“The human dilemma is hardly new. We find ourselves through no wish of our own on this slowly revolving planet in an obscure corner of a vast universe. Our questioning intelligence will not let us live in cow-like content with our lot. We have a deep need to know why we are here. What is the world made of? More important, what are we made of? In the past religion answered these questions, often in considerable detail. Now we know that almost all these answers are highly likely to be nonsense, having sprung from man’s ignorance and his enormous capacity for self-deception… The simple fables of the religions of the world have come to seem like tales told to children. Even understood symbolically they are often perverse, if not rather unpleasant… Humanists, then, live in a mysterious, exciting and intellectually expanding world, which, once glimpsed, makes the old worlds of the religions seem fake-cosy and stale…”
-Francis Crick