And by that, I mean that religion is a force that has always divided people, and been the cause of a great deal of suffering and death. The rising up of different sects, on through the Crusades, the Reformation, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, 9/11, 7/7 and so on. We have killed the Jews, killed the Christians, killed the infidels, the non-believers, the unfaithful, etc., and so on, and so on. Children in many religious schools throughout the world today are taught to hate people who do not believe the same things they are taught; science and evolution are “wrong”, and outmoded religious texts are all they need.

At one time, religion was important; when human understanding of the world was insufficient to explain the workings of nature, religion offered a framework that people of those eras could fathom. Today we use fairy tales to explain concepts like sharing, manners, and basic scientific concepts. However, civilization has grown up in the past few thousand years, and we should no longer rely on fairy tales to explain to adults how the world works. Our technology is sophisticated enough to delve deeply into natural phenomena, and dispense with a god who hides behind supernatural magic and demands constant devotion.

Let’s briefly mention god here. I consider myself more agnostic than atheist. I feel that it comes down to one of two possibilities – either nothing, or something beyond what most people consider god. If nothing, then you die, and that’s it. Your consciousness is gone forever. Brutal, but possibly true. In which case the whole idea of religion is a useless waste of precious time.

If there is a god, then it is totally unlike the standard idea of god, i.e. an old man in the sky. A real god would be the total sum of all things in existence; galaxies to subatomic particles, including you and me. We would all be part of god, no more or less divine than any savior or prophet. Experiences after physical death would be more, much more than just going to Heaven or Valhalla or even Nirvana. The Bible, Koran or Bhagvhad-Gita could no more explain it than you could explain the Star Wars saga on a grain of rice.

So whichever way it is, religion is a remnant of our collective childhood that we cannot bear to dispense with. But now it no longer helps us deal with existence, it hinders our ability to comprehend the true nature of reality. The Universe is a fascinating place, and each of us truly precious and unique. Religion suffocates us, and blinds us to the real wonders of the Cosmos. We do not need the illusion of god to shield us from what’s out there, or divide us from each other in our lonely journey on this planet.

The ‘true believers’ always condemn such talk, and try to find fault with ‘proof’ of solid theories, like evolution. “Where’s the proof we evolved from apes?” is one popular cry. “How can you prove the Earth is as old as you say? is another. It becomes a pointless exercise, since people like this will not admit the proof when it stares them in the face. I was involved in a discussion like this once with a very religious co-worker. “What’s the proof?” he would ask.

“What about the fossils?”, I replied.

“What fossils?”

It’s very clear that we have a good overall record of how humans evolved. There may be quibbles over the details, but the proof is in the fossil record. For other animals, such as horses, the fossils are nearly complete and tell the story very well. But if you don’t believe in the proof when it’s shown to you, what will it take? My co-worker had no knowledge whatsoever about the details of the obvious evolution of Homo left behind in the rocks. If you don’t know how your supermarket shelves are restocked each night, you might as well believe elves do it.

And there’s certainly more proof for things like evolution than a garden of Eden. It strikes me as odd that people who are willing to believe superstition on faith will always demand ‘proof’ of any evidence to the contrary.

They will also try to point out that our moral codes, the rules that govern our societies, were fashioned by god and given to us so that we might lead ‘good’ lives. Anyone who rejects this is ‘bad’, ‘immoral’ or ‘anarchic’. This is of course, utter nonsense. Morality was devised by human beings, not a supreme being. I don’t need god to live a moral life. I’m not worried about divine retribution.

It may be asking too much that people who are raised not to think for themselves suddenly have a blinding flash of insight and reject the beliefs of their family and immediate society. But it does happen, nearly every day. Will religion ever really go away? I don’t know. At various points in the past, concepts like slavery, the oppression of women, the ridicule of homosexuals were all firmly entrenched. While they all still exist today, their standings are decidedly less sure, if not outright wobbly. It is my hope as a Humanist that one day the notion of religion is discarded as an outmoded archaic way of thinking. One that’s no longer relevant in the modern world. Standing up to religion, seeing it for the pack of lies it really is, and raising our children to be good members of society without all the mumbo-jumbo is of the utmost urgency.

Listening to music like this, the mind can’t help but wander back to the great cathedrals these pieces were meant to be heard in. I’ve been to quite a few fantastic cathedrals in my time – Westminster, St. Pauls (both in London), Salisbury, Lincoln, York Minster, Beverly Minster, and one of the greatest of them all, Canterbury, to name a few. I find them fascinating buildings, living reminders of a time and a people long gone to us now. How many generations of pilgrims have I followed in who have stood at the spot of the Martyrdom, or viewed the crooked tower of Lincoln? I gaze in awe at the English coronation throne, used by nearly every British king and queen since the 1300′s. Yes, covered in carved schoolboy graffiti now, but there sat Henry the Eighth; his daughter Elizabeth (at whose tomb I still genuflect); Edward IV, winner of the Wars of the Roses; Henry VI, who lost those wars (and his life); George III, the ‘tyrant’ of the American colonies, and so on. All of them sat in that nasty little chair.

The whole point of these giant churches, with their soaring naves and acres of stained glass, was to worship and glorify God. The music of Palestrina, its effortless grace and stirring complexity, was also created to celebrate a creator who returned to Earth in human form, and will supposedly return at the end of days.

But I venerate these lovely old piles and beautiful voices blended in harmony for a different reason. These are fantastic objects created by the mind and reason of man. The builders, authors, architects and musicians may be worshiping a deity, but I worship the ability of the human beings who left us these monuments in stone and song. The talent and creativity of those people reach across the centuries to us, and on into the future. How simply, utterly wonderful.

In some cathedrals you can take tours up into hidden parts, to see things that most tourists don’t get to see. Things like the walkway over the roof of the nave in Lincoln; it’s like walking over great piles of rubbish, except those are the arches towering 80ft. or more above the ground. The great chain Wren wound around the inner dome of St. Paul’s, to make sure it would be strong enough to resist the weight of the outer dome it has to bear forever. Towers with their endless tiny spiral staircases lined with rough-hewn rope banisters, or the narrow walkways, with openings cut into the columns, far up above the gentry below, threading through the church walls like stone blood vessels. I’d love to spend the night in Westminster, with a set of keys to all these little doors barring me from the exciting bits.

While the aim of the creators of these hulking emissaries from another time may have been to remind themselves (or us) of God, the message I hear from them loud and clear instead is, “Remember Us”. And so I think not of some supernatural being who may or may not exist at all, but of the flesh and blood stone masons, or woodcarvers, glassblowers, painters, composers, and all the rest.  I know they existed. Sir Christopher Wren, the designer and builder of St. Paul’s, is buried in a very nondescript little corner of the crypt of that great palace of religion. The Latin inscription over his tomb slab would suffice for all the builders of the great cathedrals:  “If you seek his monument, look around”.

I was watching a show the other night about memory, these leading neurospecialists all admitted that even now, nobody is quite sure how memories are formed or stored in the brain. We know that memories (as well as all mental processes) are carried between neurons as electrochemical exchanges from cell to cell. But how does that translate into remembering an event I experienced thirty or forty years ago? What happens in my brain that makes me relive a time long ago in the past? It is nothing short of a miracle.

As regular readers of this blog (if any!) will no doubt be aware, I’m no fan of organized religion; it’s a sheer drain on the species that we’ve long ago outgrown. However, this does not mean I’m an anti-spiritual person. I don’t think I am. I just object to the layers of dogma and nit-picking that have wound up as seemingly essential baggage on the train of every religious belief. But, I feel neuroscientists are trying to work from a ‘bottom-up’ position. What if instead, consciousness worked as a top-down experience?

Some people might be tempted to call this a ‘soul’, but that word has connections that I’d just as soon reject out of hand. I’ll stick (for now), with a top-down approach. The funny thing about consciousness is that we take it for granted to such a degree, we often fail to appreciate how amazing a thing it is, stuck there in our skulls as we walk around. No other species on the planet has anything like the cognitive skills we use every day without (if you’ll pardon the pun) a moment’s thought. And why have we developed these skills? We seem wildly overdeveloped for survival on the grasslands of Africa. Billions of us exist with scant notice of the fact that we do exist; and when we think about it at all, it strikes many as perfectly obvious that we should exist. But should we? Why? And why as such intelligent creatures that we are capable of progressing beyond our own basic physical needs? We can contemplate the distant past, the far-flung future, the subtle nuances of complex emotional interactions, to say nothing of music or art or even symbolism, language, writing, math and a host of other cerebral gymnastics that leaves our ape cousins and even the dolphins far behind.

Consciousness, our consciousness, is not so ordinary that it should escape our notice. Instead it’s the rarest, most precious commodity in the known universe. We are self-aware, and yet with all our ability, we still can’t even describe our own knowing. It does not seem possible that the jelly between our ears can reproduce the moment of our first kiss, or the loss of a loved one, or eating a really good sandwich. But it does, and all the time. I have to believe that somehow we are generating the chemicals and electrical impulses, but they are the footprints, not the foot, of our thought. It’s as if we study the hammers of a piano and wonder how they can organize themselves into the music of Bach. The point is well and truly missed.

Happily, I can contemplate this without the need for Jesus, the Prophet, Buddha or any other divine messenger. What if we die and discover that we have been our own gods all along? I know, there’s no proof, but nobody can explain how my brain can let me retrace a long-ago summer’s day, when the world seemed perfect and eternal. My own personal miracle.

As an aside, it should be noted that unlike advances in systems of thought concerning nearly every other sphere of our lives, religion is virtually the only one still untouched for hundreds (or in some cases, thousands) of years. We no longer believe the sun revolves around the earth, or in the four humours of the body, or even Newtonian classical physics; why do we insist on carrying the same ideas about an afterlife that ignorant peasants had a millennia ago?

Anyway, it strikes me that more people today are afraid of other religions than are comforted by their own. Catholics are afraid of Islamic fundamentalists, Christian Orthodox are afraid of Catholics, Islamic fundamentalists are afraid of Jews, Jews are afraid of Muslims, and so on. The 21st century is supposed to be the opening of wisdom and equality for all people; instead it’s an ongoing series of pre-emptive strikes against other faiths. The Buddhists perhaps, are the only ones who don’t give a shit. They must be ripe for taking over.

It’s hard to keep any faith in the goodness of man when teenage boys are blowing themselves up on crowded buses with women and children. Sometimes I wish religion was true; it would be hard not to smirk with self-righteous glee to see Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, Krishna and a few others show up one day and turn white with mortification at what’s been done in their collective names.

And let’s get back to the central question – Has religion offered up any hope for life eternal? After all this time, do we have any more proof than before? Of course not. The faithful would say that proof is not required. Of course when dismissing other belief systems, they scream for “proof” the competition is better, wiser, greater, etc., then sneer with triumph when none is produced. My personal opinion is that there is either nothing after you die, and it’s all been a sham perpetuated out of fear for centuries, or there’s something much more wonderful and sacred than the tiny little sand castle scenarios each religion offers up. Either way, it’s not something to be slaughtering the innocent over. If you believe otherwise, then you’re stupider than I’m giving you credit for.

I was watching a financial news show on tv the other day, when the presenter said “controversy”. No big deal, you think; but it’s how he pronounced it: ‘con-trovisy’. Say what? It’s ‘con-tro-versey’. How did you read it just now? I hear a lot of this going on lately. News readers just toss off new ways of saying words we’ve all used without trouble for years. When did alternative pronunciations become acceptable? I don’t recall voting for any of it. I’ll have to start compiling a list as I hear them and post them here so you don’t think I’m making any of this up.

Going back to the first paragraph in a way, I had a visit today from two older gentlemen dressed in nice black suits. I was friendly enough until I spotted the leaflet they were trying to press upon me, with the cow-eyed Jesus and the words “Christ the Redeemer”. I said no thank you and shut the door in their faces. I don’t have any time for niceties when it comes to this sort of baloney. It’s my house, and they come to my door unannounced and uninvited to push this stuff in my face? I don’t think so. What do they really expect to happen? Could it be that I’ve never heard of Jesus Christ, and I fall upon my knees in gratitude for being enlightened as to him and his message? Odds are I’m aware of who he is, and am free to choose if I’m interested. If I am, I don’t need them coming to my house waving their leaflets. It’s a case of literally ‘preaching to the choir’. If I’m not interested, I’ll slam the door in their faces. Maybe they were nice grandfatherly fellas, but religion is like cockroaches: you have to use excessive force to eradicate the pests or they’ll take you over. I think going door to door is just a waste of time. You don’t see Rabbis or Mullahs wandering through neighborhoods, ringing bells and shoving pamphlets through mailslots. Makes you wonder how they can keep recruiting if they don’t work the wards.