God, Religion and the many flaws I see. Feel free to correct me., page 2

reply to post by seangkt

I totally agree with all your points. I was thinking about making a thread pointing out the flaws I see in religion, but it looks like I've been beaten to the punch.

A few I'd like to add:

- Most if not all religions contradict each other, saying that their religion is the one right religion, and any other religion is wrong, so by that logic all of them are the wrong religion since they cancel each other out.

- Religion is based almost entirely on geography. If you were born in the heart of Afghanistan, what do you think the odds are that you will be born a Christian despite your family and peers believing in a different religion? The idea of other religions may not even be introduced to you until you are 6 or 7 years old, so it's not like you would have a chance to choose your own religion. True, later in life you are free to make your own decision, but if you are raised to believe in something, how likely is it that you will suddenly believe in a completely different religion?

- The Bible claims that if you pray for something, your prayers will be answered. That's...just a lie. I mean the Pope could spend a week in solitary confinement doing nothing but praying continually for world hunger to end, pray for all diseases to be abolished, pray for no more hatred, etc., but it will never happen. Any person who is a member of a religion can pray for hours on end, and their prayers will not be answered. Sure, some small little event may lead them to believe that their prayers were answered, but that sounds a lot to me like a self fulfilling prophesy, they are out looking for their prayers to be answered, so the first thing remotely close to their prayer will be associated as Gods intervention.

- All throughout time man has created simple answers for things that we do not understand. The sun setting in the morning? No that's not a sun, that's the god of light or whatever. Creation of the Universe? Yeah, some all-knowing all-powerful thing did it. Death? No you don't die, you keep on living in another form. Rain? No we danced around for a little bit so the rain god rewarded our devotion. My point is that we like to believe that we have answers for questions, and no matter how illogical these answers are, if enough people believe it it will eventually be considered fact, at least for a short time period.

- Not exactly a flaw but my personal opinion, which may not apply to all people, and it sort of goes with the above flaw. Religion is used as a coping mechanism for people who are afraid of death, believing that we will one day die and completely cease to exist is unbearable, completely unthinkable, so religion is used as a form of denial to counteract the fact that humans die. I'm not saying that when we die, it's just blackness and nothingness, I or nobody else knows what death is like, but I'm saying that religion is used to cope with the thought that it may be blackness and nothingness.

- Finally, in the Bible Satan is the big-bad-devil that we need to watch out for, and God is the good guy who we should be rooting for because he has good morals and he knows best and what not, right? Well, let's look at the score: God killed a total of 2,270,365 people, Satan killed a whopping 10 people. Maybe Satan wasn't such a bad guy after all, huh?