"Skinny Legs and All" - by Tom Robbins

This is a great excerpt that speaks volumes of my own personal experience:

A longing for the divine is intrinsic in Homo Sapiens. (For all we know, it is innate in squirrels, dandelions, and diamond rings as well.) We approach the Divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains. To expedite those two things may be the mission of our existence.

Well and good. But such activity runs counter to the aspirations of commerce and politics. Politics is the science of domination, and persons in the process of enlargement and illumination are notoriously difficult to control. Therefore, to protect its vested interests, politics usurped religion a very long tme ago. Kings bought off priests with land and adornments. Together, they drained the shady ponds and replaced them with fishtanks. The walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held together with fear. They called the tanks "synagogues" or "churches" or "mosques."