If you think about it, do we have a choice in religion, or is it just a core part of human nature which we will always be fooling ourselves into thinking we can be conditioned out of by scientific enlightenment? Relinquishing your religion is not something that the brain takes easily – you are substituting the rock of absolute truth, around which you can build a coherent system of interpreting the world, for the learning by rote of scientific theories, hypotheses and notions, which by their nature are always seeking to be disproved or superceded: thus every ‘truth’ becomes lemming like, and our psyche begins to exist in a state which can be analogised to riding one of the little buggers to the edge of a cliff before jumping onto one further back and starting the journey again . It may do for those like us who have finally seen past religion’s manipulative and hypocritical facade to embrace science as the saviour of sanity, in fact once we have had this experience there is can be no way back that doesn’t involve brain damage, but the headfuck of endless existential questions engendered by this can be too much for some – who turn pretty quickly to bullshit spiritualism, lining the pockets of another set of charlatans – the lucky charlatan being the one that the hapless ‘nouveau agnostic’ finally rests on as the dominant absolute truth substitute.
Going back to the first sentence, could it be that it is equally core to human nature that we should inevitably seek to reject religion? Is it all a result of Homo Sapiens being an evolutionary fuck up who learnt how to learn before he could make sense of what he had learnt? Other animals just know what they have to know and get on with fighting and breeding: we have had the whiff of wordly knowledge, which has given us the narcotic ambition of total control over every aspect of our lives, even the very nature of our existence, and hence an addiction to achieving this as strong as that of a hamster seeking to run to the other side of its wheel to sniff its own arse (and the likelihood of success just as low). Maybe the truly wise are content to know what they don’t know (thanks, Rumsfeld), rather than spending the precious time before they die trying to work it out. But maybe, they are truly boring people. All I know is that, despite the headfuck, I love being an atheist – hangover in church anyone?