Sol Invictus

The late George Carlin did a deservedly well-known comedy routine spelling out why religion is bullshit and as such, why he worships the sun. And Joe Pesci.

One of the main benefits that the sun has over the "invisible man in the sky who loves you, but will sentence you to an eternity of unimaginable suffering for breaking his Iron Age Middle Eastern rules" theory, as George said, is that you can see the sun.

Not that often if you live in Yorkshire, but nonetheless you can see it and feel it from time to time. You certainly notice its absence for months and months on end.

However, you can also see a statue with an elephant's head (under certain conditions) and right now I can see a cup of tea. So while it may be necessary, visibility is not a sufficient condition of divinity.

Our "primitive" ancestors clocked that the sun does a few other pretty awesome things as well:

• When it's not in the sky, it goes dark, increasing the likelihood of being eaten by wolves.
• If the sun is around too much or too little during the crop-growing season, there's less to eat over winter and you and your family die, and get eaten by wolves.

Amongst other scenarios, most of which also conclude with being eaten by wolves.

In Sir James Frazer's monumentally tedious book "The Golden Bough", a simple theory as to how magical thinking developed into religious thinking is outlined.

I paraphrase here a work of several thousand pages – something Sir James' editors singularly failed to achieve:

Early man is faced with a world in which shit happens to him, and he tries to take control of it.

Magic – if you do certain things, other consequences follow automatically. The only real difference between science and magic is that the relation of causality is true in the case of science and false in the case of magic.

Religion – having discovered that magical practices don't do anything, early man concludes that things are actually controlled by spirits or forces that have to be asked nicely to produce the desired results.

Which was a pretty disastrous conclusion to reach, as evidenced by the best part of human history from that point onwards.

How different society might have been had only our ancestors alighted on "you're doing it wrong" as the solution to the failure of magic as opposed to "an invisible man will make it happen if you stab a goat for him".

In general, I find most references to "ancient wisdom" rather tiresome. If the ancients were so bloody clever, how come so many of them got eaten by wolves relative to people today?

Nevertheless, I suspect that they alighted on the right answer here, but drew the wrong conclusions as to what to do about it. They didn't realise there was nothing they could do about it.

The sun, of course, would have remained resistant to all efforts – magical or religious – to influence its behaviour. As George Carlin says, you're more likely to get things done by offering your prayers up to Joe Pesci. But that didn't stop pretty much every culture ever from, at some point or another, proclaiming it a god.

But were they wrong? Maybe not.

It seems to me that there are two main categories into which "things you have to do to be a god" fall:

1. Things relating to creating the world, life and whatnot, and allowing those things to continue to exist (or not).

2. Things relating to how to behave and what's good and bad.

And that's broadly it.

I'm afraid that the sun falls short on 2 – unless "always wear a sufficiently high-factor cream" is taken as a moral injunction and sun burn as an instrument of heavenly retribution.

However, from a scientific (or magical) perspective, the sun is pretty much responsible for all those things under 1.

It is only because of the sun's gravity that the chunk of rock we call home orbits at the precise distance that supports life like ours.

The sun provides the only input of energy into the earth's closed system (entropy!) without which everything would run down pretty quickly.

It's a fair bet that the sun played some kind of role in (i) the creation of life and (ii) evolution from that point.

Even people as mad as Colonel Gadaffi don't dispute that crops grow, trees produce oxygen and we don't all freeze to death immediately courtesy of the sun. You don't have to be on hallucination pills to recognise that.

OK, the sun didn't decide to do all these things because it was bored or lonely. The sun doesn't care, because it is a giant ball of gas – much like some of those who claim to speak for the gods here on earth.

I reckon it's fair to say that bringing about the conditions under which life can come into existence and remain in existence is as close to creating life as you're going to get. If those conditions didn't exist, someone or something else creating life would look rather silly shortly after doing so.

And certainly, the sun can't take any of the credit for creating the rest of the universe – but why do you need one god who's responsible for everything? Give me radical decentralisation and a local god any day – very Big Society. The Greeks had a god whose remit was beekeeping and cheesemaking, so the fact that the sun is only the god of the solar system is hardly a knock-down argument.

What's good about the sun as a god in other respects is:

• The sun doesn't care what you get up to – so there's no hell to worry about.
• The sun does not require you to praise it – it is not insecure like that.
• The sun is going to rise anyway – so you don't have to get up early on Sundays or give it a tenth of your earnings to encourage it.
• Occasionally, the sun moves in mysterious ways – capriciousness is important for reminding us who's god.

This is not an argument for the non-existence of god. If you want that, then read something by Richard Dawkins – although prepare to be thoroughly patronised with a lot of comments like "you don't need to understand that".

No. All I'm saying is if there really is a god, it's up there in the sky – but not in the way they say in church.

And if the sun disappearing is a sign of divine displeasure, then god hates Yorkshire.