I was driving to Starbucks tonight (I work at Starbucks now - what a good job it is!) tossing around the light and frothy subject of whether or not religion is manufactured by humanity or not, and do you know what hit me? I started considering that, inasmuch as Christianity manifests itself in a truly selfless way, I believe it. I think that's why we get so frustrated by consumer comfortable Christianity and pastors in the 95 American wealth percentile and salesman evangelists: what's so supra-human about protecting number one? Scientific materialism would say that our psyches are conditioned entirely by our evolutionary history, and even though there are a thousand places in my life where I find it so easy to believe this, how do the true examples of 'turning the other cheek' fit into that? In some ways, religion is more compelling than science is easy because it's more difficult to explain the occasional holiness in man than his prolific brutality. If I am truly interested in seeking out answers rationally and analytically, if I am truly searching scientifically, then the exception of man's charity should keep me searching (even if his selfishness proves to be the rule on my every side). And it is in this place that Christ begins to speak: turn the other cheek, the last shall be first, give a thief more than he attempts to take, love your enemies.

At the end of the day, the crucial question is this: Is religion merely a complicated form of selfishness (a desire for self-preservation in one's relation to an omnipotent God), or is it something more?