I've turned into a geek, I think.

I'm not quite sure when it happened -- I just realized the other day that I've spent a lot of this summer watching C-SPAN, Discovery, A&E, the History Channel and PBS. As I write this, I'm watching a PBS documentary entitled "Glorious Accident," wherein six brilliant thinkers (including paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould) are sitting around a table talking about things. And I'm following some of it.

What have I done with my summer? Sure, I've read a couple of novels and bios, I've watched some sitcoms and played some computer games. But I've been reading Carl Sagan and other skeptical writers, perusing the Pope, looking at Discover magazine. I've turned, as I said, into a geek.

Not that I think that's a bad thing. In fact, our world would be quite a grim and chaotic place were there no science, no reason, no intellectual pursuit.

I was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist church with a strong anti-intellectual streak running through it. Dinosaur bones, I was told, were a work of Satan; mental illness was actually demonic possession; and the world was, of course, a mere 6000 years old. That's the sort of baloney I grew up hearing on a regular basis.

Fortunately, my high school experience helped instill me with some critical faculties. I learned not to believe the Bible in a literal fashion, without which I would have learned all my science by rote and flushed it from my brain as soon as any given examination was taken.

In the time since then, I have grown to see science as a more and more reliable tool for understanding the reality of our surroundings. If there is a conflict between a religious teaching and a scientific precept, I will throw out the religious idea every single time -- something friends of mine who are actually employed in scientific disciplines seem unable to do.

And taking a scientific view has, I feel, made me a more moral person than I might have otherwise been. Reading about biology and anthropology has made me realize that the racist teachings I grew up around are garbage -- that race, for all intents and purposes, does not exist.

Coming to see homosexuality as a sexual preference no more or less moral than heterosexuality led me to reject religious teachings that would have led me to hate perfectly wonderful human beings. In fact, choosing science and reason over religion and superstition has relieved me of the burden of all sort of mindless prejudices.

But the rational life is superior to the superstitious for reasons more practical than those thus far mentioned. Very few religious texts ever praise reason or intelligence or skepticism -- perhaps because they realize such things are counterproductive, they arm the individual with the conviction necessary to shake off untrue ideas.

And so science, with its tedious trial-and-error methodology, has done more to rid this world of disease, strife and pain than religion ever has.

If you want to cross a river, you don't get a choir to sing until God sends rocks tumbling down to reroute or block the water. You bring in an engineer and a construction crew to build a bridge.

Mother Teresa may have brought some comfort to the poor, but proper agricultural methods would do have done a lot more to feed the hungry than all her prayers ever accomplished. Medicine will do more to remove a malignant tumor than will talk of streets paved with gold.

The time is upon us to look towards the future -- and the way to begin that difficult task is by taking a realistic look at the past. Creationism has no place in the education system of a civilized nation. The Bible, the Koran and other such texts must be seen as the works of men, presented in a biased manner to boot, rather than as the infallible word of God and the true history of the people described therein.

Ideas that have outlived their usefulness must be, as in science, discarded in favor of more likely hypotheses. The burden of proof always rests with the one arguing the more irrational point -- and Occam's Razor insists that the simpler of two propositions, the one most fitting the facts as we know them, is to be chosen.

The history of the universe as proposed by science, from the Big Bang through the evolution of homo sapiens, appears, from our current standpoint, much more likely than a history that has us the pinnacle of creation in a universe only six millennia of age. The idea of mental illness is more likely than that of demonic possession. And the idea that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth -- if such a man even existed -- was a hoax, is infinitely more likely than the idea that the dead can walk again.

We have to pick what works. And, simply put, science works.

Now, sure, science has its downside -- anyone who grew up in the Cold War knows the dangers of technology growing faster than our ability to handle it with maturity. But I do not believe that the increase in scientific and technical knowledge necessarily causes a decrease in the quality of life.

For example, as science and knowledge have advanced, some argue, human happiness has decreased. I agree, but I disagree with the idea that science has caused this unhappiness. I would put the blame on religions that to some extent teach their followers to reject science and reason and facts in favor of what long-dead people thought.

Putting scientific fact in one box and religious teachings in another creates dissonance in the mind. There is a struggle between the two sides. No wonder we're unhappy! We feel, in some inner place, like idiots when we have to say "I do not see that comet, the one right there!" Rejecting evolution is as foolish in our age as the Papal Bull Against the Comet was in its own.

The scientific, secular individual does not experience this dissonance. If s/he rejects a new idea, it is because of skepticism, not dogma. His or her mind is willing to change, to accommodate new ideas, new facts, new views of reality. The scientific person is willing to admit s/he is fallible -- that it's just possible that some key belief s/he holds near and dear may be wrong!

But for the most part, religious institutions aren't willing to do that. As scientific facts come along, religions attempt to reconcile old superstitions with reality, to say "There's not really a conflict." To admit that those texts are based on ancient superstitions from an uneducated age would be more honest.

I don't believe religion is inherently evil, or that it should be eradicated from the face of the earth. In fact, I believe that some amount of spirituality -- by which I mean a feeling of kinship between ourselves and one another, a connection to the universe -- is necessary to keep our morale going in light of science's continually diminishing our significance.

However, the religions fittest to survive in the future are those who are willing to adapt and change with the times. And the only major religion I know is even halfway willing to take that risk is Buddhism.

The Dalai Lama, when asked what would happen if reincarnation were definitively proved to not occur, replied, "We would change our teaching. But it's going to be very hard to prove it does not occur."

Religion is good at creating ideas that cannot be disproved. But an idea that cannot be disproved has no claim on being true, as it cannot be proved, either. And it's hence useless.

So it is up to minority religions such as Unitarian Universalism, or Deism, or Naturalism, religions that are theistic barely or not at all, to step in and help keep our society functioning. But they must first overcome the resistance offered by entrenched dogmatic religions who, lacking a claim on truth, rule instead through terror and intimidation and dogma.

If civilization is to endure, it must be so, with the outdated making way for that which is more fit for the coming era. It has been that way since life crawled out of the ocean so many years ago.

God is Dead -- Now What?