Three pounds of "spirituality"

The religious folks like to talk about faith (not thinking) and grace (getting something for being bad) and hope (something bad happens and you hope like hell it stops happening) and prayer (talking to themselves and sometimes, unfortunately, out loud, because we are all, um, bad).

But today's topic is "spirituality."

Ask 10,000 religionists what that is and you'll get 10,000 different answers, but they'll all pretty much agree it's about this (pointing at themselves): being alive and awake and some sort of shit (they don't say "shit") is happening on a major scale in some sort of way that is beyond understanding and it exudes from you and MUST be derived from elsewhere.

We humanists/objectivists call that shit that's happening "the brain" -- which weighs about three pounds in adults. We don't call it spirituality; we call it "that shit that's happening."

It's happening because we THINK. We don't know exactly how that whole neuron network works yet, but we know that if somebody gets Alzheimer's or has a bad seizure or is a liberal that that "shit that happens" pretty much stops happening, pointing to the fact that "spirituality" is physical and not "derived from elsewhere."

The religionists' caveman belief in "spirituality" and its separation from this world and our bodies is called dualism: there's one physical world and then there's that "other world" elsewhere, somewhere, out there, in there, over there. They can't, of course, prove that other world, and they can get downright sniffy if you ask them to, but they KNOW it exists and that when babies are born -- BAM, a spirituality transports in and shit starts happening.

Now, it's pretty damned awesome that that three pounds of meat in your head with trillions of neurons can grasp the extent of the universe, plan 10 years ahead, grab a Frisbee at a dead run, build a supercomputer, paint the Mona Lisa, compose a Ninth Symphony, articulate morality, put a bullet through a quarter at a thousand yards, speak 10 languages, and express love in a sonnet of overpowering eloquence.

But that's what it is, isn't it? That's WHO we are! We are that three pounds, in bodies ranging from 80 pounds to 580 pounds. No matter what we weigh, we are all three pounds. Three pounds of "spirituality," of thinking and doing.

I was thinking of trying to prove the religionists wrong in this post, but have you ever tried to convince the man in the insane asylum that the birds he's talking to AREN'T really talking back? Don't work, and he can get downright sniffy.