I have to line up with Andrew on that Atlantic piece about Arthur C. Clarke.

“What Clarke failed to understand about the supposed ‘mind virus’ of religious belief is that it answers exactly this question — it grounds human dignity in transcendent truth.”

The problem here is that the word “truth” ought to be plural. So ought “religious belief.” There isn’t just one, there are lots of them, and they disagree fundamentally among themselves about the transcendent stuff.

  • This one says that after you die you go to a different plane of existence; that one says, no, you are reborn on earth.
  • This one says there is an invisible Sky Father supervising our affairs, that one says, no, there are lots of Sky Fathers, each with a different portfolio; while yet another one says there are no Sky Fathers at all, only an ineffable void.
  • This one says you should love your enemies; that one says you should kill them.
  • This one says the Sky Father sent us a messenger 2000 years ago to show us the right path; that one says, yes, but he sent another messenger 600 years later, whose message was even more definitive; a third group tells us that, no, the second messenger didn’t show up till 200 years ago; while down the street there’s a religion that says the Sky Father will send a messenger in his own sweet time, but hasn’t yet …

Doesn’t look very dignifying to me, nor for that matter much like truth. Compared with this mess, those corny, laughable old non-transcendent truths — stuff like water is wet, fire burns, E = mc2, and eπi + 1 = 0 — look pretty good.