Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded

[JackRiddler]

26. The appeal of religions is really not that amazing.

You're right in all your descriptions of quantity (a "mere" 2000 years, this little planet, our lifetimes on it are but a blip of a blip of a blip) and yet you and everyone else also experience the "mere" length of an average lifetime as a seeming eternity (most of the time). Your experience of every moment contains a self-aware universe of perceptions, cognitions and feelings. As far as we know, the only thing-that-knows consciously any of the facts you cite or anything else is this blip of a blip of a blip of a brain (or organism). These sentient, conscious organisms, these people need orientating stories scaled to their actual experience of the world. Science and scholarship have usually ceded the realm of creation myths and meaning-of-life paradigms to the religions. Human psychology will always need to fill that realm with something, and for most people, a strictly correct but negative declaration that the religions are full of shit is not enough to meet that need. This is why there is now a "big history" movement among many academics.