Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled.
Nothing has changed that view in the ensuing decades.
“Most religions are there to control people and get money from them,” said Dulak, now 76, of Rocheport, Missouri. He also cited sex abuse scandals in Catholic and Southern Baptist churches. “I can’t buy into that,” he said.
I think the God of Spinoza view is a good one to convey to people that want to hold onto something. To say that the whole of existence is the nature of reality is redundant, but that is the answer. We exist because that’s the way things work, so the boundaries of the whole system don’t require a personal deity. The system in a sense is the deity and that waters it down to nothing supernatural. The one thing that I can still get behind is the possibility of simulation theory, which would totally fuck everything up. It is a theory though and not a steadfast belief.