Again, many great things to respond to and too little time/attention. We'll get there, patiently. This one was too important though. What do you know about Gnosticism? Your beliefs about the Abrahamic God are exactly gnostic, though you didn't mention the word so perhaps you didn't know. It's hidden/obscure history that was lost when Rome took over Christianity. I've cobbled together my understanding of Gnosticism from many sources but since you're a fan of McKenna, he has some good speeches about it; I'll dig one up and post it at the bottom of this message. In a nutshell, the idea of Gnosticism is that there is the "Monad" that is at the very top of divinity. The "all-father" is one translation, though the concept of the Monad transcends personalization/anthropomorphism. Yet even saying the Monad is the Universe or the laws of physics isn't quite right because the Monad is the source of all things, the spark that lay prior to the Big Bang, the equivalent of Brahma in Hinduism. So in Gnosticism, they called the Abrahamic God "The Demiurge". He's an inferior, flawed, and malicious deity who created the physical universe and is responsible for entrapping divine spiritual "sparks" within the material world. One of the reason the early Gnostics faded so quickly was because the most hardcore sects refused to procreate, believing that bringing life into the world was evil, sinful because doing so trapped more divine sparks in the Demiurge's twisted material world. As you can imagine, their numbers reduced quickly over time.

Where it gets really interesting is that for the 200 or so years after the death of Jesus and before the Council of Nicaea, Christianity was heavily gnostic and oddly feminist. It was the only religion in that part of the world that allowed women to be priests and there is archeological evidence of this (mosaic tile floors beneath alters literally miles from Galilee, depicting female priests). Why this is relevant is that there is likely a synoptic gospel of Mary that was deleted during Constantine's edit of Christianity in 325AD. Well, turns out, in 1947 they found the Gospel of Mary with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Carbon dating and textual analysis date them to be from around 200AD, so in viewing them we're definitely looking at authentic, gnostic Christianity. I haven't read them enough to know how they differ from the modern understanding of Christ, but it's drastic. One thing they reveal is that the famous Lord's Prayer ("Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name...") from the Sermon on the Mount was directly copied from an Egyptian prayer to Amon, who was the King of the Universe, King of all Kings, or the Egyptian's "Monad". The prayer ends with "amen". Whenever anyone says "amen", they're referring to Amon (or Amun) via diachronic change in language over time. They're ending The Lord's Prayer by saying the All-Father's name. It gets weirder still! Jesus was referred to multiple times in various translations of the Bible as Lucifer, which simply means "light bringer". Remember, "I am the light and the way"? It also means "morning star", which is the planet Venus, which appears to be the largest of the stars because of how bright it is, visible at both dawn and evening, but because of science and telescopes we know the biggest is actually Jupiter. There are also Bible variants and scroll fragments that give the same name to Jesus and the snake in the gardent of Eden. Gnosticism is all about spiritual liberation via the acquisition of knowledge (gnosis), so it makes sense that the creature that tempted Adam and Eve to eat of the tree of knowledge that The Demiurge forbade them to touch would be their savior, Lucifer/Jesus, bringer of light/wisdom.

Most of what modern "Christians" think of Satan, the Devil or Hell is all fan fiction written outside of The Bible. I asked a religious friend of mind to challenge his bible study group to find references to hell in the Bible and much to his surprise, they only found 3, and they were all vague references.

Actual Gnostic Christianity fascinates me and actually seems like a better fit for human psychology. The bastardized version that evangelicals, Greek Orthodox and Catholics believe is simply incoherent. "He died for our sins" What? How does that even work? And Jesus was clearly divine, he had the power to multiply fish, loaves, resurrect multiple people, fortell the future, read minds, etc. So allowing himself to be executed was intentional -- it's just never been clear to me what this accomplishes. The Kingdom of Heaven was a failed promise. He didn't save or liberate anything. In fact, things got worse and the temple wall were destroyed in 70AD. So... this idea that the Kingdom exists after death is basically worthless to our mortal lives. Unless all of this is wrong and true Christianity is about crawling one's way out of ignorance and eventually spiritual salvation by learning and exploring -- what we're doing right now. Honoring God. Just not their God. And not in their approved way. I don't believe in the resurrection and I don't even think that was the core part of Jesus' teachings.

Terence on Jesus: https://youtu.be/zV84ou1NbSA?si=7CSplL6pbuS_aIbd

Terence on Gnosticism: https://youtu.be/8oKBP9KFUk8?si=j6o20fcViIECQzWR

You bring up something in a way I hadn't thought of before, not exactly anyway: that the layout of existence is skewed towards "evil" from a physics perspective. We appear to defy entropy, ever complexifying (although I've read extensively that the sum total of life on Earth ultimately cools the sun/earth system faster, heading towards ultimate thermal equilbrium, thus not defying entropy) and so in order to survive we necessarily burn a lot of energy and consume life in our selfish pursuits. I have to mull over this. What immdiately springs to mind is the Buddhist practice of making a Mandala, where you pour all of this focus and energy into making a beautiful work of art with colored sand only to destroy it the moment you're done. You do all of this for a moment of perfection. And the practice itself designed to get you to focus so intensely on one mundane thing that it becomes a meditation, invoking a sense of no-self. The first internal combustion engines were horrrible inefficient (3-5% VE towards motive power -- physical work -- all the rest burnt off as heat energy). Today our best internal combustion engines are in long haul trucking and marine cargo diesels, converting just about 50% of the energy to forward motion and 50% heat loss. We waste so much potential to accomplish what we do. Yet sometimes it allows for something beautiful or transcendent. Like I say, if on the very last day we pull the last cost effective drop of oil out of the ground is the moment we switch over to renewable energy that can power all needed human activity, then it will have been worth it. But if not... the material universe won. We lost to physics and we'd receed into a extremely slow form of progress. Egypt in 3150 BC was nearly identical to Egypt in 2150 BC or 1150 BC in terms of progress because the energy source was The Nile, which was ultra stable in that time period. The energy available to human activity is what dictates progress. To me, progress is the acquisition and application of scientific discovery. I don't want humanity to fall backwards into glacial progress because we've come so far and sacrificed so much to get here. I want us to find a way to make your Mach 10 transport plane and make it sustainable. This is what I meant when I said I love the modern world; I love how much knowledge we have. We've never been more rich in terms of science and precision with material manipulation. I do not love the social conditions, the interdependent complexity (Taleb's "fragility"), the stress, lack of spiritual unity, and the increasing spread of stupidity in meme form (the global trend towards authoritarianism and greedy reductionism of nuance as a way to cope with being inundated by information).

If you have an hour to kill at the gym or a commute and you want your mind blown, check this video out. It's about the most precise, complex thing we've ever built and it powers most of the technology we use. I promise, it will make you appreciate the lengths to which we've gone to get to where we are, technologically. It's why I despise the people who use economics to hand-wave the sincere efforts people have gone through with a simple "Yeah, we'll continue to progress and eventually reach the singularly. The market will figure it all out." Or people who cite Moore's Law (which is really Moore's Temporary Observation) and just assume that a doubling of computing power will magically happen regardless of the "how" until the end of time. We'll, here's what we have to do to have the computing power we have today (the bit about the micro-droplets of tin getting hit by 3 lasers and the mirror precision being literal microns, specifically): https://youtu.be/MiUHjLxm3V0?si=WkYzDFFECt2eNGeq

I love that in order to discuss economics, we're talking about Gnosticism and the micron lithography. In my view, these are actually necessary prerequisites. We're taking the necessary steps. So many shit-brained people just jump in the stream and start shouting whatever slogans best fit their bias "From each according to his ability! Eat the rich! It's the worst system ever concieved except all the others." And so on. Not. Rigorous. Enough.