I see these press releases from churches every week in the newspaper. One of them in particular caught my eye.

A little shrine near where I live was having a special Adoration of the Virgin Mary event, and the description of it included a “procession in praise of the Sacred Virgin Mary,” followed by a sermon on the virtues of the Sacred Virgin Mary and ending with an elaborate ceremony in praise of that very same Sacred Virgin Mary.

I had to chuckle. Wow, that was an awful lot of praising of the Sacred Virgin Mary in one little press release. And wow, that was going to be an awful lot of sucking up to the Sacred Virgin Mary in one little event.

Really, does the Sacred Virgin Mary need all that earnest fawning bestowed upon her?

I mean, I can imagine people during medieval times thinking they had to bow and scrape like this in the presence of a queen or prince—and the Royal Person actually expecting and needing it—but there’s something comically unclean about the thought of real people doing it today.

And yet these people are deadly serious about it.

There’s a whole long speech I could get into here about the inner nature of people desperate for praise and adulation, the basic idea of which is that nobody truly big and powerful would need or want such toadying.

Anybody who knows the basics of how people work inside could tell you that the person who demands constant praise from others has desperately low self-esteem. Being unable to feel good about himself on his own makes him a sort of addict; he needs a frequent fix of “feel-good” from others because he’s unable to generate it on his own.

On the other hand, it seems to me that a guy (or even a Sacred Virgin) who really didn’t need it would be sickened by all the wheedling, flattery, and devotion. I start to see the scene as something like a Monty Python skit, with the lot of them dancing around and singing a demented ditty:

O, you Virgin Mary, you are so very nice.

We shower you with praises, we shower you with rice.

We tell you we adore you, we tell you that you’re swell.

We really, really like you—please don’t send us to Hell.

But I won’t go into that whole long speech because a really terrible realization came to me shortly after I read the notice about the event. A cascade of thoughts that went something like this:

Imagine the work that went into this one event.

Total up all the labor of the people to arrange and advertise it.

Add in the efforts of all the people who would come and be part of it—all the showering, shaving, and dressing; all the shepherding of kids and great aunts; all the tying-up of dogs; the bringing-in of cats; the fueling of cars; the packing of baby things; all the time and money spent traveling to and from.

Go back and add in all the work that went into building this one tiny shrine and maintaining and using it over the decades—the building, dedicating, cleaning, publicizing, volunteering, painting, wiring, amping, repairing, carving, grass cutting, landscaping, stained-glass-window making, stained-glass-window cleaning, sign-making, remodeling, refurbishing, preaching, kneeling, breast pounding, head thumping, and hosanna singing.

And then multiply that by, oh, ten million or so to include all the effort devoted to all the services in all the churches in all the world in all of human history and pre-history. Multiply that by a factor of two or three or ten to calculate in all the thought, effort, worry, and fear that went into such godly pursuits in people’s spare time.

Now gather all that human sweat, devotion, creativity, imagination, worry, and concern in one big ball and imagine what could have been done with it.

You know those ancestors of ours from 40,000 years or so ago? No, not the Neanderthals—the other ones. The Cro-Magnons, the “modern” humans.

It’s hard for me to believe those people were stupid. They even had bigger brains than we do. I suspect they were every bit as smart as you and I, and considering that they didn’t have the cushion of civilization, they may even have been smarter than either of us. Possibly even much smarter.

Maybe they had to be. Whereas our dullards today are cradled in a supportive society, their dullards were eaten by saber-toothed tigers or stomped to death by woolly mammoths.

Snatch a Cro-Mag kid out of the past and drop him into a modern kindergarten, and he’d probably do just fine, school-wise. He might do better than fine. Give him a little caring and encouragement, and he might be one of those kids who go to college at the age of twelve and end up with a PhD by the time they’re fifteen.

Think about all that brainpower back there in the distant past.

And then think about the very brief span of modern history from the first stirrings of organized and directed capital-S Science to the time when men walked on the moon. It really took only three or four hundred years.

What the hell happened to us?

The Egyptians could have had a real science of the human mind.

The Greeks could have had genetic engineering.

Renaissance Italians could have had cities on the moon.

If we’d started 20,000 years ago, those of us alive today might have been functional immortals living on a paradise planet with no population problems, no pollution, and no energy shortages.

Hell, we could be conversing with genetically engineered English-speaking elephants by now, watching book-writing chimpanzees being interviewed by Oprah on Mars.

Instead … we’re here. Only here.

We have people—real, actual human beings, somebody’s mommy and daddy, and somebody’s favorite little girl—dying because we can’t seem to get enough food to everybody. Dying because we’re too stupid to understand the limits to reproduction in an environment with limited resources.

We have coral reefs dying all over the world. Oceans being fished out. Elephants killed for farmland. Whales slaughtered for sushi. Bulls, bears, and dogs tortured and killed for entertainment. Chimpanzees and gorillas shot to death for meat.

And we have wars, wars, and more wars. My own nation seems to be endlessly caught up in them.

What happened to us? I’m suddenly afraid I know …

What if all that effort we talked about earlier—all that building, dedicating, cleaning, publicizing, volunteering, painting, wiring, amping, repairing, carving, grass cutting, landscaping, stained-glass-window-making, stained-glass-window-cleaning, sign-making, remodeling, refurbishing, preaching, kneeling, breast pounding, head thumping, and hosanna singing …

Well, what if that was what took place instead of all the possible inventing, researching, thinking, planning, building, feeding, imagineering, engineering, launching, exploring, questing, loving, preserving, protecting, creating, and curing?

What if the past 20,000 years were, instead of twenty millennia of boundless human discovery, progress, and understanding …

What if it were just 20,000 years of wasted time? What if it were 20,000 years of mental illness? Religious intoxication? Mystical masturbation?

What if we spent the whole time, most of us, singing our drunken hosannas in nervous determination, smiling with forced unconcern as the possibilities of greatness passed us by?

For generations. For millennia.

What if that were the case?

Well, if it were, and it seems to me all too believable that it might have been, then it would be really, really terrible.

It would be a tragedy off the scale of anything I can imagine.

Reprinted with permission from Hank Fox, Red Neck, Blue Collar Atheist (Hank Fox Books, 2019).