ON RELIGION
When man first walked erect and became aware of the world around him, he became aware of the natural cycle of nature. The seasons of the year, the passing of night into day. As his knowledge of this new world grew, so would his ability to harness it, from his use of early stone tools, to the use of fire for light and warmth. However certain natural phenomena would have occurred that went beyond primitive man's understanding. Hurricane, flood and earthquake all above prehistoric man's limited comprehension of how his world worked. He would look at these events in wonder and awe, frightened by their sheer power and devastating effects, perhaps attributing some form of sentience to them. Believing them to actually be alive, after a time perhaps even giving them names that would later evolve into the names of the ancient Gods.
At that early time, as these natural occurrences were looked upon with reverence, they would have been worshipped. The Sky God, the Thunder God, the Earth God, all would have been prayed to. Perhaps for a better crop, a successful hunt or just good weather. So by attributing the natural forces of the earth to some supernatural being, religion was created.
It has only been in the last three hundred years that man's scientific understanding of his world has enabled him to discover how it works. The natural phenomena discussed earlier no longer having religious significance. Rather rational explanations based on scientific research and experimentation have proven this theory. However this now poses an interesting question. How does religion still exist when the foundation for its discovery has proven to be false? There are no Gods in the sky, earth or seas. Yet people are still believing in an all powerful God, who is only an extension of the ancient religions and deities worshipped by prehistoric man in his ignorance of the world around him.
Organized religion has been around for thousands of years, from early pagan worship to the hundreds of religions and denominations we know today. The one common theme that runs throughout these various creeds is faith. People are asked to believe in something that has never been proven to exist. God is only an abstract concept or idea, based on man's ignorance to accept the facts around him.
By looking at one of man's modern religious rites, we can see where its origins lies in the prehistoric past. The rite of burial has been a part of most religions for thousands of years. The exact point at which man began to honor the dead has been lost to us, however the origin of burial comes not from a religious standpoint but from a purely practical one.
When man was still a hunter/gatherer thousands of years ago he was not the top predator on the planet. Burial was important as it eliminated the smell from the rotting corpse to attract other and larger predators. So ancients man’s burial of the dead was not to honor the dead but to protect the living. This rite was still carried out even after the threat to mans supremacy had long passed and has evolved into the funeral rites that we carry out today.
As mentioned earlier the key factor in any religion is faith. Faith in an all powerful being who created the world around us. To see how this idea is totally without foundation and unproven, let us look a little closer at faith itself.
If one hundred people were asked if they had faith that the sun would rise tomorrow, all of them would say yes. This is based not on pure faith but on scientific knowledge, mankind has discovered that the earth revolves around the sun and as the earth spins on its axis the sun appears to move across the sky. Rising and setting every day. Now ask those same one hundred people if they believed in the existence of god and only about half would say yes. Fewer still would say they believed in the existence of extra terrestrial life, yet there is probably more evidence for their existence than any God. Both extra terrestrials and God have yet to be proven to exist, one has a slim possibility as our knowledge of the universe expands. One has no possibility at all.
The question now is, why do more people believe in the existence of God than extra terrestrials when there is more chance of finding life on another planet than finding God actually exists. The answer is simple. God is perceived as being good and benign, extra terrestrials are not (alien experiments etc). Therefore more people are willing to believe in something that they are not afraid of, even if the chance it is real is zero.
In the Bible God says that without faith he is nothing, he says he exists because people have faith that he does. If God decided to prove his existence then people would not need to have faith in his existence because he would already proved he was real. Therefore faith in him would be meaningless. However God said without faith he is nothing so he would cease to exist in a puff of his own logic!.
The reason people believe in an all supreme being is they are scared. They are scared of their own mortality. What happens after they die, they need justification that they are going to a better place. When you are dead that’s it! You wont think feel or be aware that you are dead. Don’t be scared of the inevitable.
So to sum up God does not exist. There is no and never will be prove that he does. His unwillingness to do so proves that religion as a whole is flawed. A world based on faith has caused hundreds of wars and millions of deaths. Why would a benign and all powerful deity permit this? The answer is he didn’t because he is not real. He is just a figment of people’s imagination that can be traced back to prehistoric mans attributing of supernatural forces to natural ones.