themurphyYou described almost every religion ever.
Religion is a mental disorder. Prove me wrong. (with actual studies and not anecdotes)
NKBTNReligion is just ceremony and doctrine surrounding belief.
A bit like having cake and a party, because you believe the earth completing a lap of the sun dated from the day of your birth is worth celebrating. Or having someone arrested and taken to court and sent to prison for stealing from you, because you and many others in society believe in concepts like personal property, and justice, and morality. You know, all those things you believe in that definitely exist, even though you’ve never seen a photo of morality, or seen a scientific study proving that justice exists. But they must do because old books say so, and so do your peers, and anyway our whole society would fall apart if people stopped believing in them.
Humans, simply put, are weird. We’re a species composed of mental disorders unique to us and nothing else in nature. To single out religion as being especially weird and worthy of contempt is… well… a bit weird and worthy of contempt, IMO
Religion is just ceremony and doctrine surrounding belief.
A bit like having cake and a party, because you believe the earth completing a lap of the sun dated from the day of your birth is worth celebrating.
Cakes, parties, planets, the Sun, rotation, years, are all real. Your gods aren’t.
Bread, wine, communion, annual religious festivities are also all real. Gods may not be real, but neither are a lot of human concepts. Good, evil, justice, aesthetics, mathematics, class, debt, trust, freedom… any number of things we believe exist but do not have any physical presence in the universe, no proof outside of human inference and intuition (and the occasional bit of paperwork) that they exist. They all, however, have their uses, and their effects are made manifest by our actions, for good and ill.
“Those who dance are thought insane by those who cannot hear the music”