I’m not a huge fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson, but there’s a quote of his that I like: “The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.” The deeper you go into science (specifically physics, but really any field of science), the less intuitive sense it makes. Real science is light-years more complicated than the “lies-to-children” that we were taught in grade school science class, and most of us will never get to the level where we can understand half of it. Unless you’re a scientist, then everything you know about physics or chemistry or biology is a watered-down, oversimplified, allegorical approximation of a concept. If you do end up doing research into any of these fields, you’ll quickly find out that reality does not work the way you think it does. There are more questions than answers, and many of the answers operate by rules that are so far outside the scope of reality as our brains understand it, that normal logic does not and cannot apply.
The same is true on the religious side of things: the deeper you go into it, the less sense it makes. The gods are weird, eldritch things that don’t think or act like humans, but we perceive them as being humanlike because that’s easier for us. The spiritual world doesn’t operate according to the logic of the world we’re currently living in, so we filter it through ideas and symbols that we do understand; most religions have an entire system’s worth of stories, rituals, and theologies to explain this weirdness and complexity in ways that the average person can easily understand.
For example, Heaven and Hell is a lie-to-children. It’s easily understandable, and very satisfying to our human minds, to believe that we’ll go to Heaven if we’re good and Hell if we’re bad. But that’s a heavily oversimplified idea that does more to scare and control people on Earth than it does to prepare them for the afterlife. A more accurate way of describing the afterlife might be an enormous port city with different kinds of transportation leading off in all different directions, and everyone has a different destination depending on a lot of personal factors (many of which aren’t even relevant while you’re on Earth). Some people might go up to higher planes, some might go down to lower ones, some might reincarnate, some might ascend to godhood, some might go places and do things that we don’t have any way of comprehending. And describing the afterlife like this is still an oversimplification, because calling it a “port city” is still using a familiar, human metaphor to describe something that is fundamentally unfamiliar and inhuman. If you see visions of the afterlife, chances are they’ll be filtered through the lens of whatever religion you practice, because that’s a lot easier to make sense of than whatever the real truth is.
The answers are similar for almost every other big question. Here’s some of the answers that I’ve gotten to big questions:
Is God one, or many? Yes. Here’s a metaphor about trees and leaves, or different parts of the body, or something, because that’s easier for you to understand than to try to explain how something can be both singular, infinite, and a multiplicity all at the same time.
Are we bound by fate, or do we have free will? Well you see, there’s this web — actually, it’s not a web, it’s more like a nervous system, but it’s not that either, so we’re just going to call it a web — that has a infinite number of branching “pathways” that show the trajectory of every decision you or anyone else has ever made, and how those decisions affect everything else, and how other factors beyond your control affect everything else, and how the gods affect everything else, and how everything else affects everything else. All of those things interact in all of these complicated ways. We can see it all from our vantage point, so we know where it’s all going and why, but that doesn’t negate your ability to make your own choices. So once again, the answer is “Yes.”
Why does God allow suffering? See above. We care about you, but we don’t even notice your little instances of suffering becuase they’re so brief and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. If you ask us to relieve it for you, we don’t really get why.
…and so on.
That’s why myths are useful; even if they’re not literally true, they use symbolism and allegory to help the audience understand the nuances of the concept that it’s trying to convey. Zeus does not literally make it storm (because thunder and lightning are a result of static discharge that builds up in clouds), but the storm is a symbol or expression of what Zeus is as a concept, or as an entity. If you can see through the story to what it’s really trying to convey, you get a little closer to the truth. In other words, the wackier it gets, the closer to the bullseye you are. And you still aren’t that close, just by virtue of being human.
That’s all to say, embrace the weirdness! It’s a sign that you’re on the right track.
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