I was clicking through YouTube last week, procrastinating (that’s redundant, right?), when somehow my eye strayed from the cat videos long enough to be caught by some slightly more serious videos featuring John Cleese and Neil deGrasse Tyson. They weren’t in the videos together, mind you, but they were discussing some of the same things: how religion, when followed too rigidly and taken too literally, can become a danger to scientific progress and society as a whole.

Specifically, John (we’re on a first name basis, you know) had this to say:

“I think that the central problem of any religion is that the founders of religions are always extraordinarily intelligent people, and what you notice as you get older is extraordinarily intelligent people are not literal minded. And the great problem of religion is when what is said by the founder of the religion, which is supposed to be taken metaphorically, is taken literally.”

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