“Let’s all pull down our pants when I turn off the lights,” she said. I was 10 or so, and my family lived in the moment of nowhere. It might have been somewhere sometime, but at that moment it wasn’t. The closest nearby kid my age was a quarter mile down our dirt road. His name was Freddy. He had an older sister Lynn – I’m guessing she was 12. She was the advocate of the depanting. Their father didn’t live with them. I guess I agreed, because the light went off. My friend was standing near me and I remember him whispering, “Don’t do it – let’s trick her.” We tricked. When she turned the light back on, her pants were at her ankles and ours weren’t. She was pissed.

I had forgotten about this, but I remembered it when I was thinking about something I saw on television last week. There was a guest on some talk show, talking about the way that the relationship between the religious and the secular is so contentious. He said that both sides have to stop trying to find conflict, and instead recognize each other’s right to their beliefs. If we can shift the focus even a little, we will be able to accomplish much more. It was one of those things that is obviously true, but that you don’t think about often regardless of which side you are on. I probably spend 100x more time thinking about how silly I think religion is than about how to cooperate with believers to achieve common goals.

Then I started to think about the argument itself (you can’t really call it a debate). In the fight between one side and the other (let’s call it the loonies vs. the obviously correct) which side has their pants down when the lights come on? At first, I thought the pants on folks were the rational ones. We like to point and laugh. But then I wondered if exposed underwear might represent truth. So that would make pants down the non-loonies. Show us your truth! But we are not an embarrassed lot in general, so I went back to my original intuition. I’m a pants on guy and the downing of the pants in the dark is a mindless act of group-think. (Boy am I lucky the analogy police are off guzzling donuts somewhere). So walking back up-track to examine my mangled train of thought, why did this memory surface when I was thinking about the secular vs. religion thing? It hit me like a ton of molten hot Krispy Kreme glaze. We cannot get along with each other because we both do something that runs directly against the core requirements of the other’s group membership. The mythligious believe arbitrary things without proof, and the agnostheists reject group think.

That part is obvious, but this part isn’t. Religion is a really, really useful thing. Ask Jared Diamond – he’ll tell ya. Religious folks have created a social construct that allows them to climb their way into places in the human strategic space that require a degree of organization, coordinated action, and motivation far beyond the capabilities of those of us bound by logic and Nash reality. I mean sheesh, try to wage a centuries long global war of conquest without a puffed up sense of self-importance. Religion is deliciously useful.

So that is why we keep it around. We change it as needed too, but that takes longer because you have to wait for the folks that were taught the ‘old ways’ to stop whining and die. Interpretations of religions change hugely from generation to generation. The caste system slides away, God stops supporting slavery, women become equal…not small changes. Heck, Old to New Testament – are you KIDDING me? But here is the nut. The whole faith thing is all based on turning the light off, and on everyone pulling their pants down at the same time. It is hard to do that when you know someone is going to be pointing at your wonder woman underwear and laughing when they come back on. That is why we fight each other.