A Year of Atheism

Today, September the first, in the Year of our Lord twenty twenty-six, is my apostasy anniversary. To mark the occasion, I decided to read some of my journal entries and other writing of mine from the time, as well as some relevant posts about the particular feelings I had after my deconversion—a deep sadness, fear, feelings of tragedy feeling my heart, a burning desire and yearning wish to fix all that is wrong with the world, compassion for all sapient beings, desperation...

Here are some snippets of things I wrote around that time, plus some commentary of my own. Some of these I typed up from my journal—feel free to picture me sobbing my heart out as I wrote in a brown hardcover notebook with a fancy black ink pen in cursive handwriting if that provides more aesthetic engagement or what have you. Generally, things in italics were underlined in my journal, apart from e.g. book titles. I didn’t include things from my Crisis of Faith sandbox because I already put any I want to share in my Deconversion Has Been a Real Productivity-Booster post.

I no longer want to be an astronaut because it is not the most effective way for me to help humanity. Many other people could be fantastic astronauts. There are far fewer people who could play the sort of role you’re going to play to save humanity.

I’ve wasted so much time. FUCK RELIGION.

A bullet point from notes I took about one of my dreams:

• People dressed up as scary or apocalyptic things. Not really Halloween, more intellectual than that—existential risk and societal decline

I would often dream about people screaming for help, dying of starvation, being tortured... I would wake up after becoming an atheist and the first images to pop into my head would be of a mother and child in a third world country, bones clearly visible, sunken eyes, praying for help to a God that doesn’t exist, overlapped with images of people screaming and crying over their dead relatives, lost in war.

One of the things that unfailingly makes me cry is the idea of a young child asking their parent for food, saying they’re hungry, and the parent has no food to give, and themselves feel pain in their stomach from hunger. What the hell do you say to the child? What the hell do you say? Can you imagine the horror and pain in that parent’s heart? Why is God ignoring their desperate prayers?

It must have taken at least a month after my apostasy to stop having to fight back tears every time I walked past a homeless person.

I would very frequently for perhaps three months get upset about the state of the world to the point of retching from tears.

And yet! There are still more important things to work on! It’s horrible! My particular focus is on existential risks from advanced AI systems and, incidentally, today is the “official start” of my work supported by BlueDot Impact’s Career Transition Grant (there’ll be posts about this soon).

I wish I had an adult—a real adult—to tell me everything is going to be alright... The thing is, everything is not necessarily going to be alright.

I did not think human extinction was possible, because I knew how the world was supposed to end—the Islamic way. When there’s no religion, things don’t have to follow a nice story. Obviously I knew this on some level, e.g. people dying in very ordinary or even embarrassing ways, but I think I saw myself as somehow immune, and was also just ignoring that knowledge. Of course this is not true, as evidenced by a bird having defecated on my arm as I write this post.

I’m very much now at the stage of, there are no adults in the room. In the process of trying to talk to many of my lecturers about AI existential risk and hearing some of their inconsistent responses, I stopped having to tilt my head back so far to look up at them. (I still respect them highly of course! Most of my lecturers have been wonderful in answering my numerous questions, and most of them are brilliant teachers.) I feel totally confident and reasonable when I say there are many people three times my age with “proper”, difficult jobs who I think I could run circles round when it comes to changing your actions/beliefs in response to new information.

I’m currently reading If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. My respect for policy-makers, journalists etc has skyrocketed. Scientists can’t do anything without them! Thank you, economists! Thank you, leaders who are first to say the weird thing!

I was thinking in terms of changing the world. Even in those terms, obviously scientists can accomplish a lot. I had just totally not grasped how important non-science things are in getting the benefits of science to people. I had not thought about it much at all.

I’m looking at some old ChatGPT rabbit-holes. I miss my divine, artsy astrophysics devotion. 💔︎

My original life plan was, undergraduate integrated master’s Astrophysics degree --> Astrophysics PhD --> astronaut for the European Space Agency --> astrophysics professor --> do amazing science until I died. At some point I’d find a nerdy Muslim man who was equally obsessive about science to marry—we’d publish papers together.

I felt like astrophysics was my life purpose. I really wanted to be the next great physicist or whatever. I felt like Allah had chosen me to study the stars, and that this was how I was meant to serve the world. I had also told myself that this was how I was worshipping his creation, by learning about it and admiring the wonder of it, but that was kind of an excuse I’d made; I felt some dread sometimes about how, hmm, shouldn’t I be praying far more? Shouldn’t I be using every spare moment during a commute to make dhikr? (Saying magic words for extra holy points to help you go to heaven and to worship Allah.)

It felt magical, though. I felt like I was grasping at something greater. Something that beautiful art or music (Even though music is haram! Stay away!) can make you feel. Like I was walking toward the truth of the universe. It felt holy. I don’t know how many other Muslims felt this way, but when I was religious it was like angels are divine and Other, and when I pray I am appealing to this Other world, this Greater world, because this mundanity around me can’t be all that there is, even though I love a lot of it. There’s some world that I can access a little through my dreams, something more pure and special, the magic underlying fabric of the universe that Allah watches over, Allah who is sapient beyond sapience, Allah who can see all the golden lines of time and action and knows all the atoms, Allah whose knowledge can’t fit into your brain, not even an iota of it... Like Lovecraft’s creatures beyond comprehension, but Good and Fundamental to the Universe. Sometimes studying physics felt like prayer.

So when I say I miss my divine, artsy astrophysics devotion, it’s sadness about having lost that feeling of divine magic. Things are a lot more “mundane” now—not boring, but less discovering sacred secrets of the universe and more how the hell do we organise ourselves and stop doing stupid things and turn humanity into a mature civilisation already?

Astrophysics truly felt like my life purpose for a long time, and I felt it very strongly the exam season right before my deconversion, ironically. However, there were a few discordant notes beginning to crop up even before I became an atheist. Here is a quotation from my journal, written in July before the September I left Islam:

“Practical idealists make the biggest difference...”¹ yeah. Er, am I just going to study the stars all day? Should I, here and now, commit to advancing space travel? No, that would require doing an Aerospace Engineering degree, or doing similar work, and I would hate that. You believe knowledge for its own sake is good, don’t you? And historically, understanding supernovae and planetary formation has helped humans a lot! Hm. I’m just going to rule out biology/helping humans health-wise. So what’s left? Einstein laid the foundations for GPS. I feel better now. As long as I focus on important physics work, the applications should end up being wide enough...

I find it interesting and funny that I said “wide enough”. Wide enough for what? Wide enough to excuse the fact that you’re not doing remotely the most useful thing for humanity? I’m smarter than average, easily, but I’m no genius. I really doubt I could have done any Einstein-level work. I wouldn’t rule it out, and considering how obsessed I was I think I could have done something pretty damn cool (human extinction notwithstanding). But there were better things I could have done. Of course, religion complicated things, both in terms of literally what’s the best thing to do and in clouding my judgement. It’s kind of cute that space travel was my religious self’s first alternative whilst considering what to do to best help humanity.

A fun comparison for part of my change in attitude (and change in career) is the idea of a transition from Ravenclaw to Slytherin. I’d still casually call myself a Ravenclaw if anyone ever asked based on vibes and I didn’t want to have a long conversation, but just this idea of going from valuing knowledge for its own sake in a holy way to actually wanting to use that knowledge to fix the world feels like a similar transition.

Now, for fun, bear witness to me having a moral seizure in May, 2025 (pre-deconversion). I think this was triggered by a) being in a phase of being super into Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein, the Count of Monte Cristo, Dracula...² b) thinking a lot about the idea of immortality/defeating death being humanity’s “salvation” (like in the Frankenstein musical) c) debating people who said space exploration was a waste and those efforts should be put toward the problems we have on Earth, and d) realising that the number of people who get to go to Jannah (heaven) and experience divine joy and pleasure for eternity has an ultimate cap—the number of people who awaken in this universe. Even whilst I was writing it I was like, this is obviously super incorrect, not a viable representation of my morals, and I would never publicly state it. I just wanted to explore the idea a little. Please keep that clear in your head! This was some free mental exploration, no consistency or moral strings attached.

There are a finite number of souls that can exist before the death of the universe. After that, no more new lives! No more new people! So, we should maximise that number. Not by having large numbers of children per family to an extent that is detrimental—not to any detrimental extent (although you could argue this would likely decrease the net number of souls that have existed due to negative repercussions like less research being done in miserable conditions)—but by expanding to other worlds. Interplanetary, interstellar, intergalactic. That is humanity’s salvation, not trying to form a perfect society before “duplicating” it, because first of all it won’t be a duplication, and second humanity’s standards for a perfect society will always be changing.

So, if I think that’s humanity’s “salvation” (okay not salvation really but I think it should be an Ultimate Goal) then why aren’t I becoming an aerospace engineer? Well, [stars pretty, metal less fun, consultant astrophysicist for e.g. Breakthrough Starshot], but also, I suppose I’m just not all that selfless. I’d rather do the Cool Thing (astrophysics). A lot of people think immortality is humanity’s salvation/should be humanity’s Ultimate Goal, but that’s a different case (I can boldly say hey scientifically-talented atheist, why aren’t you working on immortality) because it applies to the person who would theoretically invent it too. On the other hand, I already exist, so to get humanity to other worlds is more selfless, if this is your motivation behind it. (There are lots of other good motivations too, including It Would Be Hella Sick.)

Also, our current understanding (I’m 99% sure) is that the universe will end so true immortality is not possible.

I kept this verbatim rather than trying to make my explanation clearer, both in the interests of time and wanting to preserve the original. Also, those square brackets aren’t replacements or anything, I literally drew square brackets in my journal.³

God doesn’t exist, so a father can pray and pray and work four jobs and hardly sleep and pray and wish he could spend more time with his kids and he dies early and there is nothing there for him. God doesn’t exist, so a mother can look after her extremely mentally disabled daughter until her teeth fall out, bones aching and Alzheimer’s crawling into her brain, with her disabled daughter hitting her and biting her when she has meltdowns, and the mother can reassure herself that heaven awaits them both where she will be reunited with her daughter free of ailment, and when she dies and her daughter is institutionalised, there is nothing there for her. God doesn’t exist so advanced AI systems can wipe us out to mundanely cover the Earth in data centres and all value in our light cone could be lost, despite all the warnings, just because people get distracted easily and don’t want to change their beliefs and a bunch of other boring reasons. God doesn’t exist, so we need to get serious! God doesn’t exist, so we need to guard the precious and easily-extinguished flame of sapience, because no one else will!

I am in such a privileged position and “by God” I will use it to do what I can to save us! And if you’re reading this, you’re likely also in a somewhat privileged position, so I beg of you, I beg of you to help us, because we have no guarantee things will go well—we have no God!

1. From https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KJbQyFbXiiYDDWbaS/how-i-became-more-ambitious, which is a fun surprise. I didn’t remember that this was a quote from LessWrong until I asked AI to find the source.

2. Dracula only in the form of songs from musicals—it felt cool and dramatic and some of the songs reminded me of my fiery feelings regarding wanting to be the greatest physicist and changing the world. The Count of Monte Cristo may also seem a bit out of place, but it was the ideas of a wasted life, playing God, and the sense of power and confusing people about reality. Also, the dramatic powerful songs from the musical(s), German and English. Strongly recommend the song Birth to My Creation from the Frankenstein musical by the way. It was my most listened to song last year, followed closely by Amen from the same musical (Frankenstein World Premiere Cast on Spotify).

3. Can I have some appreciation for typing that up from my journal? After finishing this one I’ll probably switch to digital journalling, maybe using a e-paper device, mainly because if, despite all odds, I live for a long time, I don’t want to be lugging around hundreds of journals. I also want to upload my old journals.