In what religion or teaching or philosophical theory is the universe and life viewed as something like the Greatest Deception? A beautiful, clever and fascinating "trap" for human free will?

One Answer

1. There was a German philosopher, Philipp Meinlander. His opus magnum – ” Philosophy of liberation (redemption)” “it hasn't even been translated into English yet. And for good reason.
   This man “killed God” with special grace and sophistication before Nietzsche, who would write his famous “Gott ist tot” in 1881. The Mainlander passes away five years before that.

   The absurdity of his existence, the lack of meaning, prevented him from committing suicide. And he writes his book with the sole purpose of giving the world meaning, so that he can have a reason to leave it. It gives off a childish joy when he concludes a chapter of his book: “Nun ist auf einmal Sinn auf der Welt” (Well, at last there is a meaning in the world).

   On April 1, 1876, the 34-year-old philosopher received the newly printed copies of his book from the printing house. Some of them he left in the room, others he took to the attic. When he returned, he made a platform out of books, climbed up on it, grabbed the loop he had made beforehand, and stuck his neck through it. Then, with one foot planted on the books and his free hand brusquely pushing away the fresh, still-smelling copies of the printer's ink, he fell into the void.

   The thinker found only one use for his literary works – he used them as a footstool for hanging. Cynical, symbolic, and quite consistent, given the content of the books.

   He was able to express the surge of moods and spirit of the era, which, along with progressivism and forecasts for a bright future, absorbed the feeling of the approaching end, the feeling that the power of reason is running out, and powerful and unknown forces are able to influence life in spite of reason.

   The philosopher realized that despite the fact that science makes a person's life more convenient, he remains alone with the final questions, being immersed in anxiety and experiencing the meaninglessness of being. This is the reason for his terrible pessimism, which is quite clearly visible premonition and anticipation of future disasters.

   As someone with a special plan for the human race, Minelander was not known for his modest thinking. “We are not ordinary people, “he once wrote in the third person, in the style of royalty,”and we must pay dearly for the right to feast at the same table with the gods.”

   The essence of his anti-natalistic anti-pessimistic philosophy of hopelessness is as follows::

   He believed that the Will-to-die that he understood to guide humanity was spiritually instilled by God, who had planned and executed His Own final resting place at the beginning of time. Existence seemed to terrify God. Unfortunately, God was immune to the erosion of time. Therefore, His only way to free Himself was through the divine form of suicide.�

   As long as God existed as a single entity outside of space-time and matter, His suicide plan couldn't work. In an effort to annihilate Its Unity and make it possible to pass into non — existence, It split Itself — in the manner of the Big Bang-into fragments of the Universe that exist in time, in other words, into those objects and organisms that began to accumulate here and there for billions of years. On the philosophy of Minelander: “God knew that he could move from a state of superreality to non-existence only through the development of a diverse world of reality.” By using this strategy, He excluded Himself from being. «God is dead, “Meinlander wrote —” and His death is now the life of the world.”

   Once the great individuation of the world has been initiated, the momentum of its Creator's self-destruction will continue until everything is exhausted in its own existence, which in the case of humans means that the sooner they realize that happiness is not capable of being as good as they believe, the happier they will have to die. The” will to live, ” which Schopenhauer claimed activates the world to torment, was revised by his student Meinlander not only as evidence of the innate suffering of living beings, but also as a secret theory of the universal urge to burn oneself as rapidly as possible in the fire of becoming.

   In the light of this theory, the progress of humanity is an ironic symptom, according to which our descent into extinction can not be more favorable, because the more our circumstances change for the better, the closer we move to the appointed end.

   Meinlander's argument that non-being is ultimately superior to being was compiled from his unorthodox interpretation of Christian doctrines and his understanding of Buddhism. As the conscious ordinary mortal knows, Christianity and Buddhism are based on the call to leave this world, and the destination of this abandonment is either unknown or impossible to comprehend. In the case of a Minelander, this destination simply doesn't exist.

   According to his forecast, one day our will to survive in this or any other life, following the example of our Creator, will be overwhelmed everywhere by the conscious will to die and remain dead. Instead of resisting our end, Meinlander concludes, we will see that “knowledge of the futility of life is the flower of all human wisdom.”

   Our disappearance will not be the result of unnatural chastity, but a natural phenomenon once we have evolved so far that we begin to perceive our existence as hopelessly meaningless and unsatisfactory, and then cease to be subject to the urge to reproduce. Oddly enough, this evolution of aversion to life will be facilitated by the growing happiness among us. This happiness can be accelerated by following Minelander's evangelical principles of achieving things like universal justice and mercy.

   According to the philosopher, only after receiving and tasting all the benefits that are possible in life can we understand that none of them is as good as non-existence. While the average pessimist would have been content with the usual annihilation of human life, the ultimate stage in Meinlander's reasoning was the maturation of the “Will to Die” contained, according to his logic, in all universal matter.

   Such a philosophy leaves no chance for the world, because the entire universe is just the “decaying remains of God” scattered across the void, who committed the great deicide at the beginning of time. And this process continues right now. And that's what we call life. We are a bizarrely aging matter that must live out of itself with only one meaning-the achievement of non-existence, which the mysterious Deity who conceived this whole grandiose spectacle so longed for.

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