7. What are your religious beliefs? Have they changed, or have they always stayed the same?

Yeah let's see if posting this picture works this time.

Anyway religion- that isn't a touchy subject at all. Anyway I sort of hate religion because it purports to bring people together and unify them but really I feel like it causes just an awful lot of problems. Especially because you can't prove anything about religion. Like, inherently, that's what religion is- belief. Or, rather, with the mythologies attached to most dogmas, more like suspension of disbelief.

I was raised Roman Catholic, which anyone will tell you pretty much guarantees eventual atheism. It's not surprising- as they say in Dogma, we don't celebrate our religion, we mourn it. When I was in grade school we always livened masses up with fun songs and more kid-friendly sermons, but either way, it's an hour of your life that I always felt would be better spent reading- even if it was just the bible or something. After all, the bible has some pretty good stories. There's lots of fire and brimstone and general kickassery, if you read the right parts. The rest is mostly paragraphs tracing very long genealogies or a bunch of outdated rules and regulations that were, for various reasons, crucial at the time to enforce but which are mostly moot now. (There is evidence for this on both a scientfic and sociological level, I've read about it some)

Don't get me wrong, in general, religions fascinate me. Religion is basically a giant origin story- and everyone knows that's the best part of a superhero franchise. (Well, except The Dark Knight, but Batman doesn't adhere to society's silly rules.) The problem is those psycho people who take these stories for literal truth. I mean stand back a second. They're absurd.

I was once having this conversation with my friend who is Hindu, although I'm pretty sure her family doesn't really practice it. I'm sure her parents do (they are from India) but I know her and her sister just kind of stick with the "don't eat meat" thing and that's about it. But she was sort of making fun of Christianity, pointing out that we basically believe in a zombie god (which, btw, is another example of an awesome story. Zombies. Zombies!). Since I don't actually believe in that, I didn't take too much offence, but when I pointed out to her that she apparently believes in lots of gods with lots of limbs and that when we die we get put into an animal's body (or a different caste- whatever) and she seemed to take mild offence.

The point I'm trying to make is, I don't believe that you can can prove that there is a God/gods/Allah/Yahweh/Zeus/Buddah/Force/Flying Spaghetti monster. But, to be fair, you also can't prove that there's not. So I guess I feel like it's safest not to bank on anything. As a scientist, I know that the world and life is a pretty fantastic thing, and you don't need religion to understand that it is inherently divine. I guess the closest thing I have to a set of beliefs is math. I'm terrible at math, and so are a lot of people, but it has the power to unlock the mysteries of the universe and to divine answers from the chaos. And in the end, that's what religion really is, trying to fix the entropy of the universe, to give order to madness, and to resolve the chaos that lies threatening every part of our world.

The picture, by the way, is of Arcade Fire when I saw them in concert on Easter. Really I can't think of a better religious experience.