What a punch!
> This is why we invented religions, and will continue to reinvent them in ever shifting guises.
Something off about this statement, though. Like out of place in some otherwise wise observations.
Man has our escapism but it isn't at all uniquely circumscribed by "religion".
Unless you define, circularly, "religion" to be man's escapism.
I'm trying to avoid some apologetics over some theology or something. For myself, I'm an apostate. Most religions people would call me an atheist, but I sense that most atheists would reject my membership application.
But what I see in essays like this is a limited human attempting the impossible task of reconstructing some meaning to existence.
The task being impossible b/c we can no more reconstruct meaning than we could reconstruct our, say, biological selves. That was the job of eons of evolutionary process.
Which is what "religion" hosts, encodes... along with crufty theology, escapism, etc.
What you seem to be pitching is this "Just be good" philosophy that for some reason I keep seeing show up on T-shirts the past couple of years. But this is not a substantive philosophy.
When I left religion in my early 20s, in retrospect I feel I threw the baby out with the bathwater not realizing that there was deep, evolved meaning and framework amid the mounds of garbage. That remained even when I thought I was rejecting all of it, the escapism, dogma, fear, etc... In other words I couldn't discard whatever was encoded in myself.
But I worry now I'm not giving my kids what I'd gotten and took for granted. Worry now that a whole generation is not getting it. That we're going to be left with "Just be good" - and otherwise these desperate, searching, doomed essays from people who realize that "Just be good" is not good enough but who have no heritage from the past that hosts pretty much all we could expect to have.