One of religion's trump cards is the offer of an afterlife. TimeStamp's fanciful speculations about consciousness tie in nicely with that. All the talk of multiverses, an ever-expanding bubblebath of universes, etc., given credence by quantum physics (and I'm not arguing with that), has also thrown up the speculation that consciousness is, er, sort of immortal. So you get your afterlife (and forelife) even if you think religion's a pain in the bum. What's not to like!

Well here's what I think. I am not hitching my wagon to that stuff just yet. I need to know more (and TimeStamp thinks I'm too thick to take it in). If you're reading this you're a winner. Your father produced hundreds of billions of sperms and the one that made it to one of your mother's tens of thousands of eggs was the one, along with that egg, that made you. The chances of what should have been you turning out to be somebody else were overwhelming, but you beat the odds and here you are. And even that's nothing when you multiply the odds-against down the thousands of generations of humanity. Makes winning the lottery a dead cert in comparison. So you've done really well but that still isn't enough for you. You want an afterlife on top, maybe a bit of resurrection on judgement day. Well I feel a bit sorry for the countless billions of might-have-beens myself. When I've had my shot of life on earth that'll do me. Wanting a bit more beyond the tomb feels a tad selfish to me! My bet is that the numero uno enticement of religion is that afterlife. Without that, God would be a bit pointless. We'd lose that eternal happiness and we would never be reunited with our loved ones. And the flip side is that religion couldn't threaten you with eternal perdition. The concept of an immortal consciousness without religion is equally enticing. I don't like the idea much, but I'll admit, even to TimeStamp, that it has a damn sight more balls than God. Of course, it still has the potential to delude, just like anything else that entices, though not to disappoint, as you'd never find out that it was wrong all along. As Basil Fawlty might have said, cle-ver!