Christmas is almost upon us, and as American evangelicals would like to remind you, "Jesus is the reason for the season." Unless you're Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or, in one of the more amusing Christmas parades I've ever witnessed, a member of a 100-strong Falun Gong procession wishing your neighbours a merry Christmas anyway.

My earliest Christmases were far more packed with Santa Claus than with Jesus. Jesus was there, of course, as he cannot help but be, but he was in the background, and never seemed to me to be any more important to Christmas than Santa or my own family. Later on, when Santa ceased to have any real role in my Christmas season, my Yuletide focus shifted where it belonged: to my family. The idea of Jesus as the reason for the season never once entered my mind, and it is to their credit that my parents never really tried to force that idea upon me despite their own religious upbringings.

There is no question about whether Jesus is the reason for the season in my own home. While we have a Christmas tree out of a nod to tradition, and while we will exchange gifts, our house is utterly absent of the Christian iconography you'd expect to find during this "holy" season. Our tree topper, instead of the traditional angel or star, is a kiwi. Just as there is no trace of Jesus in our household, there is also no trace of Santa.

One well might ask whether that will change once we have children. In Santa's case, I must confess that I am on the fence about it; while on one hand the preaching of the Santa myth seems hypocritical for atheist parents, and even slightly cruel, on the other hand I can't help but think that our kids would "miss out" on something if we confined Santa to the same bogeyman's closet as Jesus and Mohammed. As for Jesus, the "reason for the season", my children will hear nothing of him from me until they are old enough to make their own decisions on whether to believe in him or not.

As for me, I do not believe. I have never been ashamed to admit it, but as long as I lived in America, I was often afraid to admit it. Thanks to the American Taliban of the Religious Right, the cultural dangers of publicly admitting your disbelief of Christian fables are only slightly less dangerous than public "apostasy" in nations like Saudi Arabia or Iran. True, it is far less likely that a Bible-waving Wal-Mart shopper from Arkansas will execute you than an AK-47-waving Islamic militant from Syria, but the violent motivation for the guy from Arkansas still exists, however curtailed. Punishment for non-belief is the same across all Western religions and their practitioners; it varies only in the degree to which that punishment is enforced. In the Middle East, it often means death; in the United States, it usually means simple ostracism. In America, if you expel Christian dogma from your life, publicly and without apology, you will very likely find yourself feeling as I did years ago: no longer quite at home in your own country.

The reason for my disbelief in Christianity or any other religion is down to simple logic. All Christians are Atheists when it comes to the beliefs of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and even to a vast degree Judaism, even though half of the Bible is derived entirely from Jewish texts. So while almost every major world religion is atheistic with respect to all others, I simply go one step farther. Since I find the concept of any god or God to be ludicrous in the face of logic, I do not believe. The idea of "faith" doesn't even enter into my life at all, because faith flies in the face of logic, and given the choice between the two, I will choose logic each and every time.

Logic, beyond being Mr. Spock's porn, is the driving force of reason. Logic makes that computer you're staring at right now possible. If your computer suddenly decided that 0 = 1, and insisted on it no matter what epithets you hurled at it, you'd either call Geek Squad/Applecare/your nerdy friend with an IT degree, try to diagnose the problem yourself and fix it, or take an axe to the bloody thing and buy a new computer that works.

But humans have marvellous computers inside their skulls that allow them to function whether logic applies or not. They can have jobs, families, and potentially hold power and influence over millions of people, all while inside their grey, gooey skull computers, in defiance of all logic, 0 = 1.

Let me show you some examples.

"God exists. I know, because the Bible says so. And the Bible is written by God. I know that, too, because it says so in the Bible. And the Bible is never wrong, because it's the perfect word of God. It's true, because it's written in the Bible."

"Allah exists. I know, because the Koran says so. And the Koran is written by Mohammed, Allah's prophet. I know that, too, because it says so in the Koran. And the Koran is never wrong, because it's the perfect word of Allah. It's true, because it's written in the Koran."

By now, you may notice a pattern. It's called circular logic, and if it happened to the machine you're staring at, you'd get a friendly message telling you to restart your computer. But for a certain subset of humans, circular logic is A-OK where the Bible is concerned.

Everything goes back to that book. You can't prove God exists, but you can prove the Bible exists, because you can very easily go to almost any hotel in the United States and find one tucked away in a drawer, "Placed by the Gideons". And therein, you will find all manner of books, chapters, and verses which "prove" the existence of God.

There's a slight problem here, which anyone who reads regularly will recognise:

Not everything that is written down is true. I know this for a fact, because I write fiction. The characters in my fiction exist only within my own mind, until I commit the words to paper (or, far more often, a hard drive). When people read what I write, the characters then exist in their minds, too… but they never materialise in the real world to do real things. Once I stop writing, and once you stop reading, they are no more. Did 18 stealth bombers really get repossessed by the Chinese government on October 31, 2008? Is it possible to use handicapped stalls in Wal-Marts to dimension-hop across America? Is Kirosho Yaro a real person? No. That's ridiculous. Just because I wrote about these things doesn't mean they can actually happen.

Why is the Bible different? Or the Koran? Because they say they are? With that kind of logic, I could write a story about hundred dollar bills pouring through my windows, and tomorrow I'd be a billionaire. Unfortunately, that's not how it works in the real world.

What's most shocking about the major Western religions is how young they all are. The earliest writings of the Torah, the foundation of the Old Testament, are no more than 3000 years old. While that sounds like a long time at first glance, consider that 3000 years against the thousands of years of recorded history before that time, and the hundreds of thousands of years that humanity existed before that.

Many people are guilty of the misapprehension that the Bible is the world's first work of literature, but that is far from the case; full-fledged writing systems pre-date the Bible by more than 3000 years, and many, many works of great literature, law, and myth existed before the Torah came about. In fact, at very nearly the same time ancient Hebrews were squatting in the desert writing about Adam, Eve, Noah, Moses, and Abraham, Homer (or a series of authors later rounded up under that one name) was writing the Odyssey and the Iliad in Greece. The New Testament itself is no more than 1700 years old. The Koran is less than 1400 years old. So while the Big Three would have you believe that their dogmas have been around since Time was Time, the truth is far different.

What is it about the Big Three Western religions that makes them all so equally convinced that they are the one, true religion, and all the others are wrong?

You can go to Egypt, and marvel at the Pyramids, those lasting monuments to a long-dead culture and its vanished religion. You can gaze in wonder at the Great Pyramid of Giza, a structure 1500 years older than the Bible, and the largest manmade structure for more than 3800 years – all built as a king's tomb. You might then shake your head at the silly superstitions that led those primitive people to erect what were then by orders of magnitude the largest and most complex structures on Earth, all for the sake of an Egyptian afterlife that we now know and accept to be as false and imaginary as Santa and his elves. No one worships Osiris now. No one has themselves mummified, placed into a sarcophagus, and perfectly aligned with the stars of Orion's belt in hopes of a pleasant journey to the underworld.

You can read about the old Norse gods, and the fatalistic view of the world their religion held, and imagine what life was like as a Viking. But few people sing Thor's praises today, and the ones who do are considered weirdos.

Apollo, Aphrodite, Zeus, Aries, Hera, Hercules, Hades… these entities exist now only in myth. No one takes their existence in the real world seriously. They are instead recognised for what they are: a way for humanity to examine itself by reflecting its own traits onto the beings who supposedly ruled the universe. But no one sacrifices goats to them anymore. I don't burn incense for the Muses every time I sit down in front of my MacBook Pro to write. The planets of our Solar System, though named in honour of Roman deities, are now known to be worlds in their own right, each far different from Earth in its own way. The planet Jupiter has as much in common with the deity for which it is named as my computer has with an actual Macintosh apple. Less, even, for my computer and the apple both exist, while Jupiter, ruler of the Roman pantheon, never did – and we accept the non-existence of Zeus/Jupiter without a second thought.

All these myriad religions throughout the ages: Greco-Roman paganism, Incan sun worship, Egyptian death worship, Zoroastrianism, and hundreds more… no one believes they are real anymore.

How is any one of the Big Three different? Why is Yahweh's existence any more believable or reputable than that of Zeus? How is Jehovah somehow worthy of loyalty and worship when Thor is not? Why is Allah worth the prayers and sacrifices of more than a billion human beings when not one person on Earth prays to Osiris anymore?

Oh, right: the Torah/Bible/Koran says he is.

I'll make a prediction here and now, and it has the virtue of being just as unverifiable by anyone living today as the existence of God: within a thousand years, all of the world's major Western religions, whether Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, will all be the same desiccated, dried-up husks as every one of the religions that came before them. They will regarded as they should be: as cultural curiosities, and no more. People will look at the Sistine Chapel with appreciation for the skilful artwork on its ceiling and admiration for the artist's technique. But the idea behind it, the very notion of an all-powerful, masculine, hominid-structured, bearded old white man creating the universe and all mankind, then taking a personal interest in the daily minutiae of billions upon billions of people, will be considered as quaint and nonsensical by our descendants as we find the stories and myths of the Greek pantheon. And the idea that people would murder one another by the dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions, all over debate over who has the most powerful invisible protector, will be considered barbarically ludicrous.

However unverifiable this prediction is, the writing is already on the wall as far as religion is concerned. Religion used to be a major source of law for most nations and empires, and for thousands of years mythological explanations were the only ones we had for the world around us. However, the questions that we ask about ourselves and our place in the universe do have answers, and as time marches on, fewer and fewer of those questions are being answered solely by religion.

But today religion continues to endure, and it does so for two simple reasons.

First, religion is a mechanism for control. It always has been. With a ruling priest class informing the masses what is and is not righteous, the ability to shape culture and laws has, until only very recently in human history, nearly always gone hand in hand with religion. With the advent of science and technology, the priest class has lost its hold on the masses to a degree, and the reaction is predictable: clerics and their credulous followers rail against the "evils" of science and technology, decry any culture which does not spring from their ideals as sinful and wrong while simultaneously insisting on a return to "traditional values" (i.e., religious values), and make every earnest attempt to seize the reins of government in order to shift power back to themselves. In some countries, this movement is uniformly successful: see Iran and Saudi Arabia. In others, the degree of success is less pervasive, but still evident: see the United States, particularly the Deep South.

For a condensed version of how religion works as a mechanism of control, you need look no farther than the Santa Claus myth. Santa Claus, as a mythical figure, mimics many of the characteristic traits of the Judeo-Christian God. Santa Claus sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, and he knows if you've been bad or good – all traits of an omnipotent father figure. The next line of the classic song implores children to "be good for goodness' sake," but children who believe in Santa aren't being good for the sake of goodness; they're being good in the hopes of a special reward for good behaviour, presents under the tree at Christmas. Bad behaviour was traditionally punished with lumps of coal in place of presents, but this has become a relatively scarce occurrence in modern times, especially with skyrocketing fuel costs.

Similar to God, Santa Claus's existence cannot be physically verified. He supposedly dwells in a cottage at the North Pole; intelligent children who note that the North Pole has now been explored without a single sign of any such cottage are answered with a reassurance that Santa hides his cottage via "magic". Santa also designates proxies, similar to Catholic bishops in the way they emulate and disseminate the will of the Pope, who fill in for him during parades and act on his behalf in malls and department stores across North America, Oceania, and parts of Europe, finding out for him what children desire most. Here, like most religions, there is an inherent contradiction; if Santa Claus is able to monitor a child's every action, why is he not clued in to their desires as well? Why does Santa, or one of his thousands of liquored-up minimum-wage proxies, have to ask what a child wants for Christmas if he already knows everything?

Parents' use of Santa Claus as a mechanism for control over children eventually fades away. As children grow up, they realise the inherent silliness of the myth; the idea that some never-seen, immortal, omnipotent, white-bearded man in an impossibly remote location monitors their every move and then, through magical means, rewards or punishes them for their behaviour, becomes frankly too ludicrous to believe any longer past a certain age. And yet for most of these children, the instant they stop believing in this mythical figure, they replace him and the set of myths that goes with him with another being and set of myths with almost precisely the same traits, and many of them never waver in their belief in that mythos. Why?

Why Santa Claus inevitably fails as a religion and why Christianity, Judaism, and Islam succeed and endure is because of the second major feature of religion: it acts as a security blanket.

Before science had an explanation for the forces of nature, primitive man believed the gods controlled the skies, the earth, the oceans. Destructive forces beyond early man's control or understanding could be presented as the wrath of an angry spirit, and these early people could be reassured that as long as they gained this spirit's favour, the destruction would cease and all would be right in the world again. Now that we can predict and even to a degree control the forces of nature, this part of religion's comforting influence is no longer as keenly necessary. It still crops up occasionally, as when especially cancerous pundits portray events like 9/11, the Indonesian Tsunami, or Hurricane Katrina as the wrath of a vengeful God, but when these beliefs crop up today, they are more often vilified than praised.

But the second function of religion's supposed comfort is as evident as ever: the evasion of death. Here, the explanation that science has for death is not enough for most people to face: that when your body dies, you, as an entity, cease to exist. Period. Not merely unconsciousness, not merely lack of consciousness, but pure nothingness of which you are not even aware, because there is no longer any you to be aware of it. Your Self after death exists in exactly the same sense that your Self existed before your conception – in other words, it doesn't exist in any fashion whatsoever.

To the vast majority of people, the Self is the most important thing they have and the one thing they cannot imagine losing, the one thing they will do anything and everything to retain at all costs. Thus, the afterlife: the comforting belief that even as your body ceases, the spirit, the Self, goes on.

This is the greatest foothold that religion has left on the human consciousness. It is a life preserver that allows us to ignore our own mortality. Given a choice between Being and non-Being, anyone reading this will choose Being. This is the beachhead that religion establishes in the minds of people who put bumper stickers on their SUVs that say "In case of Rapture, this car will be unoccupied," and it is the same beachhead that persuaded 19 young men to very rationally and calmly fly jets full of fuel into buildings full of people.

So long as men fear Death, religion will never die.

Yet it is entirely within the realm of possibility that within this century, science will crack the mystery of the Self, too, and find ways to preserve it indefinitely after the death of the body – in a verifiable, reproducible way, not involving the shamanism and false hope of the prophets and hucksters who hold sway over the masses today. The notion of preserving human consciousness in a computer or other mechanism is not new (some theoreticians refer to it as the Singularity), and it's estimated that within less than fifty years there may be a computer powerful enough to do exactly that. It may sound fanciful, even ridiculous, but your grandparents would have said the same thing about the Internet when they were your age.

If science finds a way to measurably and reliably preserve consciousness after death, essentially making death no more inconvenient to the consciousness than backing up a hard drive is today… what more use is there for God? What more use for heaven, when heaven can be created in a simulation? What use will religion be if the ultimate fear of our race is somehow rendered absolutely inert?

If at a second's notice you could download your "spirit" onto some far-future version of the Internet, incomprehensibly more powerful and complex than the one we deal with today, and have experiences, sensations, and emotions indistinguishable from the ones fed to you by your body, wouldn't that be immortality? And if so, what would be the point of religion at all?

People do not believe in God for God's sake any more than children placate Santa Claus with good for the sake of goodness. They believe in God for their own sake, in the hopes that he will protect and nurture them, and then reward them for good behaviour after their body (but importantly, not their Self) dies. A hundred years ago, Freud painted God as a surrogate father who supposedly protects us in ways that our biological father never could. But just as sons outgrow the need for their fathers to protect them from the world, just as children outgrow their belief in Santa Claus, so too the human race must eventually outgrow the need for God to protect us from the Universe.

When there is nothing left for God to protect us from, there will be no purpose for God.

And when we realise that we, the human race, are our own and only chance to improve our existence, it will improve. All else is smoke and mirrors.