One’s Belief in Free Will Defines His Politics

We love to make fun of the ridiculous beliefs people had in the past. They
used to think that demons caused disease? It’s germs, silly! The sun doesn’t
orbit us, you cretans! It’s a heliocentric solar system! Sheesh. We’re so
smart. They’re so dumb.

Yeah, not really.

In fact, relative to how deluded most people on this planet still are today,
the beliefs above aren’t that silly at all. Said differently, the distance
we still have to cross to get from our current belief systems to reality,
compared to the distance we’ve come so far, is quite large.

Here are 3 reasons we’ll be considered intellectually archaic by our
ancestors:

1. We still believe in free will. The notion makes precisely zero
   sense when exposed to any degree of scientific scrutiny or objective
   consideration. We believe it because we feel it and we want to believe
   it, not because we have any evidence of it. And in fact we have mounting
   evidence to the contrary. This matters because horrible concepts like
   deserving hatred, or scorn, or retribution–these all rely on the
   concept of free will. The sooner we
   accept reality
   on this point the sooner we become a better humanity.

2. We still believe in life after death. This might as well be gods
   causing rainstorms. It really is that bad. Organized religion and the
   primitive beliefs that accompany it are vestiges of our primitive past.
   Don’t believe me? Imagine looking a visiting alien in the face, after he
   arrived as part of a 76-billion civilization survey project, and tell
   him some extraordinary percentage of the world’s population believes
   that Jesus performed the ultimate sacrifice by dying for us…when he’s
   not even dead. Add in all the slavery and stoning bits and you’ll get a
   blank look right before he writes something on his clipboard.

3. We still waste our adult lives in pursuit of money. We start off
   as children, full of wonder, enchanted by beautiful and interesting
   things. And then we die at around age 18. We’re told to buck up and
   become adults, which means spend two thirds of your life either asleep
   or in the equivalent of a coal mine so that someone can make a dollar.
   Oh, and the other third is spent consuming content. Crappy
   content. TV. Movies. Dreck. We’re not creating art, we’re not sharing
   beautiful things. We’re asleep at the wheel, wasting the one life we
   get.

So yeah, when you’re being rated by someone 1,000 years from now, and they
read a Facebook post you wrote about how stupid it was for people to believe
that inanimate objects had souls, the joke will be on you because you still
think you have one.

The beliefs above are step 0 toward actual awareness, and virtually nobody
has even started.