Unintentional Irony Alert

Here, is Michael Crichton, proving that being a novelist is not a good qualification for being a social commentator. His main claim is a fairly harsh indictment of the environmental movement:

We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's not a good record.

I don't want to look to closely into that main claim (though you might, its contrarian if nothing else). Instead, this comment struck me:

Today it is said we live in a secular society in . . . But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

That's certainly not the dictionary definition, which, I think quite properly includes something about supernatural forces. If "belief in something that gives meaning to your life" is religion, then its hard to imagine someone who's not. If that's true, we really do live in a secular society.
- posted by Tom Sawyer @ 7:26 PM