"God-shaped hole" is a bit silly, the primary purpose of spirituality is to allay fears of uncertainty. Sorry, I agree with much of what you write above, but t

"God-shaped hole" is a bit silly, the primary purpose of spirituality is to allay fears of uncertainty. Sorry, I agree with much of what you write above, but this in particular strikes me as a non-sequitur. There is a nihilism which can come from the certainty that a human is but an insignificant blip and from the certainty that the sun will burn the Earth into a dried out rock, if not de-orbit the planet completely. The "God shaped hole" is often deemed silly by the materialist tribes. Why, in particular? I think it's because it's so often used in silly bumper-sticker rhetoric. The existence of such needs -- which can go beyond even the question of life, death, and a (fictional) life after death -- is something which human beings, materialist or otherwise, should acknowledge and examine, or ignore at their peril. Religion deals with far, far, far more than just the stuff of belief. Indeed. And so does the "God-shaped hole." I think belief is where many of both the religious and the materialists get themselves stuck, unproductively. I'm confident that there is no afterlife. However, given the arc of history, and the utter unpredictability of today's world to our ancestors of a thousand years ago, even someone who understands Thermodynamics has reason for unspecified hope.