In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

by Sebastian Junger

Physicists eventually proposed that the universe existed as a nearly infinite wave function containing all possible outcomes until conscious thought forced it to spring into existence in its current singular form. Oddly, the idea had a distant religious origin from the early 1600s, when a lapsed Polish Jesuit named Casimir Liszinski wrote a secret treatise proposing that it was humans who created God rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, Liszinki had lent a large sum of money to a neighbor named John Brzoska, and Brzoska came up with a plan to avoid paying back the debt. He stole Lisinski’s manuscript and turned it over to church authorities, who quickly stood Liszinski before a tribunal and condemned him to death. His treatise was destroyed but, ironically, its main points were preserved when they were read into the court records. They include the following (slightly edited for brevity): We beseech you… do you not extinguish the light of Reason, do you not oust the sun from this world, do you not pull down your God from the sky, when attributing to him the impossible. Man is the creator of God, and God is a concept and creation of Man. God is not existent. Piety was introduced by the impious. The fear of God was spread by the unafraid so that the people would be afraid of them in the end. Simple folk are cheated by the more cunning with the fabrication of God for their own oppression.