Church of THE Programmer

The Church of THE Programmer is a church dedicated to the belief that we are running in a simulation and that our creator is an unknown programmer, or team of programmers.

The Church of THE Programmer makes no demands of its followers.

The Belief
If humanity or another civilization within the universe survives to a point where they have the technological capability of simulating a universe, they will. In perfecting the simulation, many versions will be run. It is likely the simulations will be inferior to the 'real' universe, and less complex. However, by simulating a working universe, 'life' could be created in the simulation.

If you are willing to accept that may happen, it is easy to accept that it has already happened. If there are multiple simulated universes capable of creating life and only one 'real' universe, there is a high probability that we are living in a simulated universe that is inferior to the 'real' universe.

How to Practice
Whether our universe is real or simulated, it changes nothing. Accept that you may live in a simulation, but this is our reality and there is nothing fake about it. Be nice to others and enjoy the things that make you happy. Oh, and don't stop thinking critically, use your brains.

Take off days at work, occasionally, for 'religious' reasons.

Scope
The scope of the simulated universe could be anything from 'you' being the center of the universe to what we perceive the scope of our universe to be. The simulation could simply be the Earth, our complete solar system or just you.

The smaller the scope of the simulation, the greater our importance is to the creator.

If the simulation is our known universe, we may be insignificant to The Programmer. That does not mean we are insignificant to one another; if we didn't matter to one another, we might have been programmed differently.

THE Programmer
THE Programmer is the programmer living in the 'real' universe who created the FIRST simulated universe.

THE Programmer may have no gender, race or species. It may be a team of entities, it may be singular. It may not be comprehensible to us, in any way. It may look exactly like your friend Bob. It could be a multidimensional being and have full control over 42 dimensions. It may only be aware of a single dimension and it is completely ignorant of the universe we know, existing in dimensions it cannot comprehend.

It may not even be aware it has created us, It may not have any interest in us and what we call life, or It may be watching every single thing we do. If the scope of our universe is as large as we perceive it to be, it is likely that The Programmer of our universe is oblivious to us. Conversely, if the scope of our universe is much smaller than we presume, we may be important to It.

Cheat Codes
It may be possible to attract the attention of The Programmer. Depending on the scale of this universe, we may be able to draw the attention of The Programmer who created this universe. If The Programmer was aware we were aware of them, they might pay more attention or even give us the cheat codes to the universe.

CTRL-ALT-DEL
The Apocalypse. This will happen when one of our supporting universes hits its resource limitations, or when one of The Programmers, perhaps THE Programmer, decides to shut the process down.

We could also end ourselves, which is a bad idea, I'm hoping we get past the point where that is a considered option.