Expand The Tribe

Did you know that 100 years ago people did not know about galaxies?  They didn't know that our Sun was part of a larger galaxy, and they certainly did not know that the Milky Way was just one of - literally - billions of other galaxies.  It's only in the past century that human beings have come to understand the truth: space is staggeringly, mind-numbingly, impossibly huge, and we're just a teeny, tiny part of the whole.
    But our religions were all developed by people who thought the Sun went around the Earth.
   Take a moment for that to digest.  We follow religions formulated by people who knew in their heart of hearts that the Earth was the center of the cosmos.  Believed it from the day the village elder told them so until the day they died.  They didn't understand the Earth circled the Sun and not the other way around.  For most of human history, our spiritual lives have been guided by advice from well-meaning people who were completely and utterly wrong about the way the universe works.
   It's time to re-think some of this religion stuff.
   I'm not saying we need to re-think morality or checklists for moral behavior or anything like that.  There are some things that are true no matter how big the cosmos gets.  The major point all religions have in common is the Golden Rule - treat others the way you want to be treated.  Don't steal, don't lie, don't murder, etc. etc. etc.  It's all a variation on the Golden Rule.  People need morality, and most people need guidelines to practice that morality, and religion does a fantastic job of laying out the rules and the consequences.  So that part's good.
   The fault of religion the way we practice it now - the way that's been handed down for thousands and thousands of years - is that it's extremely, violently, pointlessly parochial.  Tribal, even.  Us versus them.  Our group over here against your group over there.  Zero-sum.  If we want to win, by necessity you must lose.  Most world religions claim to be inclusive but in actual practice they're very exclusive, and I think it's because the trappings of religion - the practice, not the message - evolved during a time when people really, truly believed the Earth was carried on the back of a giant tortoise.  When strangers could come into your village and steal your goats and your grain and leave you and your family to starve.  Of course there are people alive today who would like to take us back to that blissfully ignorant time, before vaccines and microchips and communications satellites, but that's a different rant for a different time.
   If people would take a step back and look at how small and fragile the Earth is compared to the vastness of Creation we might come to undertand that we really are all in this together, our tribe is not just those we can touch versus those within a spear's throw.  Our tribe is all of us, everyone on the planet, and we depend on each other to a degree that hasn't really become clear before we had the technology to see it.
   It's time to expand the tribe.  We now have this incredible tool, the Web, that allows us to do something we never could before: decentralize, democratize, and share knowledge.  No more tribes, no more people stuck in a mountain valley cut off from the rest of humanity for hundreds of years.  Now everyone can know what everyone else knows, and the truth is no longer subjective it's objective, true for everyone. 
   This can be the new religion, the pursuit of truth.  Real truth.  Provable truth.  Knowledge that lifts us all together instead of superstition that keeps us all apart.