Millions of people will be worshipping eternal life today. That’s what Easter is all about. Stripped of all gravitas and ceremony, that’s what this boils down to: we want to live forever, or at the very least much longer. Religion and death walk hand in hand, and will continue to do so until death does them part. We can’t blame death on religion, but sometimes we can blame religion for a death. Here for example is a news report about witches being burned alive in Kenya. Warning: it leads to another link which will scar you. One which seems to show some of what happened. It’s sick, gut-wrenching, if you find and watch it you’ll never get the images out of your mind’s eye. Be careful; you don’t need to see it to consider this post.

Because the thing is, I could link and post videos of similar stomach turning, tear jerking atrocities carried out in the name of any religion, sometimes directly, sometimes less. And I’m don’t mean your religion, this happens sooner or later in pretty close to all of them as each play the role of murderer and murdered. Over the entire written historical record this trend persists across all scales, big and small. Yet we don’t blame death on religion.

Religious maiming and murdering is just part of the retail human misery index, its suffering and death on a scale we can actually observe and comprehend for reasons we are jointly bound to discuss at places like FreeThoughtBlogs. But it’s just one part in a vast suite of, for lack of a better world, evil. We have deranged sociopaths posing as nurses and nannies who intentionally torture infants to death; our numbers include pedophile serial killers, human beings who enjoy the screams, the maiming, the slow killing of their young victims.

Even that’s just a drop in the bucket, nothing compared to the parade of genocide, enslavement, torture and death carried out on a wholesale scale, far beyond anything we can individually comprehend or get our arms around, assuming we were sick enough to even want that. And it’s not as though the universe, as spectacular as it can be, is neutral either. Far from it. There is the monster of cancer, the scourge of heart disease. There are space rocks and cosmic rays, there are toxins and parasites and microbes, there are gamma ray bursters; we’re infested with errant bits of submicroscopic genetic code and old autoimmune alleles that lay in wait inside our body, suddenly activate, and put us through living hell, strike us down like a bullet, or keaves us facing months and years of intractable pain. This is the universal condition for human beings. We are born, we grow, too soon growth turns to aging, and the long slow slide begins. If we’re lucky.

This world has real monsters in it, and real evil, there is no need to invent more of them, nor let out the old ones most of us work have been trained to keep at bay for life. We have evil, we have suffering, we have injury and disease, we must live with all that that implies, the intense fear and anxiety we all bear, as anyone over age two lives out their short lives under the curse of knowing, in the end, they will meet one version of evil or another. Each of us individually hoping, for ourselves and our dear loved ones, it will be one of the lessor evils in the farthest possible future, each of us fearful that will be sooner. Until that evil in all its forms is tempered, there will be religion.

If we want to leave religion  in our past as a species, we are going to have change the species, we are going to have to beat death or hold it at bay for much longer. That may sound like a tall order, but we are young as a technical species, and have only recently begun to tinker with mortality using the new tools of science. If those tools are unleashed in full, for a time, we will either become more long-lived or engineer it into our descendents. The religious sense this, some more than others, a few fear it, it threatens their power, it competes in their heretofore market monopoly. Perhaps some of the religiously based antipathy to science is a subconscious fear from a few, not all, that it will not just tear down the old, comforting fables, but replace them with routine measures that deliver what the ancient bedtime stories never have and never will.

We sure don’t need more monsters. We certainly don’t want more genuine fright, we are each held biological hostage, strapped helplessly into the cockpit of a fragile, decaying biological machine embedded in universe full of danger at every turn. What we need is to understand and manipulate that environment, from the biological to the cosmological. 

What we need more of is science. We need biotechnology and stem cell research, we need somatic nuclear transfer and artificial hearts. We need direct interfaces that bypass the clunky chemical senses and limited wavelength cameras nature has done her best to provide. We need bandwidth, we need storable offsite ROM and RAM; we need to be able to plan a thousand years ahead and live to see those plans blossom. This is how the ancient stranglehold religions have on our culture will finally be completely broken. And we don’t have to wait for a breakthrough. It’s already begun, it’s been going like this for the last hundred years and more.

Millions of people are ostensibly congregating today in praise of a person who died for them and was granted eternal life in the hereafter. But it’s really about their own mortality, and the only existing, highly unsatisfying option to get around it they have ever heard about.

We have work to do; all of us. We can make great cultural strides with what science has already provided. And if we want our fellow humans to put religion away gracefully, completely, for good, we must continue to deliver, more and more in real life,what religion provides in fantasy less and less. Life, a long life, one day hundreds of years of healthy life, maybe one day even thousands of years. The kind of rich, long life which would be too great to risk in the vagaries of war or mob violence, and certainly far too precious to entrust in the insubstantial hands of capricious, invisible deities.