Religion cannot be separated from culture. Lots of people’s degree of vigour in following it varies even amongst their own lifetimes.
I think science actually could explain the why. Our electro chemical stimulated nueron system seems to behave rather consistently depending on how we have been programmed. I would like to see religion join forces with science. I see no reason why knowing more about how things work would eliminate the possibility of a far superior being. I seriously doubt that God is magic and can defy physical laws and I think this is where religion might need to jump on the bandwagon.
Religions will exist as long as people of lesser intelligence exist…
I was raised by parents who were non-religious, father was atheist and mother at the time had no clearly stated position. I was an atheist until age 23, then converted to Christianity. Plenty of other people convert as well, as therefore I know this line of argument is not true.
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A greedy for-profit priesthood.
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The median priest (or minister, Rabbi, &c…) earns a quite modest salary. In my region of the USA they start about $35,000 per year. A person with the same level of education could easily earn double that or more in other professions. The notion of a greedy priesthood is obviously false. Most financial transactions that I make are with ‘greedy’ institutions. My bank, supermarket, and restaurant all want to make a profit. High levels of government, which takes my taxes, are stuffed with very wealthy people. My church is nearly the only institution that I give money to where I know that no one is there for the money, and most of the money collected will go to feeding the poor, education, and other good causes rather than to profits.
In my experience you are the exception that proves the rule. By and large parents raise their children to the standards of their beliefs, as their parents did before them. Some stray from the path but you need only look at the average son of a catholic vs the average son of a atheist to see this confirmation.
Religion however is different from belief, it serves to reason that the belief in a deity is less hereditary than the social construct of religious attendance.
Because Humans are still Humans. That’s why.
Here’s an important fact you should internalize:
“Plenty of other people” is not at all the same thing as “the vast majority of humanity.”
If you survey enough people, you’ll find a few whose religion differs from that of their parents. But they’ll be hugely outnumbered by the people whose religion is the same one their parents pounded into them during their formative years. Were this not true, religion would have a much more random geographic distribution than it does; Italy would not be 81% Catholic, and Saudi Arabia would not be almost exclusively Muslim.
There are certainly other factors that play a role in determining one’s religion. But if you wanted to choose the single factor that most reliably predicts the religion of a randomly selected human being, it would be the religion of his/her parents.
Common explanation, but totally wrong.
MANY religions offer no afterlife. Even devout Jews, for instance, don’t necessarily believe in life after death.
I laughed.
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My point is that this is the case with other planets that are ridiculous in scale and cannot sustain life, so what is the point of them? Why would a higher power spend time creating these planets or the asteroids that would eventually create them, if they would form a planet that wasn’t the right distance from a star? If the space is there then why not allow humans to live there? What is solved without having anyone live there?
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You are assuming that the purpose of creation is to sustain life. To use your (factually incorrect) example, the reason the mold is in a heated place is not to attract maggots; it’s just what happens when it’s there. The reason could be something totally unrelated, or no reason at all.
There is no reason for life to exist. It just does because the conditions are right.
Because they haven’t drank enough Mountain Dew to achieve the proper level of euphoria. Praise Dawkins.
John Shelby Spong, retired bishop of the Episcopal Church, USA has written:
“Religion is primarily a search for security and not a search for truth. Religion is what we so often use to bank the fires of our anxiety. That is why religion tends toward becoming excessive, neurotic, controlling and even evil. That is why a religious government is always a cruel government. People need to understand that questioning and doubting are healthy, human activities to be encouraged not to be feared. Certainty is a vice not a virtue. Insecurity is something to be grasped and treasured. A true and healthy religious system will encourage each of these activities. A sick and fearful religious system will seek to remove them.”
And not only life but human life. His questions are like a bad version of Teilhard de Chardin.
I think a lot of the rest of this post has been addressed well, but there’s a point in here that really kinds of bugs me. The idea that life on Earth just happened and why we need anything more than that. Consider for a moment that it really wasn’t all that long ago that God created the Earth and that’s just how it is. Why would anyone need more than that?
Yes, some people are satisfied with a given explanation and don’t need depth, other people are fascinated by the inner workings. Some people are happy to know that they push the gas pedal and the car goes or they click send and their email or text just appears on the other side. Other people really want to understand how the internal combustion engine works or how computers and digital networks work. Science itself is built out of creativity, and the whole reason we have science in the state it is is precisely because people dared to question the status quo. Countless times people considered some problems unsolvable, some things unknowable, or certain feats impossible, and today these problems may even seem mundane, it’s common knowledge, or a formerly impossible feat is now an everyday thing, like how we instantly get news from all across the world.
In the end, I think it’s unfair to just lump in all believers as people wasting their time or somehow uninformed about science. Yes, there are a lot of religious people who reject science, but most accept it just fine. In my view, religion, or to take a larger approach to include religious and non-religious, philosophy at it’s best ought to be about understanding aspects of humanity that science really can’t answer. That is, science can tell us how the Earth got here, how life evolved, and all of these things, but it doesn’t assign value. Science is purely based on objective reality, but that’s not all that exists, as each of us has subjective views and opinions. It’s like science can explain a song as having a certain length, certain scales, rhythms, whatever, but it can’t tell me how it ought to make me feel, what memories it brings up, and these things.
So as for why it still exists, I think it will ALWAYS exist for these reasons. Yes, some aspects of what used to be part of religion now fall into the realm of science, but it doesn’t give people that sense of tradition, community, purpose, connectedness, or various other things that religion brings to people. Hell, many if not most of the religious people I know aren’t even all that concerned about so many particulars at all, and there’s just something special to them about that group of people and it’s that belief that binds them together, not really all that unlike sports fandom, really.
Because people can’t handle the truth. The truth that when we die we’re dead, and the truth that there is no reason why that baby died in a flood or earthquake - it just happened.
Some people who feel this way and are clever enough to see that no human religion makes sense become deists.
Why is there so much social pressure to be religious, in the US at least? Because of the establishment churches, the execs of which make a lot more than $35K. And because politicians who want to discriminate against gays find it much easier to justify when they can say god is the reason, not them.
Most people have not been taught how to think critically and question authority.
Some did, some didn’t.
When Abraham was ordered to kill his son, did he comfort himself or Isaac by saying, “It’s okay, we’ll be together in Heaven”? NO! As far as Abraham knew, death was final. God never promised otherwise.
Similarly, does Job shrug off his sufferings, saying, “Once I die, I’ll be in Heaven and all will be well”? No! As far as Job knew, death is final, and God never suggests it isn’t.
Heck, look at the arguments Jesus had with the Sadducees, devout Jews who insisted there is no afterlife.
People are still making the mistake described in “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” of trying to calculate exactly why God spared this guy from dying in a hotel fire, but these other people all died. You still have people like Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson saying that God deliberate caused some disaster – hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes – in punishment for some collective sin – tolerating gays seems to be a biggie for these guys.
I was listening to a Catholic call-in radio show, and someone asked why God, all loving and all powerful, permits horrible evil to exist. The priest, taking the call, said, lightly, “Oh, that’s an easy question.” Pause. “That is the single hardest question in all of Christianity, and it is a question that has driven millions to question their faith.”
My brother is a Christian and his wife is Christian. Coincidentally, his son is also a Christian. I’m an atheist, my wife is Jewish. Somehow, both my kids are Jewish.
Of course, my Mom was catholic, and we went to church pretty much every week when I was a kid, and I’m a stone atheist.
So it turns out that people can be taught one thing as children, and believe another thing as an adult, and believe yet other things even later in life. However, most people who are Christian in America had Christian parents. Most people in Pakistan who are Muslim had Muslim parents. So how could it be that most people raised in a country where almost everyone is a Muslim turn out to be Muslims, while most people raised in a country where almost everyone is a Christian turn out to be Christians?