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Where Religion Went Wrong
What’s a Meta for?
I read somewhere — it might have been in a Michael Moorcock story — that “Gods are only metaphors. As metaphors, they might be acceptable, but they should never be allowed to become beings in their own right.” The implication being — and this is an occasional fantasy/SF trope — that if enough people believe in a god, that god becomes real. The corollary being that gods who lose all their believers become drifting spirits, seeking someone who can or will hear them (as in Terry Pratchetts’ Small Gods).
Thus much for fantasy, but what about Real Life, if indeed such a thing can be said to exist, given that experience is subjective? OK, let’s simplify that to ‘what most of us agree on as being Real Life’.
So back in the old Old Times, when men had only just become men, women had only just become women, and everything else on the planet defined humans as ‘lunch’, we had to stick together to survive. So we did, in troops of maybe 200 individuals at most. Everybody knew everybody, and everybody knew what they had to do. You had to gather food by picking fruit, seeds, fungi and nuts in season, steal eggs from nests, pick up snails and bugs, catch lizards and small mammals and, once you got some tools together, hunt medium-sized game. You also needed to protect the kids and pregnant women, and keep The Others off. The Others…
