps we need to approach the problem from a different angle. It is important to remember that religions are at their most effective when they are explaining something that baffles just about everyone. Example: the Roman and Greek Gods were pretty great back when we didn’t know what caused crops to grow and the sun to rise and fall. But now that those things are explained in no uncertain terms, there’s not much appeal left to the Sun God or the Goddess of the Harvest. So what’s the latest inexplicable stuff? Quantum physics! There it is. I just know you were skimming through, waiting for me to come around to quantum physics, and so I have. I think I speak for everyone whose brain isn’t larger than their actual head when I say that pretty much everything involved with quantum physics is so confusing that it might as well be completely inexplicable. So let’s try to explain quantum physics in religious terms, and throw in an immortality scenario somehow.

Here, it’s important to remember something else. If we want our religion to be popular, it has to be something that a reasonable portion of the population has heard of, and can relate to on some level. Unfortunately, that rules out just about every aspect of quantum physics. It does, however, leave us with a pretty famous cat: Schrödinger’s Cat. Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian theoretical physicist who did his work around the same time as Einstein. Schrödinger hypothesized that if you rig up a box so that it has a random chance to release cyanide gas to the inside, put a cat inside, and close the box to all forms of observation, then the cat is neither alive nor dead. Instead, the cat is simply a waveform of probabilities. Or something. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, “what?” But remember that Schrödinger was much smarter than you or I, so let’s accept, for a moment, that a cat in a closed box is not a dead cat or a living cat, but the waveform probability of a dead or living cat. What does this mean for our religion? It means we have something to explain: what does the cat experience while it is existing as a probability for you and me? For our experience clearly shows that we do not become waveforms when nobody is observing us. 

Now it is our job as a religion to give a plausible, nice sounding answer. In order for the cat to exist as a probability for us, but continue to exist in the conventional sense as well, there must be two parallel universes: one in which the cat lives and one in which the cat dies. The cat experiences only the universe in which it lives. A new universe is born to contain the probability of the other outcome. Whether the cat is alive or dead when we open the box is a function of whether the cat’s conscience moves to the new universe or stays in the old universe. This actually has the unexpected benefit of syncing up with another quantum theory - that there are an infinite number of universes existing beside our own. In fact, there's a handy name readily available for this phenomenon: the Multiverse. Nice.

It’s a short step from here to our immortality scenario. All humans, a microsecond before their potential death, also exist to everyone around them as a probability, rather than a living or dying human. As the bullet flies towards your heart, another universe spontaneously appears to contain the probability that a random twitch shifts you, and a death-wound becomes a grazed shoulder. Subsequently, your consciousness is transferred to this new universe just as “you” die in your former universe. If you are placed in a box, and cyanide gas is pumped in, another universe is born to house the microscopic possibility that you are released at the last second by a heroic law enforcement officer. This even applies to old age: immediately before your body fails in your sleep, another universe springs into existence in which you somehow reverse the aging process (perhaps the fountain of youth geysers forth from beneath your bed). What this all means is that every death you’ve seen or heard of was nothing more than the transition of that person’s consciousness to another universe. This gives us a very powerful right to use the phrase "passing on" as a euphemism for "dying." Or we could call it "transititioning."

One wrinkle here is that if we transition into another universe in which immortality becomes a reality, those loved ones that transitioned before us will still be gone. The best part about the idea of heaven, arguably, is meeting everyone up there when it's all over, and having a big party. That our immortality scenario lacks this is a problem. But one we can fix, thanks to the inexorable march of technology. Cloning technology exists, and given a few more decades will probably be refined pretty well. Once we have embraced this religion, we will be forced to accept that there are millions of copies, in the Multiverse, of everybody we know. Given that knowledge, it would be hard to worry about an individual having a soul. Our own consciousness is certainly unique, and we can call it a soul if we want. But our conscious copy in a different world will also have a soul of his own. In other words, it's not only OK to clone a dead loved one, but it will end up being a desirable action (more on this later).

So far, from a perspective of morality, our religion has done nothing but justify murder. That's certainly not ok. So the next thing on the religion-making agenda: punishing the evil. There are many possibilities for us here. It's a good place, though, to include another inexplicable phenomenon: ghosts. Everyone knows about ghosts, and whether they believe ghosts are real or not, setting up our religion to explain ghosts ought to hook a few people.

So here we go. Your consciousness, aka your soul, has a certain capacity for doing evil deeds before it becomes unable to transition to the next universe. When you’ve done too many evil deeds, your consciousness becomes unable to move on: it is trapped in the universe of its body’s death. However, we've already established an immortal soul of sorts, so the dead can't just cease to be. But nor can they be rewarded with the ability to transition on. So the souls of the evil are stuck in the world of their body's death, but outside of the body itself (let us say that your consciousness has run out of “karma”). It has become a ghost: unable to interact properly with the universe around it, and also unable to move on to the new universe that its death has created. If the evil the ghost has committed allows for redemption, then perhaps that new universe will not be created until some time in the future, when the ghost has done his or her penance for all that evil.

The final and most important function of our religion: feeling good about ourselves. Outside of punishing the evil and making everyone immortal, we have this category of religion-making. It involves catchy rituals and traditions. So where do we start? What makes our religion unique? The Multiverse. Our infinite universes have created something rather unheard of: every time somebody dies in our universe, a new universe springs up for them to move on to. What happens to us, the observers? When our friend transitions by falling off a building, we go to his funeral and cry. However, our friend gets up, miraculously unharmed, dusts himself off, and goes to the phone to call us. But how can we answer the phone if we are at his funeral? It is not quite us that answers the phone. The answer is that we are cloned: a new consciousness, identical to our own, inhabits our new body in the new universe. Each conscious mind evolves separately from then on, but this means there are infinite clones of us running around in the Multiverse, each closer to us than family. So what makes us feel good? Each night, before bed, we engage in prayer. Instead of calling it that, we'll call it “hope meditations.” What we do is spend a few minutes wishing for good fortune to each version of ourselves in the Multiverse, as well as good fortune to each of our loved ones' clones in every facet of the Multiverse. What could feel better than having good thoughts for infinite people? And as we spread the religion, we come to know that all of our clones also practice it, and we know that infinite people are having infinite good thoughts for ourselves. Loving infinite copies of ourselves and our loved ones, and in turn receiving love from that same infinite number of conscious entities. Infinite love: the Christian God of unlimited love hasn’t got anything on our new faith: Multiversal Schrodingerinity.