Eastern religions have the concept of the "atman", a sort of universal spirit or soul that permeates the universe, and of which humans are a part. It seems to express the idea of immersion in something greater than ourselves, much like the idea of the human noosphere. The human mind is pretty good at extrapolating across scales; that is, we can extrapolate the social order we learn inside the family up through tribe, clan, and nation, and we seem to overshoot and perceive one additional level, in which we're variously part of God's kingdom, or the Atman, or Gaia, some "universal consciousness", etc. The constant in all religious belief seems to be that we're individually part of some greater whole. In that respect, religion may not be a complete fantasy, but rather a poorly-articulated observation about a genuine (if intangible) aspect of human existence.

Western rational thought, taken to extremes, denies the existence of an immaterial level of human reality, and focuses only on the tangible features of human life. This leads to elevation of individualism over collectivism, based on the simplistic observation that we're physically disconnected from other humans--"every man is an island", to pervert John Donne. Most of us recognize the falsehood of extreme individualism...we hear the story of Ted Kaczinski and see pictures of him and his plywood shack, and we instinctively say to ourselves, "there's one sick puppy". The opposite extreme, sublimation in a collective, works no better, because the human mind has an individual point of view despite its connections to other minds--we have boundaries, the noosphere isn't a homogenous soup (you might say it's a chunky soup). The truth is somewhere in the middle, as always.

My to-do list includes picking up Richard Dawkins' latest, "The God Delusion". I expect to agree about the delusive nature of the anthropomorphic personification of God or god or gods, but I'm curious to see if he goes so far as to try to debunk our vague sense of belonging to a greater whole. Dawkins is a brilliant man, but sometimes he comes across as a bit of a scientific...not extremist, perhaps, but "hard ass" for sure.