hinduwoman

1) Religion was orignally an attempt to explain the world.
2) Influence the world by magic and prayers.
3) Organize society --- do good and you will go heaven; kill other members of your tribe without approved reason and you will go to hell.

Later on it became a tool for keeping the populace under control.

Radorth

This "slow and feeble" comparison to the animal world hardly disproves the involvement of a creator, and seems another transparent attempt to blur the enormous differences between us and the nearest "relative." Actually if monkeys could talk, your case would be infinitely stronger, but heroic efforts to get them to do so have all failed- for the very reason that evolutionists like to fantasize that the gap is smaller than it looks.

Rad

Stephen T-B

Radoth - there is a vast difference bertween us and the monkeys; we have very much larger and more complex brains.

There is a vast difference between us and ant-eaters. They have very long noses, long sticky tongues and very powerful front claws.
Were they made by an ant-eater god?

Stephen T-B

The observation that we are slow and are feeble has no bearing on whether or not there's a creator.
It infers that in physical terms, we are not very formidable.

But we are bright; bright enough to know how very fragile our existence is, and to be fully conscious of all the countless threats to it - from ravening beasts, disease, famine, drought, earthquake, fire flood and falling wardrobes.

Our intelligence makes us profoundly insecure. So - as has been pointed out by many others here - we've responded by inventing gods to give us protection..

Koiyotnik

According to the church billboard I once drove by: Christianity isn't a crutch, it's a speedwalk. I hadn't laughed that hard in a long time.

JerryM

I'd add one other point about religion that is both a benefit and an enormous drawback. As has been alluded to, all religions have a tendency towards becoming organized, and that promotes social cohesion. For many believers that I know personally, it seems that the social interaction and fellowship they obtain in their church may be even a greater attraction than such theological concepts as forgiveness, or sense or purpose, or salvation. But this also leads to one of the greatest failings of religion, which is that it promotes tribalism and the "us-versus-them" mindset. And we know how much misery and human tragedy this has caused.

Radorth

And the difference between the average Christian and the average atheist in terms of this admittedly harmful mindset is what exactly?

Rad

Stephen T-B

It may sometimes promote tribalism. It sometimes rides on the back of it.
Consider Northern Ireland. The Protestants are descended from Scots who were encouraged to settle there by a Protestant English Crown which was having a lot of trouble subduing the native Irish, who were Roman Catholics.
“Protestant” and “Catholic” then became the badges for the two warring communities.
Religion, if you like, validated the antagonism: it did not start it, and even if the settlers and natives had shared the same religion, they’d have found some other badge or symbol to gather around and identify each other as "them" and "us."
The Balkans, I’m not so sure about.
Due to the way the region became dominated by different outside powers, the Serbs are Orthodox, the Croats are RC and the Bosnians are Muslim.
Despite all being Slavs (from which, incidentally, we get the word “slave”) and speaking the same language, they nevertheless adopted three distinct national identities.
Why? I don’t know enough to be able to answer that, but would guess it has something to do with inter-faith marriage being taboo, with the result that the three communities became increasingly separate, developing their own distinct cultures as this happened.

JerryM

In my post, I was addressing organized religion in general, and not Christianity in particular. And I don't know what the "average" Christian or atheist is. But there is a definite difference in atheism and organized religions.

Atheism is not a religion, per se. It is just a statement about the nature of the universe. It simply says that there is insufficient evidence to support the existence of any supernatural gods or dieties. That's basically it. It has none of the features of fully developed religions. There is no precribed doctrine, no ritual, no scripture, no revelation, no worship or prayer, no priests, no church, and no claims of salvation. Lacking these characteristics makes it virtually impossible for atheism to ever become organized as a distinct religion. Some belief systems may be atheistic (denying the existence of gods), but atheism itself is not a religion.

OTOH, Christianity (herein used as as example) clearly has a precribed doctrine (though it varies among the different sects and denominations). And part of that is exclusivity. Jesus taught that (paraphrasing) "he who is not with me is against me." And believers are commissioned to actively evangelize and convert non-believers. This is the problem. Orthodox Christian doctrine (and Islam, too) does not have a laissez-faire attitude towards non-Christians. Taking Jesus's words literally, non believers would be looked upon as antagonistic and must be converted. Combine this with organization and power, and you have a potentially dangerous brew which is likely to promote or maintain tribalist inclinations. And I would agree that if any atheistic belief could attain a similar degree of organization, and had a similar adversarial attitude towards other religions, then it too would be worrisome. But the non-doctrinaire and unorganized nature of atheism, I think, makes this highly unlikley.

sullster

I agree with the old saying which says: "Religion is the weak man's crutch". The addition of a person being weak is instructive. If one is "strong", then there will be no need for the crutch of religion. Yet, few are so strong as to face all of life's traumas without the solace of the fantasy world of religion and the creators of religion know this.

Religion is very skillful at taking advantage of human fears and mental trauma. This is their genius. Accentuate the feeling of weakness and the crutch of religion can be grafted onto the mind.

In some sense religion does a good service at consoling many with its illusions, yet by promoting human frailty so much, they actually do humanity a disservice by not allowing people to create lives of mental strength and critical thinking.