A thread in the poli forum reminded me of this one, so I brought that thought here. I've found myself fascinated with the concept of religion in recent years and have spent more time reading about them and studying them than I did when I was a practicing Catholic years ago. What that has done is convince me that religion is a man-made concept, full of holes, inconsistencies and falsehoods that could never derive from a divine, supernatural being. So how has it remained popular for thousands of years? The empty promise of paradise at the end of the rainbow.
There are 22 known religions in the world with 500 thousand or more practitioners. At best one religion is correct, unless you're way out there and think there are multiple "gods" fighting over our little speck in the galaxy. Most likely, every one of them is superstitious nonsense and yet it is a multi-billion dollar industry, all because people are terrified of their own mortality and will believe just about anything to be at peace with it.
It would be hilarious if millions of people hadn't been slaughtered in the name of it over the years, continuing to this day and into the future. Unfortunately, it's a plague of superstitious nonsense that makes otherwise rational, intelligent people do the same silly things people did thousands of years ago when they needed a way to explain the world around them. We now know that many of those "gods" were just natural phenomena, courtesy of modern science. And yet, religion survives because paradise in eternity is just too hard to pass up and parents pass on these traditions to children at very young ages.
I was baptized so young I don't even remember it. I completed two other sacraments of the church by the age of 10. I was just doing what I was told. After all, the other kids were doing it, too. If I had fathered children in my 20s I probably would've raised them the same way, passing on the tradition of religion for another generation without ever really thinking about it. You're not supposed to think about it. I remember asking questions about Mary - my dad had become a baptist preacher, which was a lot different than going to catholic mass I'm here to tell you - who is not held in such high regard outside catholicism. No one could ever really give me an answer. If they did, they pointed to their bible - the catholic bible, I guess the apostles wrote multiple variations of "the word of god", go figure - because that was all they knew. I doubt they had really ever read the book. Unfortunately, I did, and a lot of it sounds like the ramblings of prehistoric men on hallucinagenic drugs than any all-knowing, benevolent god in the sky. And yet, it survives in the 21st century.
http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html
