At age 74, I can see the end of the road from here—not as a distant smudge on the horizon anymore, but as a fixed point, close enough to make out its details. I would love nothing more than to believe in some luminous beyond, some continuation, but I have never been able to make myself believe something simply because it would be a comfort. What I know is this: we are a species that got lucky. Somewhere along the long chain of mutation and adaptation, we ended up with a brain capable of asking the question—but that does not make us the answer.
Cults and religions are simply a bunch of bull. Nature Boy, the self-proclaimed messiah who wandered the California hills in a loincloth preaching raw vegetables as the path to God. Charles Manson, who rewired the Book of Revelation through Beatles lyrics until his followers were ready to kill for him. Jim Jones, who marched nine hundred people into a Guyanese jungle and handed them paper cups of cyanide-laced Flavor Aid in the name of apostolic socialism. The Branch Davidians, who burned alive in Waco while David Koresh played electric guitar and waited for the Fifth Seal. Heaven’s Gate, who castrated themselves and packed their bags for a spaceship hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet. The Movement for the Restoration of God’s Ten Commandments, who locked their congregation inside a church in Uganda and set it on fire. The Scouts and their focus on God, now revealed as a pervasively corrupt organization that protected pedophiles.
With this in mind, I recently had a discussion with a woman about politics. It devolved into an argument about religious beliefs. She started out reasonable enough—arms crossed, voice measured, citing things she had read or half-remembered hearing. She presented herself as an independent woman reasoning her way toward a conclusion. Then, when the thread ran out, she finally exclaimed that she believed in the Bible. I said, “Well great, because I believe in the Quran.” Of course I do not, but I wanted her to hear how stupid that comment sounded from the outside—how quickly a conversation about the real world becomes a conversation about which book you were handed as a child.
A few seconds after my comment landed, she turned away from me entirely—physically rotated in her chair—and murmured to a relative sitting beside her, as though I had already left the room, She whispered that none of what we were discussing mattered anyway, because the Bible told her we were living in the End of Times. Her relative nodded slowly, with what I found the hilariously solemn gravity of someone receiving important news.
I have heard variations of this maneuver my entire life: the quiet pivot away from the argument, the shoulders turning, the eyes finding somewhere else to be, the voice dropping to a register meant only for the sympathetic ear beside her. The appeal to an authority so total it renders the conversation itself a triviality—not just my argument, but the room, the chairs, the window, the whole stubborn material world—all of it dissolved in a single whispered sentence into something that could be safely filed under God’s plan and forgotten. How stupid!
Long ago I learned that humans believe in religion for the same reasons they believe in anything that makes the dark feel smaller and the poor feel as relevant as Elon Musk: it answers the questions that would otherwise howl unanswered in the small hours of the night—where did we come from, what happens when we die, why did my child and not yours leave us—and it binds strangers into communities with a shared purpose.
Religion also hands down a ready-made map of right and wrong before a child is old enough to draw one for themselves, before they have even learned to be lost. The brain that conjures God is the same brain that evolved to find patterns in rustling grass, to see the tiger before the tiger sees you. It was never built for comfortable uncertainty. It was built for survival, and survival has always preferred a clean answer to an honest one.
Of course, I learned that life on Earth began through abiogenesis—simple organic compounds transitioning into living cells somewhere between 3.8 and 4 billion years ago. Amino acids formed in the ocean, arrived on meteorites, or were shocked into existence by lightning. RNA likely came before DNA, acting as both genetic code and catalyst, eventually learning to copy itself.
We all know (being facetious here of course for silly religious zealots) that 74 years ago, scientists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey built a sealed glass apparatus and filled it with what they believed early Earth’s atmosphere to have been: water vapor, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen—a warm, lightless, lifeless soup. Then they ran electrical sparks through it to simulate lightning. Within a week, the inside of the glass had turned a deep reddish-brown. When they analyzed what had formed, they found amino acids—the molecular chains that proteins are made of, and that all known life is made of.
Though science and data are clear, there are amazingly an estimated 4,000 to 10,000 distinct religions worldwide—cargo cults in Melanesia that worship the ghost of a World War II supply plane, snake-handling congregations tucked into the Appalachian hills, ancient animist traditions that see a god in every river and stone. And yet, for all that variety, over 77% of the global population follows one of just four major traditions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The rest is a long tail of belief stretching off into the dark, too alive and too strange to count.
Everyone of course thinks their chosen religion is the correct one—the single clear signal in all that noise—and yet Christianity alone, that one branch of that one tradition, has fractured itself into over 45,000 distinct recognized denominations worldwide, each one presumably the right answer, each one presumably what God had in mind all along. (Pew Research Center Religious Global Landscape)
You see religion and mythology are deeply intertwined—two roots of the same tree, so tangled at the base that separating them is more surgery than scholarship. Mythology is the collection of sacred stories a culture tells itself: the flood that swallowed the world, the god who stole fire, the hero who descended into the underworld and came back changed. Religion is what gets built on top of those stories—the pews and the incense and the collection plate, the dietary laws and the burial rites, the prayers repeated so many times they lose their words and become pure rhythm.
Now let’s get back to the “End of Times” foolishness, which is almost as preposterous as the comment “Everything Happens for a Reason”. These myths sit atop humanity’s towering pyramid of comforting delusions—phrases whispered in hospital waiting rooms, muttered at rain-soaked funerals, and embroidered onto decorative pillows in suburban living rooms across America. These moronic platitudes, repeated throughout human history, form the cornerstone of elaborate theological architectures where a celestial supreme being maintains spreadsheets of human behavior.
According to these incredibly unscientific opinion-based systems, a divine bookkeeper presides over a bubbling brimstone and flesh-melting flames, where the screams of the damned provide background music for those who colored outside his moral lines. Yet he loves you, and this same all-powerful, all-knowing entity amazingly requires your constant financial contributions, preferably at least 10% of your income called a tithe.
I’m sorry but please forget the bullshit, and the often-miserable people who believe their selected religious crap. Instead, live the life you have while you have it. Spend your time enjoying nature, movies, books, hobbies, technology, science, new knowledge, your pets, games, your children, the world and its people. Love your friends and your family while you can and stay positive about what you have and what’s to come, whether you have ten or ten thousand days left on this Earth.
Such should be life.
Old Man Pondering 
Leave a comment