I am terrified of eternal oblivion and nihilism. Materialism is so terrifying.
I only want christian answers to my post, please.
So, why am I terrified of the idea of materialism being true?
I am terrified of the idea that, as Hume said, the self is an illusion created by our memories. This is the ultimate conclusion of materialism, the idea that you don't actually exist, you are a randomly generated clump of atoms.
If this is the case, and all of our actions are determined by these tiny colored balls connected with tiny grey tubes bumping into eachother, if atheists actually took this opinion seriously, it would be pure chaos. Most would kill themselves, many would stop taking things like love seriously because at the end of the day it would be all randomly generated biology that is the conclusion of purely random events since 14 billion BC. There would be no need to do anything, any human accomplishment would be boiled down to purely casual arrangements of liquids in brain tubes.
Morality would just be itself a randomly generated brain process. We would be unable to live because we can't trust our own brain chemicals to tell us they are chemicals. This is why I have been tempted into ending it all despite being 17. I have genuinely lost the motivation not to sin because I can't, due to my OCD anxiety, brush off the idea that nothing matters at the end of the day and that in 100,000 years we will all be dead and forgotten.
We would be an eldritch horror of an accident. The only randomly generated machine in the entire universe that has realized it's a machine. Alone in a gigantic ocean of space, with no sign of anyone being out there. Probably alone in the entire galaxy.
No atheistic philosophy can calm me down because it's all just the product of other determined machines like me, coping their way into not making the biological robot crash. Eternal oblivion is a horrifying idea.
The science is not conclusive either. Nobody knows whether split brain patients have a sentient clone of themsleves in the right hemisphere or if they are still one person. Nobody knows whether a sense of self is a random brain organ. Nobody knows whether NDEs are actual evidence of the afterlife. People who claimed to have genuine spiritual experiences can tell what they saw but they cannot replicate the experience to make you believe. All I know is that most scientists are atheists and ultimately nihilists.
At this point my only hope is to get a supernatural experience but I can't ask one.
Sometimes I have genuinely considered ending it all (but I never will because of my tiny amount of hope), just to see whether there was someone (even if i went to hell i would have known for a second that God was real) or nothing.
Posted Aug 12, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC