A Little Metaphysical Diversion Into Time and Subjective Existence

Many of the stories I read...especially in the science fiction genre...elicit speculation about the nature of reality, especially as it pertains to time: Kurt Vonnegut's brilliant novel Slaughterhouse Five is a prime example. Much of religion as I see it is based on people's projection of themselves within a universe carrying on with its reality after their deaths...the notion that there will be a year, say, 2200, in which they won't be around is very difficult for many to accept...so they desperately cling to what they consider to be the best belief system that puts at least their spirit, if not their body, in that temporal reality with everyone else.  Conversely, pretty much no one is especially concerned that before their conception and birth, reality stretched far into the past...at last estimate, some 13.8 billion years (and they weren't alive in all that time).  Yet as far as science...specifically, physics...is concerned, the laws work the same way whether you go forward or backward in time...the "progression" of time into the future is to some merely an expression of the general principle of entropy, i.e. the breaking down of complex, higher-energy forms and systems into those simpler and of lower energy.  The notion that my life span, bordered by both its temporal beginning and ending, will always possess an essential reality within the fabric of the universe, is something that very few people subscribe to: we're social creatures, and the idea that I am leaving this world while everyone else keeps going on just doesn't wash on an instinctual level...hence the religion that keeps us in a sort of community.  Spatially, it is no stretch to say that we as individuals can't be everywhere...our physical location pinpoints where and who we are in reality...but we have a problem saying that we temporally cannot be everywhen, but this equally-limiting factor is also a crucial element of defining our existence within the greater domain of reality.  There is the objective mega-universe equally existent everywhere at all points of time and then there is the personal, subjective universe that corresponds to our individual courses through each of our respective lives in our limited space and time with our experiences...