How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash? For one thing, I guess, the balderdash is usually beautiful— and therefore echoes excitingly in the more primitive lobes of our brains, where knowledge counts for nothing.

More important, though: the acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.

—Kurt Vonnegut, “Religion,” essay within Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage