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I am an atheist materialist. There is no God, no "soul," no afterlife; just spacetime, quantum fields, etc. And none of the apologetics I've read, nor religious people I've talked to, have ever convinced me otherwise. I'm saying I'm not capable of perceiving the universe in any other way.
Kind of rules out any religion I've ever heard of, no?
This is something I've gone over in this forum plenty of times, and I'm sure the regulars are all pretty tired of it.
If you want you can try Bostromian Simulation Argument big-tent syncretism: 'your God is a shadow of the Supreme Being, the true creator of our universe'. It's not really a religion, since it has no significant moral teachings. But it does bring a lot of intellectual firepower to the Deist side of things.
Even more ridiculous than classical theism, and more useless than classical Deism, which, IIRC, a number of 18-19th century thinkers pointed out was a sort of "gateway religion" to outright atheism (because a god who doesn't answer prayers might as well not exist).
But the logic does hold. If you're an atheist materialist, why don't you believe that we are in a simulation? That's a perfectly materialist conclusion based on principles we can observe. Bostrom's a pretty smart guy.
Deep down Christians know that their prayers aren't being answered, they can tell that prayer alone won't get them what they want and produce all this cope about how you should be praying to be a better person rather than any concrete outcome. Nor are they using telescopes to look for heaven, somehow they know they won't find it. Still they find some reassurance in the rehashed schizo-prophecies surrounding a 2000-year dead Jew and hope that some day, their prophecies might be resolved and good things will happen. After they die good things they hope good things will happen. And singing hymns is fun.
Well, simulationists can also hope that good things might happen. We might die and wake up from this dream as transcendent, posthuman beings. It's not a hard kind of knowledge, we could be NPCs and be deleted. But there is more weight behind this abstract hope than in theirs, for a certain kind of rational person.
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Unfortunately, your beliefs are wrong. There's probably nothing I can do to convince you, except to say I have direct experiential evidence that I cannot square with nonexistence of god.
I did get to this point starting from agnostic materialism. Assume there are no souls. Assume there is nothing special about human brains. You're having an experience right now, how does that work? As far as I can tell, something to do with information processing... why would that be unique to human brains? What is it like to be a bat? Why unique to brains at all? What is it like to be a tree? What is it like to be an interconnected global financial system? Connect two or more "conscious" information systems, is the resulting system conscious? What if you connect ALL information systems?
Impossible to know. We cannot ever know the experience of being any sort of thing other than our particular selves.
The only known "conscious" information systems are human minds, and there's no real way to "connect" them — except imperfect channels like language — such as to form a "resulting system."
And none of this undermines materialism or points to the existence of any kind of higher power, nor any kind of afterlife.
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Is there anything stopping you from passably faking a Christian reawakening?
Well, first, it would need to be a "Christian awakening" that I'd need to fake, not a "reawakening."
But more directly, the same thing that kept me from passably faking being left-wing, no matter how much it might have improved various prospects in my life — being too much on the autism spectrum to believably fake feelings and conceal my true beliefs. That and integrity, like @KingOfTheBailey says.
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I think my mind runs in similar grooves, and the answer is: integrity. Integrity matters: would you want to date or marry someone who is lying about something so fundamental? Would you want to carry a lie like that for years, knowing what would happen if the secret got out?
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