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Boymustdie I'd think that the only belief we could base in reality is "I am concious". Anything above that is up for debate.

I believe evolution is true because of the massive amount of correlating evidence in it's favor from independent scientific fields. I believe in gravity because when I trip on a rock, I fall. I believe light exists because in its absence I can't see anything. I believe there is life on other planets because the statistical probability that we are alone in the universe is staggeringly poor. I believe in ev I believe in the law of large numbers because I believe in math because it is based in logic and logic is true.

Magic? A completely evil invisible entity bent on the destruction of mankind named Satan? A man in the sky watching my every move who is going to judge my every thought, deed and action at the end of 'time?' How bout a giant invisible teacup orbiting the sun? Or a flying spaghetti monster?

Nah.

No, you don't need it, just like you don't need religion to become an irrational psychopath. I was just stating things that have been done by/have stemmed from the work of religious organizations, which is what I thought you were doing too.

Oh ok. I was more speaking from personal experience and from an individual point of view.

I agree religious organizations do a lot of 'good' but the good they do could be just as easily be done by non-religious ones and at the same time the bad they do could be gotten rid of completely.

I think individually though, there are very few pros.

The audio book "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle, can shed enlightenment upon anyone, religious or athesist. It tells of detaching from the ego, and so much obvious and simple stuff that normal society has completely forgotten because we're caught up in the past and the future, the illusion of time. I was raised Catholic, and I've found more truth from listening to Eckhart Tolle's audiobooks than all years of Catholic School.

(if you have a local library, there are some you can get software to download his audiobooks for free. software- overdrivemedia.)

In true Devil's Advocate form, I point all to the following:

http://www.blacksunjournal.com/books/1844_debunking-the-power-of-now-introduction_2009.html

http://www.blacksunjournal.com/books/1875_debunking-the-power-of-now-the-greatest-obstacle_2009.html

Something to consider: it is much easier to measure the amount of bad caused by religion than the amount of good.

Are you kidding?

You need religious belief to have these? Hogwash.

Where did it come from then? If the impossible odds of random life did come to be then why would anyone need to have morals? It is printed on all peoples hearts.

Lots of people who say they are religous have no faith whatever, lots of people who say they don't believe in any god have faith. Essentially, believing in God is the feeling that things are going to be OK, that there's a purpose to the world, that Good is a force and that it will prevail eventually, all these without much proof. It's just a way of looking at things. A hidden optimism - a personality trait - an attitude. It's like smiling for no reason at all. Some atheists are just wicked, they say "you have no proof so stop smiling" because they hate that you're smiling and aren't miserable like they are. Some atheists aren't wicked at all, they'll see you smiling and they'll smile with you for no reason at all - and they'll only say "you have no proof for your beliefs" if they see that your beliefs cause you not to smile but to hate and be angry and spiteful and vengeful.

Likewise, some religious people are as good as anyone, they'll be more interested in helping you or hanging out cracking jokes, and won't argue dogma ever, or just as some hobby, without seeking to judge. Then again some religious people just exploit their beliefs to harm and condemn others or to think themselves better than others.

Basically when people say "you should believe in God" what that is supposed to mean is "you shouldn't despair", or "you should be happy".

Diodor wins!

Where did it come from then? then why would anyone need to have morals? It is printed on all peoples hearts.

Morality evolved along with the propagation and flourishing of the inherently social and cooperative species known as homo sapiens.

If the impossible odds of random life

Not so impossible. We're here aren't we?

Where did it come from then? If the impossible odds of random life did come to be then why would anyone need to have morals? It is printed on all peoples hearts.

Do you seriously believe without religion that people would have no reason not to murder each other?

I'm an atheist. Guess how many people I've murdered in my life.

I'm worried by the fact that you seem to think that the only reason people believe murder is wrong is because they are afraid some sky god will cast them into hell for eternity.

Yeah, the reason people dont murder other people often is more out of social norms than anything else, and fear of punishment and retribution IN THIS LIFE, not the next.

I'm gonna say in advance that I'm strongly convinced the below is correct, as it's not a "blind believe" but actual logic reasoning and I have no wish to discuss it with anyone that disagrees as that'll only be frustrating to me and a waste of time, like someone arguing 1+1 isn't 2. You might find it an interesting view though, as it's quite uncommon (I haven't met anyone else with the same view anyway, even though it makes complete sense imo ).

I don't believe in something like heaven or hell or entrance/denial to paradise or whatever based on the choices you made in your life because of the following logical reasoning:

First an important fact. either the universe is deterministic, or it isn't. It can't be an in-between as even the slightest touch of nondeterminism makes it completely nondeterministic.

If the universe is deterministic, it would be completely unfair to send someone's soul to hell to suffer for eternity (or whatever) as his choices in life were already set in stone before he was even born. If a god is all-knowing and created the universe, then he also created the way we make decisions and he also created the things that cause our decisions, so if a person does something "hell-worthy", the god would have known this would happen when he created the world and thus the real responsible one is the god and not the person it created. It'd be like knowingly and intentionally writing a faulty computer program, and then punishing it for not working properly.

If the universe is nondeterministic, in that case the choices a person makes in his life are random (or a result of random factors that are out of the person's control). Thought experiment: if you'd make several (or even infinite) copies of the (nondeterministic) universe and have them run parallel, they would not end up the same, but would start being different as a result of nondeterminism, leading to different decisions being made. Therefore whether you end up in hell is purely a process of chance. In some universes the randomness would lead to you going to hell, in the other's it won't. This also seems completely unfair, as hell would now no longer be a true punishment for the choices you made, but you are victim of your own choices instead so to speak as you had no true control over them. If the person would still every single time end up in either hell or heaven in every single parallel universe, then whether he ends up in one or the other is deterministic again, it's set in stone before he was even born, and therefore completely unfair/pointless.

Also, if there had to be a god to create everything (because everything couldn't simply always have been right?), then what about the god? The god has to be created as well then. A god seems a far more complex thing than the universe as we know it, so to think our universe is too complex/whatever to always have been there and needs to have been created by a higher power, then the same logic should apply even more to a god. ESPECIALLY a god couldn't always have been there, as it's an even more complicated and bigger entity than our universe.

Makes sense grindcore.

Another take I have is that religion is useful to the extent that it is comforting to people to think that when they die, they dont really die. I think the belief in religion is a self-preservation mechanism overall and its heavily rooted in our evolutionary past.

Richard Dawkins long before he wrote about the God Delusion wrote about our genes in The Selfish Gene. Roughly the premise of the book and what he laid out in-between was evidence showing that we make most of our decisions based upon the maxim of the principle: SURVIVE AT ALL COSTS (hence, The SELFISH Gene).

Paul MacLean's Triune Brain theory is that we evolved in different stages and as we progressed into humans today we have developed three major parts of our brain. The three layers are the reptilian system, the limbic system, and the neocortex. Each layer is geared toward separate functions of the brain, but all three layers interact substantially.

The three layers evolved over long periods of time, with reptilian first - dealing with territory, limbic/mammalian second - dealing with emotions and fight or flight, and finally the neocortex - dealing with logical decision making. The neocortex is what separates us from most other animals. But we still have the other two very primitive parts of our brain that come out to play - they are the parts that make us do silly things from time to time (like Tilting off your roll in Poker, or chasing that girl who is actually a bitch).

So lets take these two theories and add them together. We make most of our decisions based upon what we believe is BEST for our long term survival, and each part of our brain has different and sometimes conflicting drives about what it considers BEST. So when we make decisions, I am not only talking about our LOGICAL brains here. I'm talking about different drives that are hard wired into our genes through millions of years of evolution that manifest due to different stimulus.

When we talk about survival, there are layers of what is considered survival. Survival today to a western person might mean having three meals a day, living in a comfortable house, having a car and being able to exercise leisure (high functioning survival - neocortex driven). Survival in the past (thousands of years ago) might have meant killing your friend because he has food you need to eat (reptilian driven survival).

Anyway, regardless, we do whatever we can do to make sure we survive, and beyond that thrive. So at our very core we are wired to try to survive first, then thrive afterwards. The higher up in social circles we go in society we see this triune brain theory in practice - it is basically a manifestation of SURVIVE lower tier, through to THRIVE highest tier.

Getting back to Religion; since survival is so hard wired, its no wonder we WANT to believe in the idea of SURVIVAL even AFTER we pass on. Its so hard wired as an instinct that it doesnt matter if it doesnt make any LOGICAL sense, since survival itself is a primitive reptilian pre-logic force, we have a desire to want to survive and keep surviving and so anything that BEST allows us to do that, we will be predisposed to want to believe it.

That is often why you can rarely have a logical debate with a devout religious fundamentalist, as his drives (despite what they may say) are NOT logic driven, or are so deeply rooted in from a young age, that they can not approach the subject of the possibility they could be wrong.

To the reptilian Brain and Limbic Brain its like saying, YOU WILL DIE if you challenge this belief. And since thats not what we are hard wired to want, they will reject all evidence because its almost like a matter of life and death (to the primal and limbic brains at least).

I imagine if someone said to me YOU WILL DIE if you touch that cup on the table, I would laugh (logic brain), but if they said that and had a GUN to my head, I probably wouldn't touch it (reptilian/Mammalian brain). Would you?

So in a way, belief in religion makes sense, considering our evolutionary past.

Ironic that most religious people dont believe in evolution however

Almost everyone on earth whether they believe in God or not believe on some level that they have a soul/spirit. Almost everyone believes that we are not purely physical objects but that there is something more to us - a duality. We have our physical bodies but we also have something else that makes us uniquely different from other living things. 99.9% (making this number up) of people are dualists.

Almost no one would argue that the brain is not the source of mental life and responsible for memory, reasoning etc. but the love you feel for your family can't really be the doing of a 4 pound meatloaf pulsing with blood can it?

This even is seen within the way we talk about things. We say things like "my bankroll" or "my car". But we also say "my hand" as if my hand is separate from me. We even take it a step further to say "my brain" as if my brain is just another possession and not really what makes me and all my experiences possible.

In fiction we just accept that someone could fall asleep as themselves but wake up as their mother. Even though we know its just a movie we accept it as something that could potentially happen.

I think asking is there life after death is like asking what happens to the characters in a movie after the movie is finished.

Almost everyone on earth whether they believe in God or not believe on some level that they have a soul/spirit. Almost everyone believes that we are not purely physical objects but that there is something more to us - a duality. We have our physical bodies but we also have something else that makes us uniquely different from other living things. 99.9% (making this number up) of people are dualists.

Do you mean that they are almost 100% sure there is something like a soul? Or do you mean that they do not rule out the possibility?