There's too damn much absolutism around here for me. It makes me gag, all these arrogant chaps and all their certainty.

And we're all mad and need treatment for our - er - funk right, Joe? Funny, where I come from, funk was always a good thing...

Okay. We can be certain about a lot of things. That all religions are made up by humans within the very finite limits of their times & contradict both themselves & each other at every turn. We can be certain that they can't all be be right, but they can all be wrong. We can be certain that viewing them as Truth does them a disservice as to their true value of what they can tell us about the mytho-poetic process and how even this might be used to justify the massacre, exploitation, abuse and suffering of countess thousands by the Roman Catholic Church alone. We can be certainly certain that such atrocity is the consequence of Absolute Certainty.

Otherwise I'm not absolutely certain about anything. Every morning I wake up and open my eyes I give quiet thanks that I'm still alive to experience my particular take on life on a ill-starred planet I share with billions of other human beings most of whom I'll never meet, but each of whom I know enjoys the same uniqueness of perception that I do. I'm pretty certain that if there was a greater emphasis on individualism in human culture as a whole we might get rid of speciesism, racism, sexism, homophobia, territorialism, religion, folk music and all the other insular parochial shit that have humanity forever at logger-heads, only now with the potential to take out the planet at the push of a button.

I am certain of uniqueness and diversity within the infinite commonality of the universe that Science has revealed to us through centuries of hard work and understanding - a process that continues to this day and will continue as long as there are human beings on this earth. Like I say, from Göbekli Tepe to the Large Hadron Collider and beyond - I hope - a thousand years into a potentially glorious tomorrow. But if only if we look to that tomorrow, turn our eyes away from the past, at least use it to build on as part of the process, not obsess over as the source of the truth. Truth is not of the past - Truth is the light that guides us into the future.

It is always easier to say what things AIN'T than what they ARE. I think that's the basis of human inquiry, a long process of joyful elimination that opens up before us a universe of fathomless possibility. As Carl Sagan says in Episode 13 of Cosmos:

And we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos - we've begun, at last, to wonder about our origins. Star stuff, contemplating the stars - organized collections of 10 billion-billion-billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps, throughout the cosmos.

That's arrogant certainty for you! Pure glorious funk in the best sense of the word. Life is splendid. And all the things the religious people think of as God - even in his more 'subtle' forms - are INTEGRAL to everything and every single one of us, bar none, only we might have different names for it.

I know a lot of very lovely religious people, some of them Roman Catholics, and quite a few of them Roman Catholic Priests. They are wonderful for their humanity, not their religion. Even if they stopped believing tomorrow (belief is only Optional after all, it is the choice that defines our humanity, not the nature of what we choose, no matter how baffling at times that choice might be) they'd still be wonderful people. You can be certain of that much - abso-fucking-lutely certain...