The words we use are often misleading, religiousness might mean many things. It might mean my desire to love or that I trust that there is a deeper meaning to this life, but usually it means I adhere to a certain set of unproven beliefs.
To have a religion is, in this sense, similar to having a political party, a sports club, whatever. It means basically that we pretend to know something that we in fact only wish you knew. It is called faith.
Now faith is very different from trust. I may trust in you as a friend, but this is different from the claim that I know that you are a friend. There are relatively few things (if any) we can accurately claim to know, although we can trust in the most bizarre things.
Now religious people usually say that you have to believe in certain things in order to give meaning to your life. I think this is a big, horrendous lie. In my opinion all you have to do is to be open. Be open to the universe, be open to what you are. In the last centuries science as developed a view of the world more magnificent than any writer has ever been able to imagine. The quantities of fish, birds and wild life that has been around for millions of years in our planet alone, show us without doubt that we live inside a magnificent story, in which we are only a pale fragment. Our greatest achievement is that we have a center spot. In our spot we can look at the life of elephants and plants and dolphins and spiders and stars and planets. In our spot we can contemplate the incredible joy of creation.
As a species we are not very special in most respects: We do not take especially better care of our infants, we are not especially wise in our relations with our peers or with our environment, we are not the most beautiful, harmonious, delicate or even physically stronger, we are not the ones who live longer, or have a better sense of taste or smell. For all these and many other characteristics there are other species who can surpass us. Our advantage is in the preservation of knowledge, which means that, although we are totally in the dark regarding what the world or what it is there for, what is its purpose, we know how it behaves and we know many if... then sequences, which means, we know that if wee do this, then that will happen.
Through this way of dealing with the world, we have advanced enormously in our technical ability to survive in the farthest reaches of the earth. We have been able even to record the lifestyle of other animals, in pictures and film, and in concepts, we have shared them with others.
But, although the recordings of all this research has allowed for the construction of a vast amount of knowledge, the fact is, we prefer the myth. Most of us prefer to think that we have a different story, origin, role and destination. we prefer to think of ourselves as the rulers of the earth. In our mythology human life is more sacred than the life of any other animal. In fact, many of us, would think that it would be correct to say that human life is the only sacred life on earth. In practice this means that if, to save a human life, you had to destroy the entire planet, than it would be morally correct to do so. We would find more correct, according to our mythology, to kill billions of billions of living beings to save a single human life.
This is how self centered our species is.
Now, many generations have come and researched the reality of our world. They have made hypothesis and tested them, they were ready to sacrifice their prejudices, and the world they found was a world very different from this myth. In this world men are not at the center, they have much more to learn, a world, an immense world rises before them, with histories, a degree of complexity, a beginning and end which defies even the most prodigious imagination. The world described by science is undoubtedly wonderful beyond our imagination.
We took up religion to make sense of our life. We thought that, if we were to consider ourselves just another kind of ape, our life would be meaningless. But it is precisely the opposite that happens. It is only when we see our species and ourselves as part of this gargantuan story that we begging to realize how tremendously beautiful each of our moments here on this earth really is. The wonderfulness of this world is much more intense, much more real, speaks much more to the senses, to our hearts, to our souls, then the ancient sacred texts were able to convey. Compared with the magnificence of the Earth and the Cosmos, they look very pale, almost like rubish, although a shinning rubbish, shinning because, in spite of their blindness, they are part of the history of the Cosmos.
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