The following is an excerpt from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash:
“All people have religions. It’s like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we’ll latch onto anything that’ll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral- a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next. That is the way it used to be, and unfortunately, that’s the way it’s headed now.
But there have been several efforts to deliver us from the primitave, irrational religion. The first was made by someone named Enki about for thousand years ago. The second was made by Hebrew scholars in the eighth century B.C., driven out of their homeland by the invasion of Sargon II, but eventually it was just developed into empty legalism.
Another attempt was made by Jesus- that one was hijacked by viral influences within fifty days of his death. The virus was suppressed by the Catholic Church, but we’re in the middle of a big epidemic that started in Kansas in 1900 and has been gathering momentum ever since.
…Anyone who takes the trouble to study the gospels can see that the bodily resurrection [of Jesus] is a myth that was tacked onto the real story several years after the real histories were written. It’s so National Enquirer-esque, don’t you think?”