It's easier to have faith in something out there (and omnipotent and omniscient), than it is to believe that you shape your own destiny and to take responsibility for some of the actions in your life.
I agree..
I think people have to believe in something in order to survive. Whether you believe in a particular religion, or believe religion is a farce. Its all beliefs that dictate how you feel and act in life. It defines how you cope and present yourself in life. Beliefs could be a coping mechanism?
Do you think its possible to go through life without beliefs? People exchange beliefs, all the time, but no one realy stops believing. Beliefs seem to be a coping mechanism?
The worst of it all, is that all we know in life is what we've been told. There are very few things we know for certain. I think that uncertainty fuels your beliefs.
That's the realest shit anybody has said in this whole discussion. The reality is that man created religion as a way to cope with all of the things that occurred in his enviroment that he could not fathom or understand. For example 10-15,000 years ago what did people know about natural phenomena i.e. Tsunami's, earthquakes, volcanoes, meteoric showers, thunder, lightning, Blizzards, floods, shooting stars / comets etc? How could the people of those times explain such things? Of course they couldn't and that must have been daunting, so the natural human reaction was to attribute it to a higher power.
Ask yourself this, why do different people in different parts of the world have different takes on God? People have different takes on God in exactly the same way they different takes on culture and language. It all goes to show you that religion is a man-made beast. If there really was one God (in the Biblical/Islamic/Toranic sense) why doesn't everbody, bar none, believe in that God and more to the point, don't you think that God would have revealed him/herself to all us just to reinforce that belief.
Prime example, the Bible (which by the way was written by man approx 2000 years ago) tell us that God created Man first, ahead of all other animals. But we now know (through scientific advances) that man was at the back of the queue when it comes to life on this planet. The first homonids (Homo Sapiens) only showed up on Earth approx 40,000 years ago and there were in fact two different types of Human species roaming the Earth competing against each other for survival, one of which died out (Neanderthal Man or the European "Caveman") due to the technological advances of the other group which lead to a scarcity of food sources for the Neanderthal. We know all of this from fossil research and the DNA analysis thereof. Before the arrival of Homonids however, there was a whole host of animals roaming the planet, insects for example have been around on this planet for much longer than humans. So then, why is there no mention of these things in The Bible, Qu'ran or the Torah? Simply because at the time those texts were being penned there was little or no knowledge of the Natural World, it's as simple as that. For example Crocodiles have been living on earth 1000 times longer than Humans.
All religious texts reflect the level of knowledge that was availble at the time, for example the people who wrote the Bible didn't even know that the Earth is round, how many planets there are in our Solar System or that the Earth revolves around the Sun. If all these religious texts (Qu'ran, Bible, Torah) really were the "Word Of God" don't you think those important bits of information would have been pa**ed on from "The Creator"?
My argument is that there probably is a Supreme Creator out there but nobody, and I mean nobody on the face of this planet knows what that Creator looks like, or indeed if that creator even has an image.
Religion is man's dual response to living on this planet and understanding very little and having to deal with the fact that one day he will die with very little knowledge. So as a response he creates God and religion and thus ensures himself an "Afterlife", which conveniently eases his conscience.
