My thoughts on religion is that man created it as a means of comfort - there's probably some kind of Fruedian term for it. We're a social animal, and it's my belief that the fear of being alone scares us to death. We need something to comfort us, whether it's a loved one, a community, or the belief in a supreme being.
If you look beyond western culture, the only thing constant about religion is that it exists. The Native Americans have their animalistic gods... Hinduism and(?) Buddhism have their cycles of birth and rebirths... Chinese culture has its blend it Confucianism and Daoism.... every culture has or has had its own unique beliefs. One can't help but wonder what is the 'correct' religion, if any. Did Ghandi go to hell because he didn't believe in Jesus? Are we all about to be smitten by lightning bolts hurled from Mount Olympus?
The primary reason I don't believe in religion is because the roots of every major religion can be traced back to the culture and tradition of its origional people. All it takes is a few charismatic leaders to tie it together into formal doctrine. If, say, the Christian God exists, why did he let so many thousands of years go by letting people believe in 'heathen' gods like Ra, Zeus, or Jupiter? You can't possibly tell me that just because he was pissed off at two people for eating some fruit, he let millions of people go to hell for believing something they had no alternative to believe in. The fact of the matter is that
society controls what you believe in. If the Christian God is the one true god, how was Joeus Doeius, your average law-abiding Athenian, ever expected to know the truth?
Religion is just a means of identifying oneself as part of a community. It's disgusting what can be done with this power, though...
More people have died in the name of (a) g/God(s) throughout the history of the world than any other reason.
Then there's the whole just-look-up-at-the-sky argument. A while ago, I found this fascinating
article about a deep-space photo that summed things up pretty well...
Quote:
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The full ACS image is about 3.1 arcminutes square, the size of a sand grain held at arm's length against the sky. The ACS magnifies this small field into a vast panorama of some 300,000 stars and thousands of faint background galaxies.
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300,000 stars - who knows how many like our own sun? Thousands of faint galaxies - just like our Milky Way. All this in the area of a grain of sand held at arms length. How many grains of sand held at arms length does it take to fill up the entire nighttime sky? It doesn't take much effort to realize that our entire lives - the people we meet, the places we see, the memories we keep - everything we know is not even a blink of the eye in the long run.
I think it's our universal fear that everything we've ever expierienced means nothing that we've created religion as a way to deal with death. Personally, that's the reason why I want to try to change the world. I believe it was in Lord of the Rings when one of the characters was talking to Treebeard... Treebeard said that compared to Ents, Humans live such short lives. Yet what they do in that period of time is so much. I think it's the fear of passing into time, unremembered, that drives so many of us.