I don't know why we humans think there must be a god out there somewhere, a divine creator--I'm just fine acknowledging that it's the cold, deep heart of space that stares back at us, and it's that same void that will envelop us in the end. Knowing that space and planets and stars exist while we slowly rotate around the sun is enough to humble me. After space, belief in an omniscient, gendered being seems superfluous and ridiculous when you get right down to it.
But I get why people need religion. I do. Really. My understanding of religion is that it serves a very important, repressive social function. I've been reading about sexual repression in the fictionalized account of Alfred Kinsey's team and work, The Inner Circle, by T.C. Boyle. Kinsey and his (male) team wanted to eradicate sexual repression, and therefore eliminate feelings of guilt and criminality associated with certain sexual acts, in order to open up humans to the sexual panoply that is theirs for the taking. Problem is, you can't have people going around fucking any and everything and everyone all the time, or the world would look like an Hieronymus Bosch painting. One grave factor that Kinsey didn't seem to consider important was that someone realizing their sexual potential might at times infringe on the free will of another person, that is, might rape them and stunt their development. (I also think Kinsey himself probably was probably on the autism spectrum, or was at very least, a single-minded sociopath.) It is no exaggeration that women would lose in this kind of open, libidinous, pan-sexual scenario. This is why animals fight each other to mate with females, and why extreme puritanical restrictions have been placed on female sexuality since the dawn of time. Such an eradication of boundaries can only lead us back to the chaos from whence we came. This, in a nutshell, is why religion and social law exist. Anyone who argues to the contrary in favor of plural or open marriage forgets the obvious fact that they too were born into and live within the context of an ordered world, and that their behavior is the exception to the rule.
At some point, atavistic urges must be contained, restrained, and retrained if a species is to progress; hell, if a species is to survive into successive generations at all. When we were cavemen, I'm sure there were cave orgies every night, with cave people murdering and fucking and eating each other left and right. We were animals, pure and simple, guilt-free and unconscious; monkeys for whom behavior had no consequences. Sure, life's a party, but that shit can't last! Then the Monolith arrived and we became conscious of other things to do with our time, and the possibilities of what we might become began to emerge out of the darkness.
What is religion if not an agent of control, a "right and clear path" established in a world of free will and entropy? "Do unto others" is the golden rule, and we have laws in place to reinforce good behavior and punish bad. As I have learned from watching one too many shows about demons, vampires, and supernatural entities (and maybe from CCD), being evil is easy, the path of least resistance; being good and principled is the thornier path to take in life. Have you ever tried turning the other cheek? It ain't easy. Much more satisfying to slash and burn to make your point. What would Jesus do indeed.
I know I certainly prefer living in an ordered world, with police, electricity, plumbing, the internet, movies, garbage collection, house plants, deferred gratification. At this point in time, humans have mostly mastered the art of impulse control. Mostly. (Some might argue that we have replaced sexual urges with food, but that's a different topic for another time.)
There are no gods or demons out to get us; these are just metaphors we humans have created in an effort to help us understand ourselves, and life in general. We are self-conscious, self-loathing, dirty, pathetic, insecure, ingenious, comedic, poetic creatures. Try as we might to control our world, order it to our liking, things in our nature will always bubble up to the surface, just as in "The Tempest," despite all of Prospero's careful planning, Miranda will always see Ferdinand and exclaim:
"O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in't!"
It's up to us, what we see in the stars.
I feel sympathetic exhaustion after reading this.
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