I always thought of you as the Heavenly Father, and all this time I’ve been praying to a committee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This should feel different. It’s not faith any more, after all. It’s science. It’s, it’s evidence-based<\/em> as they like to say. Before, I could just talk to you; it never occurred to me to wonder how you’d hear my small voice out of all these billions. I think maybe part of me was hoping you wouldn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But now there’s a mechanism. We’re all just numbers now, that’s all we’ve ever been. These thoughts in my head are just math and state variables and logic gates. If that’s true \u2014 and what kind of flat-earther would deny it, after five years of merciless confirmation? \u2014 then the model can be frozen between one tick of the system clock and the next. The whole universe could have stopped dead a split-second ago, you could have poked around to your heart’s content. In the space between one breath and the next, you could have read every thought sparking in every creature in the universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe you plot my soul on some kind of graph, shame on one axis, remorse on another. Maybe you can see every x about to tip over into y. You know what my next thought is going to be, and the thought after. Math is deterministic, after all. And when you’ve seen enough, you can just \u2014 start the cosmos up again and wander off for a coffee, and you don’t even have to hang around to hear the rest of this prayer because you already know how it’s going to end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t care what they call it these days: Handshaking Protocols, NPCUI, OSping, Divinity dialup. It’s still just prayer. I know that, because it feels the same as it always did. Even if nothing else does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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