This post has made me think about religion and Atheism.

I'm afraid I come across as an Atheist evangelist. I don't really want to convert religious people to Atheism - (I'd rather convert a PC user to a Mac). I do wish that religion was an order of magnitude less important in people's life - say maybe on a level with astrology.

I do think that atheism is becoming more mainstream, accepted - and a "movement" centered around leaders like Dawkins and Hitchens. I wonder what the world would be like if say 85% of the world professed atheism?

It's possible that things would be much, much worse. It could be akin to taking people of their anti-depressants. Maybe we don't want to have the majority of people facing the fact of their own mortality.

I saw Ricky's new movie The Invention of Lying the other day- it was a subtle appeal for atheism that portrayed a completely rational, truthful world where everyone knew they were going to be eaten by worms when they died. But I wonder if the meaning of the movie kind of back-fired. The people in the rational world were completely miserable with the truth. (Kind of a shit movie by the way - not Ricky Gervais' finest work)

I saw something on 60 Minutes a few years ago on a study that was looking at what common characteristics centenarians shared. The single most prevalent trait was a deep, deep faith. All of them went to church on a weekly basis. And this is silly to confess, and completely irrational but I sometimes think about Carl Sagan's relatively young death from Myelodysplastic syndrome and wonder what his health would have been like if he was a church deacon.

Here's an idea. Maybe faith has been selected for by evolution. People who "let go and let God" are more likely to live a long, healthy life and procreate - and so religion has been baked into our genetic code.

Scary thought.