[Religious] and military systems fit well with industrial systems, like the logic of money fits with law and order. Each requires a life of obedience.
-- Paul, in Masculin, féminin, by Jean-Luc Godard

For the previous couple of haircuts I've noticed my barber has been less and less talkative. We used to carry on with great jollity about politics, Italian movies and women, especially women. Recently divorced, he'd been having trouble connecting with the sex who must be obeyed, and when he did, it sounded (to me, anyway) like he'd survived a night with the scuzziest scag in town.

I mention this because during the most recent haircut, while I was waxing lyrical about one of my favourite sexual encounters of times past, he interrupted to say, "But that's only lust." I happened to look at myself in the mirror just then and the look in my eyes was an unvoiced uh-oh.

There are but two ways to say the word "lust" in conversation: lustily or prudishly. His use was in full retreat from the former. He then revealed that he had, well, found Jesus. "I like to think of myself as Christian," he said.

My hair was only half cut so I thought I'd better respond, as opposed to fleeing. I tried to be positive, talking about the spiritual aspects of all religions, but ended by pointing out that they were usually suppressed in the interests of keeping the followers simple and in line. He didn't know about that but there was a lot of love in his heart these days. Fair enough, we could all use more love in our hearts in these heartless days.

Il barbiere did a lot of scripture quoting, as they do, and talked about the great friends he was finally meeting. But signore, I wanted to plead, these young Christians are so lame. I mean, the word was coined for them. True, they aren't as consciously evil as their politically lame counterparts, the Howard Youth, but their earnest wholesomeness is so yesteryear. Or should that be yester-century? Yester-millennium? Whatever time they're trying to resurrect, they seem totally out of sync with the 21st century. I said none of this because he's a genuinely nice guy. The conversation finally petered out. I congratulated him on his newfound happiness and we parted with the usual handshake.

But jeez … although it may be arrogantly presumptuous of me, I can't help but feel sorry for the bloke. He's one of a vast legion of lost and lonely souls whose education typically shut down their minds and left them with no great intellectual or spiritual goals. To me, there is nothing remotely spiritual about the resurgence of Christianity, particularly in its fundamentalist aspect. It's all about manipulating frightened people who are unable to cope with the wild, contradictory changes taking place in the world. They cluster together to shut out the fear of an anchorless existence. The glue that binds the heart of our so-called civilisation -- family and work -- is melting from the excesses of rapacious, competitive capitalism. Everything is coming unstuck and there are only a few ways to avoid the horrifying realisation that this history's future is a goner: give yourself over to time-erasing consumerism or join a fundamentalist sect of your local religion.

If you look at Australia's icon, John Howard (and his wife Janette), it's easy to see why brick-veneer Christianity is on the rise. Conservative, to the point of philistinism, and shallow, blinkered and regressive, it is luring the larval young into trying desperately to recreate the strict moral illusions of someone's faulty memory of a golden age where nothing immoral seemed to happen because no one would admit to its existence. The sixties unlocked sexuality from its corset of moral rectitude, but only for so long. Today the scaredy-cats have introduced a new, improved chastity belt, a chastity belt of the mind, if you will, and its use is being promoted in this era of "choice" as voluntary. Insidious? Enter that old brain stunner, family values.

Premarital sex may or may not be a good thing. It depends on your spiritual (as opposed to religious) awareness. If you're on a spiritual path, any sex is just another distraction. If you're not, it's one of the great brain-charging gifts of being human. And it goes lingam in yoni with love. But for Christians (and other religions), sex is an elemental force to be feared. Organised religion likes its followers to follow. It preaches marriage and family as central to the wellbeing of society, that is, a society attendant to its rules. It follows that sex is only allowed within marriage, because, besides procreation, the natural desire for multiple partners must be curbed. But it can't be curbed. If it could, the vast artistic history of humanity would have amounted to little more than songs like Doggie in the Window, painters like Norman Rockwell, and writers like CS Lewis.

In the end, the family is not the most central aspect to religion's idea of societal wellbeing. That (dis)honour belongs to a drudging, grinding work ethic in which the securing of a meaningless job is the most important goal in life. What better way to insure a constant workforce than the millstone of marriage and the Biblical exhortation to procreate further fodder for the workhouses of the future?

The evolution of our species has seen our god-like brains evolve to the point where they are now vastly superior to our bodies. (As to who gave us these brains, perhaps one day we will be evolved enough to comprehend this mysterious source.) For most of this painful evolution we have used our bodies like oxen in what has amounted to slave labour. Countless lives have been wasted over the millennia in service to an elite ranging from kings to corporate executives, with little or no time left to contemplate the mysteries. Now that we are beginning to know better, this elite is banking on 24/7 consumerism and a return to 19th century working hours to distract us yet again from contemplating the mysteries. But the history that has flourished for them and kept us in chains is coming to an end.

If we stand back and take a good hard look at the accomplishments of our lives, we will see that, unless they contributed to the positive evolution of the species, they haven't meant a damn thing. We've been conned into thinking our life has had meaning, when in fact, we have been little more than expendable worker bees, ciphers of existence.

There is only one way to exit the maze of little joys and big sufferings and the finality of death. Religion is a dead end. The brain is the gateway. It's time we started using it.

The super-minds of the future are unlikely to remember the 20th century for its Manhattan project or the moon shot, for those were merely spectacular human stunts. Because information processing is the key to all other acts, the building of ENIAC promises to be the human product most celebrated by its cyberdescendants. They will marvel that a bunch of derived apes with computers made of jelly managed to cobble together a technological civilization and high-level physics without blowing themselves up like kids in a fireworks factory. They will ... chuckle at the superstitious nature of people who actually believed a great spirit of the universe created and fawned over them, and then demanded their worship in exchange for a reprieve from eternal torture. How little humans understood that they were not the creations of gods, but the creators of minds as powerful as a god.
-- From Beyond Humanity, by Gregory S. Paul and Earl D. Cox

-- Gort Slypesunder

PS: If you want to take a quantum leap from these words, read the article and all comments here.