excellent, thanks!

Parallels my own thoughts to an uncanny degree, though I wouldn't call myself an agnostic as he seems to, or accept his characterization of materialists... (I don't think there's something wrong with the brain per se that needs to be fixed in order to get rid of religion.) But, overall, very close.

Particularly the point about how if there's no afterlife, then there's the strongest imperative to live a just and moral life in the here and now. "This is all there is and now is the time to get it right" might be one way to summarize it:

"In the end, you don't need a top-down entity to give life meaning. If anything, if nobody is out there, it is much more important to find meaning ourselves. Instead of this world being a mere staging for the next world of eternity -- meaning it doesn't really matter what we do now -- it's better to realize there is no eternity, that this is it. In that case, we better be careful what we do, make our choices consciously, treat people kindly and be moral because this life is what really counts."

YES!


His comments on the type of thinking that underlies religious faith, as also being present in attitudes about political/socio-economic systems, also resonate with my thinking of late.

"...people believe in economic and political ideologies just as fervently as they believe in religious doctrines. Most political, economic, racial -- and racist -- ideologies have no basis in reality at all. They're articles of faith. And the best tool we have for discerning truth from all those false patterns is science."

In the US (and here in Canada from folks in Alberta, the Texas of Canada) in recent times for instance, you often encounter a kind of naive faith in the free market as a cure-all for social problems. Often accompanying this is a kind of simplistic, binary thinking: "Oh, if you don't like capitalism, you must be a socialist/communist." Nope. Not me.

That kind if black-and-white choice is always a tip-off that someone's thinking on that particular subject is rooted in an emotional state rather than in reason. The Gurdjieff protege Ouspensky called this "formative" thinking: "It is always possible to recognize formative thinking - it can only count up to two."