Hello Dave!
“On yet another world, intelligence had been born and was escaping from its planetary cradle. An ancient experiment was about to reach its climax. Those who had begun that experiment, so long ago, had not been men – or even remotely human. But they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deeps of space, they bad felt awe, and wonder, and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they set forth for the stars. In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night. And because, in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed. [...]
The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic. In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships. But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter. Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into rust. Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea. And they still watched over the experiments their ancestors had started, so long ago.”
“But let me remind you of Haldane’s famous remark: The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine – but stranger than we can imagine.’
“With the historic abolition of long-distance charges on 31 December 2000, every telephone call became a local one, and the human race greeted the new millennium by transforming itself into one huge, gossiping family.”
“My field of interest is the psychopathology known as Religion.’
‘Psychopathology? That’s a harsh judgment.’
‘Amply justified by history. Imagine that you’re an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species which has divided itself into thousands – no by now millions – of tribal groups holding an incredible variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there’s a ninety-nine per cent overlap, the remaining one per cent is enough to set them killing and torturing each other, over trivial points of doctrine, utterly meaningless to outsiders.’ ‘How to account for such irrational behaviour? Lucretius hit it on the nail when he said that religion was the by-product of fear – a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe. For much of human prehistory, it may have been a necessary evil – but why was it so much more evil than necessary – and why did it survive when it was no longer necessary? ‘I said evil – and I mean it, because fear leads to cruelty. The slightest knowledge of the Inquisition makes one ashamed to belong to the human species… One of the most revolting books ever published was the Hammer of Witches, written by a couple of sadistic perverts and describing the tortures the Church authorized – encouraged! – to extract “confessions” from thousands of harmless old women, before it burned them alive… The Pope himself wrote an approving foreword!’ ‘But most of the other religions, with a few honourable exceptions, were just as bad as Christianity… Even in your century, little boys were kept chained and whipped until they’d memorized whole volumes of pious gibberish, and robbed of their childhood and manhood to become monks…’ ‘Perhaps the most baffling aspect of the whole affair is how obvious madmen, century after century, would proclaim that they – and they alone! – had received messages from God. If all the messages had agreed, that would have settled the matter. But of course they were wildly discordant – which never prevented selfstyled messiahs from gathering hundreds – sometimes millions – of adherents, who would fight to the death against equally deluded believers of a microscopically differing faith.’”
