What You Can Imagine Depends On What

Atheism, A Term Which Will, I'm Sure, Eventually Become As Unnecessary As Round-earthism.

The Task Of The Mind Is To Produce Future, As The Poet Paul Valery Once Put It. A Mind Is Fundamentally An Anticipator, An Expectation-generator. It Mines The Present For Clues, Which It Refines With The Help Of The Materials It Has Saved From The Past, Turning Them Into Anticipations Of The Future. And Then It Acts, Rationally, On The Basis Of Those Hard-won Anticipations.

You Don't Get To Advertise All The Good That Your Religion Does Without First Scrupulously Subtracting All The Harm It Does And Considering Seriously The Question Of Whether Some Other Religion, Or No Religion At All, Does Better.

Religions Have Depended On The Relative Isolation And Ignorance Of Their Flocks, Forever And This Is All Breaking Down.

Isn't It True That Whatever Isn't Determined By Our Genes Must Be Determined By Our Environment? What Else Is There? There's Nature And There's Nurture. Is There Also Some X, Some Further Contributor To What We Are? There's Chance. Luck. This Extra Ingredient Is Important But Doesn't Have To Come From The Quantum Bowels Of Our Atoms Or From Some Distant Star. It Is All Around Us In The Causeless Coin-flipping Of Our Noisy World, Automatically Filling In The Gaps Of Specification Left Unfixed By Our Genes, And Unfixed By Salient Causes In Our Environment.