Here, friend!  Grab my hand…  quickly… yes, there you are.  It’s going to be all right now.  Hold on tight… Alley-OOOP!  There!  You made it!  We made it!  Was that an incredible journey, or what!  I just arrived myself, friend, and I’m telling you, it’s difficult to fathom how far we’ve come.  I really can’t believe we are just now waking up from this torturous, hallucinated nightmare called human history.  What a cast of characters!

Okay, okay, I agree with you, my friend.  “Nightmare” is a bit harsh.  When the meme of "life after death" emerged from our primitive, essentially fractal brains --  a perfectly natural result of centuries of staring at the bodies of lifeless family members and wondering where “they” had gone, “it” became incredibly powerful.  It was the very first time anybody on Earth had ever adequately addressed the issue of “Why?” 

"It" quickly became the reason.

The meme became The reason for life’s seemingly interminable struggles.  It went directly to the top of the charts.  The emergence of the idea of life after death was no less than the invention of the human soul.  With the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, after spawning on the side, no less than the idea of religion itself, the “reason” became a mass-produced, mass-distributed, evolutionary force of social change.  To the people who received a copy of Gutenberg’s bible, it may have been the first time they’d ever seen written, linguistic symbols and ideas on paper, period.  The very first book they’d ever held in their hands.  It must have been a transcendent, magical time to be alive.

The fact that this meme still exists today, friend, is a testament to its evolutionary power.  There are billions of people still clinging to it, in huge congregations of different meme flavors.  Many of these groups display the classic, accompanying symptom of delusional paranoia toward science, and toward differing theologies, or anything that threatens the survival of their particular flavor, even to the point of bloody violence.  Many religious groups today still attempt to suppress modern scientific research.

It all relates back to primitive fear of the unknown.  It’s called survival.  The wealthy modern man, with all his technological extensions, has lost touch with how difficult survival was in our dim past, and how difficult it still is today, for many people.  In perhaps the epochal, definitive event of our existence,  homo-sapien groups adopted the religious meme of “life after death” and soon became the fittest groups on the planet, populated with warrior-clerics who would fight members of their own species to the bloody death over mere symbolism.  Thousands of years ago, less-evolved hunter-gatherer tribes, ignorant of the “god” meme,  must have been terrified of this new breed of human, a violent being who raved about invisible gods and waved strange symbols overhead, obsessed with purging the surrounding habitats of “non-believers.”   Ancestors of the American Indian tribes tell how their forefathers first perceived the arrival of European settlers: "We see the face of the White Man and he wants something. We don't know what he wants."

That’s why religious people are still around, my friend, because they represent the genetic lines of our primitive ANCESTORS.  We might owe them a debt of gratitude, I suppose, although I’m not sure they really had a choice in what they “believed.”  Today, it’s clearly time to move on in our mutual understanding of what we’re really doing on this planet, which I've been told, by people I trust, is the evolution of intelligence itself as the universal sculptor, or artistic force, which will ultimately shape the Cosmos.  Yes, my canny friend, this idea is itself a meme, but at least it’s one founded on scientific principles, which are by far the best tools we’ve developed for answering the all-important questions of who and what we are.

Let’s leave this ancient place together, my friend.  Although I’m not sure I could advocate celebrating our sordid history, let’s definitely study it at length, like an objective historian would, and develop a clear-sighted appreciation of our insane past on Earth, perhaps even honoring our naïve ancestors for courageously playing their biological roles.

My friend, let’s move forward and leave the old refuges of our minds, and together we’ll be just like the sea-faring explorers of more heroic times.  Let’s work in teams with hard, pleasurable vigor, our insatiable native curiosity driving us onward and upward towards scientific truth -- our only truth.  Let’s rescue and restore the childlike wonder we’ve lost in our tremendous struggle to survive into the 21st century.  Let’s restore hope for the future, and bring back the excitement of discovery in life, as we collectively evolve, in intelligence, on our beautiful shared planet.

Yes, take my outstretched hand, my brothers and sisters, and now let’s begin intelligently discussing all those millions you’re hoarding in the bank…