I've been thinking quite a bit about origins, our creation and our place in this universe. I approach the question mathematically, trying to reduce everything to the simplest terms, weeding out all superfluous elements, simplifying, so to speak, to the most streamlined, elegant explanation.

I've always had a problem with conventional religions, the cause of so much turmoil since they first surfaced in societies, the cause of so many wars and internecine hatreds spanning centuries. They are often prejudicial, favoring one set of followers and cursing all others. Most are sexist in their dogmas, dictatorial in their laws, unimpeachable, stern, cold rules to guide the society that spawned them through a prophet who spoke directly to God.

I've always had a problem with the idea of God, as it settles nothing, just removing the question of our own creation one step, as any deep thinker would ponder: "well where did he come from? Who created him?"

So I decided to erase that complex muddle of contradictions and imponderables that have taxed and bested our best thinkers over the ages, filling whole libraries with tomes enough to drown one in endless investigation. When I simplified the blackboard of my calculus with this erasure here is what I had left, something I dare say is an elegant solution:

We created ourselves. We created the universe from the first 'big bang' and set in motion all the evolution that followed, the blueprint that led to ourselves from the primordial mud and first organic particles that started our own slow climb.

How did we do it? We don't know the details yet, can hardly frame or comprehend the question, the omnipotence of creation. But we are evolving rapidly in this comprehension of our universe and everything in it. We will, if we continue peaceably as a collective species another hundred years, achieve this enlightened state.

We already consider ourselves the wards of this planet. We have dominated it on every level. We are poor guardians so far in our apprenticeship years but hope to collectively pull together and improve. We begin to explore space We plan to spread and colonize it. Advances in medicine will prolong our lives. Advances in science may soon allow us to abandon this delicate 'meat sack' and exist for eons. The evolution continues, with computers our electronic handmaids, perhaps partners. Their AI is also ours.

One might ask how this unriddles the mystery of creating something out of nothing. In details it doesn't. But we're already here. We know that creation occurred, just not 'how'. My theory is that there are many levels of consciousness above our own, that our future generations will grasp them one by one, that time itself might be something much more complex and malleable than the linear ruler guide we envision it now. And if such dreams become realities in the future, what's to stop me from positing an 'eternal recurrence', which because it's a circle, has no beginning and no end and never needs one.

I know this all sounds wildly hypothetical. But if we did form a religion around this axiom, it would be non-sexist, all-inclusive, non-divisive and positive in its overall direction of the human race bettering itself to reach this perfection of self-creation. It would require of us no self-abasement, no daily grovelling on our knees before some cruel taskmaster, no Sunday reciter of hymns to a benign overlord with fervent prayers to be admitted to a heavenly afterlife while we ignore this one, this real one, this tangible one, which is all we know, all we have for sure.

My religion would not involve prayers. How can we pray to ourselves. It would not include demeanment, abasement before a far more powerful, sometimes angry entity. It would only encourage self-improvement and harmony with all our fellow mortals to reach the stage of enlightenment. I don't lay claim to this radical idea, read Pico del Mirandola, 'oration on the dignity of man' 1486. It's only some ten pages long and proposes the highest goals for the human race, from the mind of the greatest Italian renaissance scholar. It was written in his youth. He died at thirty-one. They say his life was so pure, so angelic, thousands visited as it lay on his bier smelling of perfume for the three days until he was interrred.

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