Salutations, mad ablations! Gracious me is it a beautiful day here in Berkeley. From what I hear, Colorado is getting dumped on right now, so it’s amusing to look up and not see a single cloud in the sky. Ah hold on, I believe something I said needs clarifying. Within a certain subset of the Colorado population, the term “getting dumped on” means that Colorado is getting a ton of snow. One of the many lessons I’ve learned in California is that Colorado lingo, or mountain lingo in general (like “fourteener”) is not universal knowledge, so I don’t want to confuse any of you Californians or other non-Coloradans with my strange vernacular.

I happen to be sitting in the Earth Sciences and Maps Library on campus, which I mention only because this is only my second time in this library, so this is my formal proof to the universe that I’m trying to keep my life interesting. Ooh, something else: I decided on a whim to come to this here library, so I guess I’m becoming “spontaneous.” Gracious me. If I’m not careful Imma become a Social Sophia here pretty soon. That’s just not good for business. I’ll have to make a note to further limit my social interactions this week.

Now then, before I go any further, I would like give a big, huge, very large, and unrequested shoutout to Kathy #Last Name Redacted for Security Purposes#. Kathy #Last Name Redacted for Security Purposes# noticed that I was falling behind on posts, and she tossed me an email asking what the frickedy frick I was doing not regularly posting to XFA. Quite honestly, I didn’t think anyone would notice, so Kathy #Last Name Redacted for Security Purposes# is really just an American Hero in my eyes.

Hmm. As long as I’m on the plug train, I’m going to plug one more thing. Sahale, I think you’ve been reading this blog, so just to let you and anyone else from FTO know, I watched y’all’s movie this Tuesday, and it was really quite spectacular. For all of you unfamiliar with Free Burma Rangers, I don’t think I can do their organization justice with my simple words, so go look them up, and if you can find it, watch the Free Burma Rangers documentary. I can assure you that it will be a much better use of your time than reading any of my silly, silly posts. I know I tend to be a bit…dramatic in these posts, but if you take nothing else away from this post, you gots to watch the Free Burma Rangers Documentary. The work they do is objectively magnificent.

It seems irreverent to jolt the conversation back onto myself after any mention of FBR, but hey, this be my blog, and so help me, I shall keep universal jurisdiction over this content if it’s the last thing I do. So then, we’re going to shift gears from social justice to silly, silly research at Berkeley.

Those of you keeping up to date with my posts will know that I have taken on a position studying Quark Gluon Plasma at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Now I know the nerdiness of the term “Quark Gluon Plasma” make roughly 1/3 of you want to flee, so let me give a brief extremely technical overview of what QGPs (Quark Gluon Plasmas) are. Basically, you start out with standard matter, so we’re talking like sandwiches, puppers, small goats, really anything you can see or touch (or physically interact with). You break the matter down into really, really small parts, which nerdy nerds like to call “particles,” because, I don’t know, a lack of imagination? Now then, you got a bunch of small bois, but to turn it into a QGP, you got to heat it up. A lot. Like to 10 Trillion degrees. So your standard toaster oven isn’t going to do the trick.

Holy cow, I’m pandering. Ahhhh this is gross. I can feel myself trying to change the way I write to ingratiate myself with a specific subset of my wee audience. You can’t get me that easily, small subset of my wee audience! Let me take a deep breath. Ok we’re better now.

Enough of that toaster oven garbage. Basically you throw small particles into a $4 billion dollar particle collider, and you literally just start spinning the small bois in a big loop. Once they get moving fast enough, you make them run into each other, and even then, the conditions have to be just right to actually form a QGP. I believe the term I used for QGP in a previous post was “hot bois.” That’s actually pretty accurate.

That’s what I’m supposed to be studying, at least. In reality, I have spent the last TWO AND A HALF WEEKS trying to build a piece of software that I’m supposed to learn about for my research group. TWO FRICKIN WEEKS. Have I been studying the hot bois? Absolutely not. I have been staring at a frikin linux shell tryna get stupid root to not conflict with the stupid g++ header files, and literally getting nothing done.

And the real kicker is (don’t tell my research group), there are so many other things I’d rather be doing than studying hot bois. My time working on Orchid and Super Secret App Project is sacred, and so I have to spend 9 hours a week intently gazing upon a perpetually exploding piece of software.

“Okay buddy,” I hear you say, “calm down. It’s really not that bad.” *deep breath*. You’re right, wise reader. You’re always right. Why don’t I listen to you more often?

Man alive, I got myself on an emotional diatribe again. Amazing how quickly that will happen. You are right, of course, calming reader. It really isn’t too bad. I actually just talked to Barbara (the group leader), and if I can’t get this stupid software to compile, I’m going to bounce on over to a new project. Thank goodness. I basically hate acts-framework’s guts anyway so good riddance.

Enough of me complaining about this incredibly opportunity I have to help further human knowledge in incredible ways. I think now I’m going to talk about research at Berkeley in general.

While stereotyping people is usually an all-around bad practice, I’m going to quickly put Berkeley’s population into two main groups. You got the STEM people, and you got the humanities people. I’m going to talk about the STEM people because I’m really just one of them.

For STEM Berkeleans, research is almost like currency. You got to get it, no matter what it takes. Instead of focusing on what knowledge the research is actually producing, the term “research” has become this vague, nebulous object that you’re either a part of, or you’re not. Somehow, even though it is never explicitly said, Berkeley convinces you that you’re doing something wrong if you don’t manage to get “research” during your time in college. Does it matter what the research is? Certainly not! Does it matter whether it’s in a subject that interests you? Not in Berkeley’s eyes. No, you just got to get it. This is especially true for non-computer science majors, cause you don’t really have to research in CS to land a 6-figure job.

Those of you who actually live in Berkeley may have an entirely different experience than this, but I’m guessing it’s probably fairly similar. This has been my experience at least.

I would, however, like to add several caveats. In my experience, once you actually land a research position, your supervisors are generally very encouraging of you finding the research that most interests you. Also, there is a subset of the Berkeley population, and these are the real heroes, that are actually really, really interested in the stuff they are researching. These are the people I hope will be filling the great Universities of the future.

Now then, coming into college, being a small timid sheep very susceptible to Berkeley’s whisperings, I too became irrationally convinced that the acquisition of research was of principle importance. In my defense, throughout high school I generally lived by the philosophy that I should take any academic opportunity I could get my hands on, so I was a perfect target for Berkeley’s subconscious manipulations.

Anyhooooo, whence upon arriving in the golden state, I quickly began looking for every opportunity to push myself in physics (even though I literally didn’t like physics at the time), and by second semester I had landed myself a cute little URAP position with the ATLAS group at CERN.

Hold on a moment. I just realized that I don’t have a thesis for my current points. Wow I was literally just monologuing about my life. Who wants that? I’m about to hit six pages, so let me think about some conclusion that can be drawn from this little tale. Hmmm. This is hard. Ok I got one.

Maybe, and this is a novel idea, don’t do things just because other people are doing them. I don’t think anyone has ever said that in any context ever in my entire life ever (yes, that was sarcasm you detected). I suppose that adage probably falls under the category of clichés that people say a lot, and then don’t really follow.

Well I suppose I can say something more meaningful. Even though it doesn’t fit into the glorious vision I had in high school of winning a Nobel Prize in Physics, it turns out that I really just enjoy writing software way more than doing physics. Ain’t that the darndest thing.

You know, “Sahale” really is a very good name. Of all the names that a person can have, Sahale is really one of the better ones. I think Sahale might be a mountain in Alaska. Dang, I forgot. Sahale, if you’ve made it to this point, do me a favor and message me about what your parents named you after. Or don’t. You’re probably galivanting around on some mountain right now anyway.

Anyway, for the rest of you, may your knees never lock out, and your backpacks remain intact.

Peace.

Jambo! My oh my have I neglected to write these posts. My glorious vision for XFA was to write a post every single night. Well, guess what. That didn’t work. It turns out life takes time.

It’s truly been a minute since I scratched the metaphorical nub across this metaphorical piece of parchment. What has happened during that time, you ask? Well, non-existent reader, I had various emotional nadirs.

But before that, why did I name this post the way I did? Because, gentlemen and female gentlemen, I am stream of conscious-ing this post like I have never done before. Some of you particularly befuddled readers are probably wondering what the rest of this flippin’ site is if not for a stream of conscious montage, and to that I can say…nothing. You would be absolutely correct.

Who cares? I have a difficult time believing anyone does, so onward to glory, to victory, to death, and the grave (that’s for you Dr. Ridings).

Oh gosh. There is so much coursing through my mind-icles right now. WHERE DO I BEGIN. Oh I know.

So I decided that my life isn’t nearly busy enough, so I have taken on a super-secret project. The person with whom I am working on this particular project wishes that I keep everything hush hush, so to honor her wishes, I won’t divulge any juicy details.

What I will say, however, is that it involves building an app. FRIK YEA. Ya boi ex fizz has been looking to get into the app dev business for a couple and half minutes or three. At one point in high school, I very unsuccessfully tried to start building Android Apps using Android Studio, but that was a cataclysmic failure, mostly cause I didn’t really know Java at the time.

But times have changed, brethren. No longer are we humans confined to the dark ages where people had to write two separate code bases for Android and IOS apps. No, my friends, we hath progressed. Whilst we lay stewing ignorantly in Xcode and Android Studio, the glorious gods of Facebook bestowed upon humanity the most glorious creation man has ever witnessed: React Native. No longer would the common man have to know Objective-C/Swift and Java in order to build a cross-platform application. After the glorious arrival of React Native, humans need only write their codebase in JavaScript, which would then be exported to either IOS or Android Applications.

If any of you reading this are actually app developers, you are probably shaking your slimy heads and grinding your moldy teeth because I’m so behind the times. Yes, I know FB released React Native 4 years ago. Whatever. I don’t care about you haters. Let your boi enjoy the wonders of React Native in peace, OK?

The rest of you probably have literally no idea what the flip shack frack I’m talking about. Look at me go: in one simple paragraph I have lost the attention or respect of app developers and non-app developers alike. For those of you keeping score, that partition of humanity is in fact the entirety of humanity. I guess I’ll just be lonely. I am, after all, alone in my room, typing away at a blog post that very few of my friends will ever read. Ha. Life is just the funniest thing.

Any discussion of my current loneliness provides a wonderful Segway to my next topic: mental health! Oh boy! Because I know the internet is a trustworthy place full of caring, loving individuals, its time to get personal. I, Daniel Matthias Jehoshaphat Geisz, am going to a therapist this Thursday. Apparently, there’s some sort of stigma associated with therapy, but I think I have done such a tremendously laudable job distancing myself from the rest of humanity that I feel rather immune to societal judgement. That is, of course, until someone judges me to my face. Then I’ll just wilt away like a dainty lil’ fuchsia under the gales of a Missouri storm.

Why am I going to a therapist? Well, I suppose that is the question. Many people throughout my life have told me I should see a therapist. Actually, in retrospect, maybe I should have taken offense at that. Eh, who cares. Life is too short to be offended. And, I mean, maybe they were right.

The real reason I’m going to the therapist is because, for a variety of reasons, I took Berkeley’s online screening for bipolar, and my test answers were very consistent with someone who has bipolar. Now then, do I think I think I have a serious case of bipolar? Absolutely not. I happen to know someone with this condition, and I cannot even begin to imagine what bad bipolar is actually like. Be that as it may, I suppose the narcissistic side of me is quite interested in talking to someone about myself and seeing what they have to say. Hopefully it will be…therapeutic. Ha.

I have been quite emotional lately. I suppose now is as good a time as ever to discuss that in some level of detail. Those of you who know me (let’s see, that’s all of you) will probably know that I was raised in a Christian household by my truly wonderful Christian parents, and that I took Christianity very seriously my entire life. My childhood essentially had the effect of baking in a belief in God to my very existence. With this belief in God came a certain belief in the afterlife. Regardless of whether I made it to Heaven or Hell, I was guaranteed existence after death.

Now then, even though I logically decided two months ago that I do not believe in Christianity, my body basically still did. What I mean by that is that for 20 years I became so used to believing in Christianity that my brain wasn’t really emotionally ready to accept my decision, and so I’ve basically been subconsciously believing in the afterlife for these last two months, even though I logically don’t believe in anything.

This all changed this last week, however. My brain was finally ready to accept my change in beliefs, and for the first time, I was forced to emotionally reconcile with the notion that this life might be the only life I get. For those of you out there who don’t believe in the afterlife, this realization is old hat for you. For me however, I was basically stripped of the emotional security I have been carrying with me for 20 years.

Normally, I try not to be too dramatic about my personal problems because that’s literally so annoying, but honestly who the hell is actually reading this? I don’t think I’m going to publicize this post, so I think it’s safe to say it’s going to get about zero views.

To that end, stripping is terrifying. No one likes to strip, particularly when it’s the metaphorical stripping of emotional security. Basically, I was frickin terrified of the future. For those of you fluent in the enneagram, I’m pretty sure I’m a 6, and 6s really don’t like it when you take security away from then.

But, blessed readers, I emerged from that gauntlet like the offspring of a hippocampus and a griffin. The fear of what’s to come has been crippling me…So to your silhouette I turn once more. Gotta love Mumford and Sons. Anyhooooo, this minor emotional setback has really driven home the importance of living in the moment and enjoying the present. Wow I’m original. Slap that on a building and call it a plaque.

Well now. I think that’s enough stream of conscious for one night. I’ve been trying to get to bed earlier anyway, so tonight’s going to be a win, win, win. A phat W, if you will. An upside-down M, if you won’t.

Best of luck with all your endeavors, and may no goblins attempt to lick your pinky toes.

Bon-frikin-jour, brethren! What a week it has been. Last night my housemate and I journeyed into San Francisco to see the SF Symphony perform Saint-Saens’ Organ Symphony among other pieces. The Organ Symphony has a special place in my heart because:

1. Saint-Saens was a musical sorcerer and everything he touched is distilled platinum.
2. I myself played the Organ Symphony back in my glorious bassoon days, and I know the piece in and out. Listening to it performed live is remarkably similar to the feeling of seeing an old friend.

This schmeag named Jean-Yves Thibaudet debuted a spicy, spicy tango concerto for piano which was also quite fun. Monsieur Thibaudet is apparently one of the sauciest pianists still trotting, but I certainly hadn’t heard of him before this concert. Perhaps I need to make a better effort to remain attached to the culture of classical music. Perhaps not.

Now then, onto Orchid! Gracious me. I just looked at the Orchid project, and to my general horror I have only posted one piece about Orchid. This is slightly egregious because Orchid is hands down my most time-consuming personal project right now (aside from Project Supernatural, which implicitly consumes several hours per day), and literally the whole point of XFA is to document such endeavors. Perhaps I should just drop all pretenses of XFA being anything other than a brain dump for me. That would certainly be easier to explain in person. Eh, I like it as it is.

So what’s the latest news with Orchid, you ask? I think I’ll give a bit of an update as to my general progress, and then I shall give an account about how this project is affecting my life.

Superficially, Orchid has changed very little since I last posted. Actually, it literally doesn’t even properly compile, so to the untrained eye it may appear that I’m doing everything all wrong. However, if you take a peep under the hood into the code base, you’ll see an expansive evolving architecture for this project. You may remember from previous posts when I was noisily complaining about Orchid being the most organizationally challenging project on which I have ever worked. Well, blessed readers, nothing has changed. I’m not gonna lie. This is hard.

For my own personal gratification, I will now give a bit of an overview on how this project is working from a software perspective. If you consider yourself above computer science nerds, by all means, skip these next paragraphs and go to the part of the story where I tell the tale of Orchid provoking emotional breakdowns.

If you read the first post, you will know that one of my principal goals for Orchid is for it to look really good. Like Latex, for those of you who are familiar. This, in practice, is very difficult to accomplish. At the beginning of the project, I had to make the very big decision about how I want to actually render the math onto the application window. This is tricky, because I need the computer to be able to tell what mathematical terms are being clicked, which means the computer has to know where the terms are being rendered on the screen. This isn’t a problem if you’re using a text editor, and the computer only has to worry about one line of text. It is a problem if you’re trying to allow for more complicated mathematical expressions that aren’t linear in writing.

Because I really am trying to avoid reinventing the wheel as much as possible, I ended up settling on a slightly strange approach to the problem. During my research, I noticed that people have gotten really good at rendering math on web pages. Web pages are nice because you can add behaviors to each of the individual html elements that can allow you to easily detect if some element has been clicked or is highlighted, or whatever else.

Now then, JavaFX (which is what I’m using to build this application) has a cute little feature called a WebView, which can be used to display web pages. With Orchid, I basically have a WebView as the main editor window, and in the background, Orchid is just adding html to and manipulating the WebView’s DOM. I’m actually quite happy with this approach because I can very easily use the application to convert the entire editor window into html, which can then very easily be converted into a pdf.

This approach is, however, a bit quirky because I’ll have JavaScript listening to what the user is doing with respect to the main editor window, and the JavaScript will communicate this to the Java on the backend, so it kinda feels like I just stuffed a website into a desktop application (which is exactly what happened).

Another reason Orchid is a bit strange is because it doesn’t really lend itself to a MVC architecture. This is simply because each mathematical term in the model has a one-to-one correspondence with an html element in the WebView’s DOM, so it actually ended up making most sense to have each piece of the model be able to contribute to the view. So then, while the controller is abstracted from the model and the view, the model and the view are extremely parallel in nature, which is interesting.

Gracious me, if you don’t like CS, I super hope you didn’t read those last paragraphs. It honestly may not have been comprehensible to those of you who do like CS. Whatever. Let’s go right on ahead to how Orchid is messing with my life.

A simple axiom of my current existence is that I would rather be working on Orchid than doing my schoolwork. While this is of course in part due to the fact that I find Orchid more exciting that things like finding the infimums of sets, there are also more subtle reasons. Interestingly enough, ever since I started working on Orchid, whenever I’m doing math or physics, I’m always subconsciously trying to figure out how I would approach the current problem with Orchid, once it is completed. Because Orchid is inherently category-theory based, this mindset is actually quite useful in understanding the subtleties of various equations.

However, this has also started biting me in the butt. There are some topics in physics that Orchid will be able to handle incredibly easily and efficiently, and so now it’s frustrating to do my physics homework by hand because I know how much faster and easier it would be to do it with Orchid.

So then, the very idea of Orchid is making me frustrated with my math and physics homework, which isn’t exactly where you want to be when those are the subjects you’re majoring in.

Another reason I find Orchid to be particularly compelling is because it’s literally a perfect marriage of math, logic, and computer science. It’s kinda my ideal project. And because of that, I would rather be working on it than, well, most anything else.

Finally, I have found throughout my life that I tend to learn more useful information from my own personal projects and academic pursuits than I do in my classes. This is simply because school and classes can’t tailor their curriculum to the interests of each student, so they just teach you a ton of generally useful information, most of which you may never need. When I’m working on a personal project however, whether it be Orchid, building XFA, or ever learning Quantum Mechanics back in High School, I’m only learning information that is personally gratifying and applicable to my interests.

Now, I’m going to complain like an annoying twit.

I’m generally just frustrated with college in general. There, I said it. It feels like I’m spending a tremendous amount of time learning somewhat useful information when I could be spending my time learning and applying more practical information.

Gracious me, I’m starting to annoy myself. I’ll get straight to the point. My frustration with academics coupled with my liminal spiritual state has made me particularly prone to emotional crises. Two days ago, I hit the emotional nadir of my semester. I wasn’t doing great, I’ll admit.

Well whatever, enough complaining. I know for a fact that some part of me loves all the math, physics, and CS I’m doing in school right now, so I’m just trying to bring that mentality to the forefront of my mind.

Wow, I’m fading. I suppose if you want to take something away from this post, know that Orchid is a fun and cool boi. I got midterms to study for. Peace.

¹ And it came to pass that on the tenth day of the second month, Danny rose from his bed in the early morning. ² Having completed his morning routines, he opened Instagram, and unfollowed 20 people, as was his custom. ³ For Danny’s following to followers ratio was abhorrent in his sight, yet he feared the Instagram bots that had been known to shadow ban his account from time to time.

⁴ After unfollowing the allotted number of accounts, Danny returned to his home page. ⁵ And behold, there before his eyes, Danny witnessed his posts from the previous weeks. ⁶ But lo! As Danny looked upon the images he had shared, his wrath burned against that which he had created. ⁷ And he said to himself, “Never before have I created something so lacking in originality and meaning. Come, let us destroy this account I have created lest it inflict another citizen.” ⁸ For while the pictures Danny had posted had been meant for an interesting project, as before in previous years, the meaninglessness of Instagram weighed too heavily on his soul, and he sought to only to destroy his account.

⁹ Danny turned his countenance upon the Account Settings page within the app, and behold, he scrolled from the top of the page to the bottom. ¹⁰ And not finding the option to delete his account, Danny began searching through all Settings pages, hoping to find that which he sought. But even as he searched, his every attempt was thwarted as the Account Delete option was hidden from his sight. ¹¹ In his frustration, Danny turned his countenance to the sky and wondered: “Why can I not delete this thing that I have created? For this account is a blight unto the land and must be hastily destroyed.”

¹² But it had come time for Danny to climb the hill to enter into Berkeley Lab, and so he closed the app, and began the walk to the bus stop. ¹³ And Danny was given temporary relief as his research distracted him from the horrors of his Instagram account. ¹⁴ But when the time had come for Danny to leave the lab, Danny was reminded of his struggles earlier in the day. And behold, Danny opened his laptop, intent on enacting destruction upon Instagram.

¹⁵ And Danny was filled with joy, for after a Google search, the Account Deletion page which had previously been hidden from his sight was revealed unto him. ¹⁶ And from where he sat, Danny finally brought destruction upon the account that had been plaguing him. ¹⁷ And that is why, even to this day, the link upon XFA to Danny’s Instagram redirects to a page stating: “Sorry, this account isn’t available.”

Hello, hello, hello! Man, it feels good to be click-clacketing away at this here keyboard. It feels like an eternity since I last wrote a post to XFA. I have a few life updates before I plunge into the icy depths of theological philosophy.

First off, there are certain opportunities that arise when you begin a blog. One such opportunity is to throw your content at random parts of the internet and see how people respond. For instance, I was like, “Hey Danny, what would happen if you chucked the post about your life being at Maximum Overdrive on Reddit?” Curiosity overwhelmed me, blessed readers. So I slapped that bad boy on the Berkeley subreddit with some crap about me wanting to see if other people felt like they too were pushing themselves to the limit. Really just whatever it took to make my post not look like a flagrant attempt at self-promotion, which it basically was.

Reddit responded exactly how you would expect: some schmeags tried flexing about their incredibly busy and impressive lives, others wrote self-deprecating posts about how they weren’t involved in anything, and many people took the sweet time out of their day to talk about how dumb I am and how cringy it is for someone to post about their attempts to “stroke their own ego” on reddit. The usual suspects. What’s really funny is that I’m probably going to do the exact same thing with this post. If you did come from Reddit, however, know that the question I posted is actually completely valid and is something I’m super curious about, so I’m not just making feeble attempts at self-promotion. You are, however, urged to like, comment, and subscribe because I need the validation of digital human beings to sooth my aching, angsty soul.

Now then, enough of that nonsense, let’s talk about religiosity, shall we? As some of you attentive readers may know, I’m currently in a history of religion class. This class is taught by Ethan Shagan, and my gosh, if there is one person who could convince me to leave my life as an emotionally conflicted STEM enthusiast, it’s my boi Shagan. This last week we talked about the origins of Hinduism (which is absolutely fascinating, btw. If you’re looking for some way to sooth your aching, angsty soul, look no further than the Rig Veda). While I could go on a variety of Hindu-based tangents, I will nobly hold myself back in a desperate attempt to actually follow through with my original purpose for this post. Instead of talking about the specifics of Hinduism, I’ll instead let you in on my super secret, super original epiphany: Christianity and Hinduism are surprisingly similar.

Danny, you may be asking, are you a mental nudibranch? How, in any way, are Hinduism and Christianity similar aside from the notion of a supernatural power? I have several responses to that query. First and foremost, nudibranchs are incredibly cool and beautiful creatures, and I would be honored to be compared to one such angelic entity. Secondly, while the claims and central tenants of these two religions are certainly different, the manner in which a human is instructed to interact with the supernatural is remarkably similar between the two traditions.

Before I go any further, I should probably add one caveat. Because my central focus has been on Christianity throughout my life, before college I hadn’t taken the time to productively grapple with the claims other religions made about the unknown/supernatural/divine. Since divorcing myself from my wholly unhealthy notion of Christianity, I’ve finally reached a place where I can properly examine the teachings of other religions and ask how I might apply such teachings to my own life. All that is to say, the similarities I’m seeing between Christianity and Hinduism reach far beyond these two particular religions.

What’s remarkably interesting is that so many religions emphasize the notion of sacrifice. Sacrifice comes in various forms: sure, you can slaughter a cow and offer it to Helios, but there are many other more subtle forms of sacrifice. For instance, many traditions of various religions (@Christianity) teach the notion that some biological impulses ought to be suppressed in order to achieve some greater connection with the divine. The archetypical “sex before marriage” comes to mind. In many ways, this act of giving up something intrinsic about yourself can very much be seen as an act of sacrifice.

And this, attentive readers, is where I see the similarity between Hinduism and Christianity.

To be specific, in class we discussed the importance of sacrifice in the earliest forms of Hinduism. I can’t remember off the top of my head if Prof. Shagan was referring to the early Vedic tradition or some of the later teachings, but somewhere in these texts, it is claimed that the pinnacle of existence is to live a life in perpetual sacrifice to Vishnu. I’m pretty sure it was Vishnu. Shoot. It also may have been Krishna. My apologies to anyone who may be more familiar with Hinduism than I and is actively scorning me. Anyway, this notion was very striking to me because of its similarities to Romans 12:1 in the Bible which states: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.”

This is like the exact same thing.

Such a similarity probably wouldn’t come as a surprise to someone like the catastrophically intelligent Ethan Shagan. Interestingly enough, Prof. Shagan actually made the claim that any tradition that can be called a “religion” is characterized by some notion of sacrifice.

Now then, it’s taken me three pages to get to this point, but this universality is incredibly interesting to me. The fact that two incredibly different religions like Hinduism and Christianity could possibly be characterized by such a staggering similarity is indicative of a deeper, more fundamental truth at play.

On the one hand, an argument could be made that regardless of the true nature of the supernatural, human beings have a deep notion of the zenith of a human life. Perhaps we are in fact the product of several incredibly random processes, and through eons of complexity-propagation and evolution, we humans all have the intrinsic notion that life is lived at its fullest when we live in a state of perpetual sacrifice. From the perspective of biology and game theory, this idea makes some level of sense: if one organism lives in a way that prioritizes the health of the group over that of the individual, a group of such organism would probably have a higher likelihood of survival than if each organism prioritized themselves over everything else. So then, perhaps religion is just a biological artifact that points to our fitness as a species.

However, there is another argument that can be made which I find to be a bit more exciting than the last paragraph. I call this…The Universal Conspiracy Conjecture. There’s no way in heck that this is an original thought, but hey, who ever cared about originality. Basically, the idea is this: what if everything in the last paragraph is true. So basically religion is just an artifact of evolution, and we’re the product of cold, hard game theory. However, let me gracefully add a simple caveat. What if some higher superintelligence created our universe specifically so that through a multi-billion-year process, the universe would produce a form of complexity (namely humans) that would fervently seek out the true nature of the superintelligence itself. To me, this is an incredibly compelling notion. Instead of us actively interacting with the superintelligence itself (which, btw, could just as easily be a god as a flying spaghetti monster), perhaps this superintelligence designed the fundamental physics of the universe in such a way that the highest form of complexity contained within the universe would achieve a greatest state of being by pursuing interaction with the superintelligence. Dang, I basically just said the same thing twice.

I probably could say quite a bit more about this idea, but the fact of the matter is that I’m about to hit five pages. The funny thing is that I just typed five pages in an hour, but I have a five-page paper due next Thursday (incidentally for History of Religion) that will probably take me several days of work. Amazing how we spend our time.

Anyway, I have some closing thoughts. For those of you who did stumble upon this because of Reddit, I am incredibly curious to hear your thoughts on the matter, and if you do end up responding to the post, I humbly ask that you would refrain from attacking me for my purported self-promotion and egotistical nature. We both already know I’m an egotistical basket-case, so that’s really quite boring to talk about. If you do want to rail against me, I certainly can’t stop you. In fact, go ahead. I can just be your internet punching bag. For the rest of you, we’re probably friends in real life, so if you find any of this interesting, maybe just text me? Or DM me? I won’t pretend to know the coolest trends in millennial communication these days. Shoot I just hit 6 pages. If you made it this far, you’re a true hero. May your path be free of bumbles, and your sight be free of briars. Tally ho!