The Council Convenes

[upbeat music] Out of everything, four billion years of case files, religion might be my single favorite entry. You say that every session. I mean it more every time. They looked up at 400 billion galaxies and concluded someone built this for them personally, by name. Thousands of gods, gods for rain, gods for harvest, gods for the specific coastline they were standing on when the rain arrived. And they built extraordinary things in the answer. Cathedrals of such impossible beauty that every confirmed agnostic who walks into one goes completely quiet for at least six seconds, and crusades simultaneously for centuries without apparent irony. Faith sustained them through every extinction we almost delivered. Plague, famine. Every session, we nearly closed the book. And burned them, silenced them, erased generations of their finest minds for contradicting a book declared perfect on a vote. The remarkable thing isn't that they believed. Everything that has ever existed believed in something. The remarkable thing is they still do, right now. After everything in that book, they still get up every morning and reach for something bigger than themselves. In every language, to every name they have for the same question. It's a beautiful principle, applied at most 30% of the time, and they never stop trying to close that gap. Record that. [laughs] I already have. Well, we've heard the record. What do you think? They invented gods because they could not bear to be alone in it. [upbeat music]