Ten

What distinguishes us from other animals is our egotism.

They are content to eat, sleep and fuck. We demand a reason for living.

Our short lives are not enough, so we created eternal beings in whose service our lives would have meaning.

We told ourselves that we did not create these wonderful beings - it was they who created us, in their image - and serving them distinguishes us from other animals, makes us superior to them.

We told ourselves that these beings created the world for us, and sought to understand what their purpose was in doing so.

We created many gods, because we couldn't agree on the nature of these beings whom we created in our image and pretended created us in theirs. We understood their nature as little as we understood our own. Nevertheless we went to war in their defense, to prove to ourselves that ours was the one true god.

All wars are religious wars, even in this ostensibly irreligious age. Only our gods have changed. We no longer worship beings greater than ourselves, our ideal selves. We no longer hold ideals, or the people who have them, sacred. We worship things.

Or we try to.

It's impossible to forget everything we've learned about nature and human nature - everything that made us what we used to call civilized, human - and become savages again, worshipping idols of steel as our ancestors worshipped idols of stone. But we try.