If I had to summarize the difference between religion and not being religious in a few sentences, I would say something like this:

Being religious means that you literally can’t believe that you are alive. I am alive, I can breathe—I can’t believe that this all works and how it works.

There are two ways to look at life.

This is how a sound falls into my ear.
I literally can see my thoughts.
It’s like having a force field around me.
My brain works like a radio play.

At a fundamental level, this universe is unbelievably elegant. The smartest one determines the strengths of the key. This rotates, and it picks the best one, so our universe is not judgmental in that sense. Also, it’s an unbelievable test of faith. It’s like the universe saying: you have the lock in your own hand, but you can press me as hard as you can. You are also pressing all the opinions of everybody around you, which makes the key even stronger.

Buddhism makes two (catastrophical) mistakes:

  • Distancing too much: it’s like those Chinese puzzles—in order to solve it, you first have to take a step forward, you have to connect. Having pain? Go towards that part of your body.
  • Under-identifying with thoughts. I say: overidentify with all your thoughts. Treat them like birds flying in your own head. They are yours. They are partly you.

Nothing in this world is binary, and nothing is deterministic.
Determinism sounds logical if all you do is use binary logic. If you stop doing that, a new world opens, where determinism is not the only possibility.

From the Other Side of the Fence

Let’s think of the most natural things that exist in our universe: animals, plants, humans. Life as it should be—making mistakes, but individually unbelievably beautiful.

Computers are on the other end of the spectrum. Computers don’t do anything wrong, but they symbolize everything that often goes wrong, like a lack of communication between people—impersonal, a safe shelter from feelings of discomfort—and on top of that, they are made from silicon, aluminum, and plastic.

So, if your perspective is “life and nature,” you may see computers as pure evil—especially if you hear that somebody is building a supercomputer that’s going to take over the world.

I think this is very confusing if you are a scientist working on AI. You like what you do, and you believe you are doing good from your perspective. But from the other side of the fence, people don’t like you.