In a quick retrospective, it seems like it was an unspectacular weekend. Except for attending a friend’s 60th birthday party last night (my Aunt Bernice, in New York, celebrated her 100th this weekend. Although I got regular facebook updates, we obviously weren’t there), I pretty much didn’t get out of the flat all weekend. 
I did get quite a bit done on a writing project I’m working on now and I’m enthusiastic about, but I’m not at the creative stage yet. Basically, I’ve been handed a lot of notes, stories and musings of a somewhat eccentric expat, and tasked with turning it into a book. There is a lot missing, like chronological order, coherence, and good spelling and grammar, but the stories are interesting, so I have high hopes. I finished a couple of proofreadings, and watched a pretty good movie (Hancock) on TV. I don’t think Will Smith is really a great actor, because he basically just always plays Will Smith, but I almost always like the movies he’s in, which puts him up there with Schwarzenegger and John Candy. I mean that in a totally complimentary way.
Had quite an interesting discussion today about religion, the role of religion in our society and, a bit deeper that that, the difference between belief and reason in arriving at the opinions we want to call our own.
My opinion (theory, if you will, or perhaps more technically, hypothesis) is this: Religionists are worried. They are pressing for religion in schools, more religion in government, they speak of America as a Christian nation, and they use the word atheist as a sneer, as a curse.
Of course, partly it’s just force of habit, and they do these things because they always have. But partly, it’s because they are worried. For thousands of years, they have had the power to execute people, torture people, throw people in jail forever and confiscate all their property if they didn’t sign up for the appropriate religion. We have a way to go before we have a purely secular society, but they can’t do that any more, outside of a few countries, and those countries are not the ones shaping the future of the world.
They have lost their biggest recruiting tool. Without force, there is very little reason for anybody who didn’t start out as a believer to become a believer. Sure, they’ll recruit a few impressionable souls here and there. People looking for enlightenment may try 5 or 6 over the course of their youth.
But, in every generation, a few more will grow beyond the superstition. A century from now, or maybe two centuries, religion as we know it will be a thing of the past.
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