Instead of viewing rationality and religion as being opposed to each other, where we are gradually evolving into human reason being the highest level in a form of humanistic ideals, indeed both are really just ways of viewing the world, to understand it. They are different frameworks for us to work in: rationality asks us to question, to seek, to find answers in human methods, while religion teaches us to seek methods of the supernatural. It is a whole transplant of mindset, rather than a shift in perspective. After all the ancients didn't really care much for rationality and reason simply because they were not educated enough, and that's why they attached spiritual significance to objects: 'fetishism' in the terms of George Eliot, and soon came the organised religions, as we all know, like Christianity. Perhaps these new ideas signify the emergence of the human race as being able to lead and rule the order of the universe.

I am slightly doubtful if that can ever be a reality. The universe is just too complex and mysterious: there are just far too many things outside the realm of the human that we can't control at all, not to mention dictate. The recent SARS virus is a case in point. Weaknesses, fears, irrationality, all point to the fact that perhaps this 'humanism' based on the notion of the imperfect being is not as wonderful as it seems, an ideal though it may be. Why then are we so scared of death if we seem to rationally be able to control everything?

We can't. we're all fallible anyway, and the sooner we realise this the better. I've seen people become happy because they've realised the need for some spiritual order 'coz the rational humanistic order satisfies not the inner souls. And that's why God will never be dead, as Nietzche famously put it a century ago.