I stood beneath a tree today with my brother and we talked about how small the tree used to be when we were younger. We looked at its branches and how long they stretched now, and stared at the roots in awe. They too reached out from the base of the tree, like a child becoming an adolescent becoming an adult, moving out into the world, finding out what how it processes and perceives the world. And then I thought about chopping the tree down, and how I could never do that, and how even if I were to take an axe to the thing, maybe the stump that was left in the ground as a reminder of the tree's brilliance would go on existing for thousands of years. The basic matter of the tree would remain in existence into infinity, and so maybe the tree itself would, too. And this lead to me considering the minute, sub-atomic ways in which we are only now learning that the human species receives and processes information, and that in turn forced me to consider that maybe, perhaps, in some way, after the human brain ceases functioning and we die, maybe we still continue taking in stimuli and processing it. It is an extremely biased, anti-intellectual stance to say that the human brain can detect and process every bit of information we receive from every dimension of reality. Maybe the remotest parts of our being, the very smallest pieces of genetic material we consist of, goes on into eternity. Maybe we all get to live forever in ways we never even came close to dreaming were possible and our every anxiety about death and destruction is wholly unfounded. Maybe (probably) we are all wrong about reality and the truth is something that we could never even hope to conceive of (yet). Regardless, it occurs to me that the only way to obtain this knowledge is through science. Religion is static, the most conservative, concrete way of thinking possible, and it is nearing irrelevance. To me, anyway.