I don’t feel like doing anything serious, so tonight, I will get chatty.

This mostly going to be music, but we will start off with a YouTube series.

Let me introduce you to my new Internet boyfriendu :

How do I love you? Let me count the ways. You are sharp, cute, funny, nerdy, crazy about science, upbeat, fun to be around, and are really rocking the blond hair black beard thing like you are a travel sized Thor.

Oh, and the show is ten tons of fun too, of course. It’s like it was made for me. The high energy level, the quick pace, the combination of science and silliness, the taking of pop[ culture questions to ludicrous extremes, it has everything but Adam Savage.

And Jamie Hyneman, I suppose, but meh. Slap a beret on a walrus and call it a day.

And like I have already over-established, I love the host. He is so funny and cute! And he gets overexcited by science just like I do!

In fact, I am a tiny bit mad at him and the show because they are a little too much like an idea I had for a video series called “Fruvous Gets Way Too Excited About Science”, in which I would do my best to share how excited I get over science news some time.

It’s not exactly the same, obviously. Mine would be a science news show where I try to convey just why exciting science news is so goddamned exciting.

Come to think of it, that would dovetail neatly with another idea of mine, which is to do my own “science sermons”, so to speak. Inspirational speeches about how amazing the world (heck, the universe) is when you can see it from the point of view of science.

Like Carl Sagan’s and Neil Degrasse Tyson’s magical words about how we are a mote of dust in a sunbeam, a pale blue dot on Pluto’s horizon, and yet also the most complex and intricate things in the universe at the very same time.

Science is such a trip, man!

I could totally be a science educator like my crush up there. I have endless love and enthusiasm for science, I know enough about it to get the idea across to others, I am highly charismatic and articulate, and it would be work I would absolutely love.

Oh, and many times in my life, I have explained something to someone so well that they ask, “Wow, why hasn’t anyone else explained it to me this way?”

Because I am fucking magical, darling. I only make it SEEM simple and easy.

Some people talk about science replacing religion. I understand why they want that. It’s certainly the closest thing I have to a religion myself, and I bet I am not alone in that.

But science can only replace a few of the functions of science. It can provide a cosmology, of course, one with sweep and grandeur and an unparalelled ability to see yourself as one tiny part of an enormous cosmic thing.

Yet it is very bad at anything involving warmth and comfort. Its strict adherence to absolute objective reality means it cannot offer comfort to people when times are tough, it can’t be there with them when they are lonely and scared in the middle of the night, it can’t hold their hand when they feel like their world is coming apart, and it can’t provide satisfying answers to the questions people have burning in their hearts.

In short, it cannot provide people the emotional inputs they desperately need in order to keep their minds and their moods balanced. Religion can.

Take it from someone who has never had religion at all and has spent a lot of time thinking about what it does for people who have it. I can see what I am missing due to my atheistic upbringing. I know, inimately, that logic, reasons, and science only go so far and that beyond that point, you are going to need something beyond reason and the conscious mind in order to make it through the world.

I’m working on it.

In fact, I am increasingly sure that all the most important things that religion can give a person are given when they are very young. Religion gives people a fundamental sense of security and safety that can last a lifetime, and can even survive a total rejection of the original faith and everything it stands for.

Because the dogma doesn’t matter, the corruption of the faith doesn’t matter, the outright absurdity of the beliefs doesn’t matter, none of that matters. All of that comes after the patient has received their inoculation.

I can’t prove this, obviously. I couldn’t prove it if I fMRIs of every brain in the world. But nevertheless, I think it is true.

And it would neatly explain the phenomenon I have observed where even the most virulent of atheists retains enough of a faith in God to stay angry at Him.

Logically speaking, if you don’t believe in the existence of God, then there is nobody to get mad at. At least, that’s how it seems to an outsider to religion like me.

I have no anger at God or Allah or Whoever or their churches or their minions or their holy books or any of all that for the same reason I am not mad at Sherlock Holmes or Captain Nemo or Mister Tumnus the Faun from the Narnia books.

Because I never thought they were real in the first place.

But for those who had then lost religion, my kind of thinking makes no sense. Or rather, it makes perfect sense but it completely fails to track with them emotionally.

And that is because no matter how their conscious mind rejects the faith, that deep down core of belief never dies.

It just hides.

And I wish I had one.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.