uberkuh

Religion is dying or, rather, evolving. Look at history and it devolves, ending in primitive sun worship. You could say that we started with the Sun and ended with the Son. But this is where it ends, to be sure. 

Religion is an outgrowth of a big brain. Religions reflect survival needs. When our ancestors needed food, they prayed to a food god. We have mastered food production. Today, we need things like moral guidance, so we pray to a (supposedly) moral god. Because we can think, we can pray. 

Prayer is essentially a plea for nature’s help. Our ancestors went so far as to sacrifice one another for this help. Today, we sacrifice mostly our desires, making some improvement.

These days, I try not to look down on theists for their beliefs. We are all in the same boat. We all have the same needs. Religion will not help us in the long run, but it gets us through the day sometimes. We all have to cope somehow. 

And nothing says that a big guy doesn’t sit in the sky. Maybe there is more than one, like a family. Maybe Earth is a toy for one of this family’s children. Call him Milky.

The serious point to make is that nobody knows what lies in outer space. It is possible that some cosmic force(s) exists, which governs our lives. We proudly rational atheists and agnostics tend to forget that.

Being an atheist means not believing in a god. It means not believing in a supernatural entity who poofs galaxies into existence. It doesn’t mean not believing in the possibility of intergalactic intelligence.

I like thinking that there might be something out there larger than myself. I feel like a kid again, only this time more rational and less fearful. The gods of our religions are too small and insignificant for the infinite grandeur of our universe.