boinsie wrote:pav wrote:But, I'm far from being anti-religion. The thing is most people see either only the good stuff religions did, or only the bad.
I'm mostly able to see both, I think.
I can see how in the past religion was necessary to get people through their day-to-day lives. When you don't understand scientifically what makes thunder, lightening, earthquakes, etc, it's a great way to explain away these things. When you as a leader need your country to expand over into another area, it's really convenient to be able to say that it's for this great all-powerful being that created everything around you. To say that it's this being's will that your nation have all these things makes it seem alright, even makes you feel entitled to it, and it makes the army fight harder. I see how it's important there, too.
So, for sure I understand what a powerful tool religion is. But to me it's just that, a tool. Not reality.
And if
I can get through day-to-day without needing the promise of anything after I die, and without the knowledge that these mystical things happened way back when, I guess it bothers me that so many others seemingly can't. And that people are still able to use these completely unfounded reasonings to convince other people of things,
and it works... that just dumbfounds me.
see that's a conversation I had with my best friend a few months ago.
Religions have other purpose then explaining thunder and sun and night and stuff, now. They used to be for that. But as humans, we are farther than that now, aren't we? I hope we are. I think right now, and for so long, the questions that humanity has been asking is "why". "Why are we here". It's not just about what's after death, although it's big part of it, but it's about the rest, and the things science cannot explain, and god, there are some. a lot. My physics teacher in high school said science, nowadays, understands maybe 1% of the rules of the universe. Of course, this statistic was probably made up on the spot. But It does tell something though.
There is much we do not know now, and probably much that science, the way it is today, will never understand.
Maybe you can go through your life without religion to answer those questions but a lot of people can't and you have to accept that.
Using religion as a political tool, that's something else. But like I said, if they didn't use religion, they would be using something else.