Imagine - Baba Brinkman

Like John Lennon

I can imagine a world with no religion

It’s a world you can visit,

just get a ticket to Denmark, Norway or Finland

I can imagine a world without religion

even if religious is adaptive

And religious rituals are designed to elevate, bind, and enrapture us

Nature is full of adaptations that fill us with a sense of admiration

From the peacock to the leopard asleep in the treetops,

it’s all so amazing

Which means religion is also amazing, incentivizing cooperation

Building civilizations and building trust among strangers in congregations

And building walls of separation between competing factions

Religion enhances and also entrenches human interactions

And yeah, I can imagine a world with no religion;

it’s not so far fetched

In fact, that world has been imagined already;

it’s called «Star Trek»

And yes,

I too dream of a unified human race exploring space

But for that to happen we’d have to see the end of wars over faith

Or maybe just the end of faith,

but this view of religion is an antidote

It’s the evolutionary view,

which every human on this planet should know

Even if they don’t agree with it,

don’t agree with it!

That’s fine, just try to comprehend it

If everybody could at least comprehend it,

religious violence would be all but ended

This vision begins with every human being as part of one species

An African ape that expanded its range,

but we can still interbreed with ease

We all share a common ancestor a couple hundred thousand years ago

And we all share a set of instincts that are known by the label «spiritual»

A set of practices that assisted our ancestors in becoming ancestral

But that doesn’t mean religion today is either benign or beneficial

Things done changed!

There’s more information out there for the curious

And scientific findings are contradicting varieties of religious experience

And today belief in the supernatural isn’t necessary or sufficient

To live a meaningful life,

but it does carry some nasty baggage with it

Like homophobic scriptures,

sectarian divisions,

karmic victim blaming

Pernicious guilt,

fear of hell,

taking infidels into slavery

Treating women shamefully,

and trusting the gods instead of changing things

If everything happens for a reason,

those reasons could use some explaining

So yeah,

I can imagine a world without religion,

but that’s not my vision

My vision is a world with religion,

in which religion is naturalistic

It embraces the path we’ve been on,

and the fact that we’re naturally selected

And celebrates our place in the cosmos,

and the planet we’re inhabiting in it

But with no supernatural, no superstition,

no miracles breakin' the laws of physics

And no religious justification for the mistreatment of conspecifics

With the supernatural gone,

we can still experience transcendence

We’ll get it from dancing and meditation,

we’ll tap into compassion without limits

We’ll get it from music and moving images,

from shared moments as audience members

We’ll get it from nature,

from being intrinsically part of it instead of separate

But most of all,

we get it from connecting with our fellow citizen humans

From that feeling of expansion that’s endowed in us by evolution

So join me in imagining religion entirely naturalized

In which communal rituals and stories still survive to enhance our lives

In which we live to improve this world,

‘cause there’s nothing after we die

Imagine how good that could be,

it’s easy if you try