From high school up until my mid-20s, I had typical atheist beliefs on life after death. At the time, I was able to be calm with the prospect of nonexistence and believed it was fair, since I was thinking mostly of myself, my friends, and people in the modern developed world, who usually live long and fulfilled lives and are ready to rest afterwards.

However, the concept of everyone getting nonexistence has felt more and more unfair to me the past several years as I’ve learned more about the history of the world.

All kinds of societies have practiced human sacrifice. Which would mean the victims would go: short and usually painful life —> extremely painful death —> permanent nonexistence. Is that fair? Where do they get to cash in or get pleasure? Nowhere.

My faithlessness has also been tested by movie characters such as Trevor in Pay It Forward. Was it fair for him (or a real-life person like him) to get nonexistence after 15 years, a good contribution to philanthropy, and almost no rewards? Absolutely not in my opinion.

My mind is having trouble sitting still on this anymore, and I’m considering officially becoming a Unitarian Universalist because of their doctrine that everyone can get to success.

I still don’t believe in a literal fluffy-cloud heaven, but I do think there are physics-based ways in which living again is possible, e.g., the Poincaré recurrence theorem or spontaneous quantum decreases in entropy. Heaven, in my mind, is nothing more than someone who got dealt a bad hand being given a chance to try again.

This in mind, do you guys think UU is a good choice for me? Do these beliefs jive with those that are followed by UUs?

I’m also a gay man and appreciate the “kindness and volunteering” aspects of religion and spirituality but not usually the “moral code” ones, and I know UU heavily emphasizes the former.

Stay strong against all the craziness ahead.

- AM702

Las Vegas, NV, USA