Joe_Cavalry All Day Every Day

you've got to be trolling. :P no one outside the bible belt is that stupid

I can say, for certain, that before I was introduced to God through church, I had no concept of a God. Then again, I was raised on facts, produced by science.

When i learned of God, I immediately and deeply believed He could not exist.

When i learned that science couldn't answer all of the questions, I immediately believed it would, eventually.

My mind wasn't poisoned by threats of eternal damnation until I was of sufficient mental maturity to see them as such. I was introduced to religion at an age when I was capable of deciding the truth or fallacy of it myself.

Though i have always wondered HOW the universe came into being, I never once thought that a transcendental, all powerful being was responsible for it.

The concept of God is a humanization of an unbiased natural force, the basest natural force whose identity can only be described as existence.

When we humanized nature, we invented God.

Do you mean to say that someone who was born on an island and had no contact with religion of any kind would believe immediately in God?

I think not. The concept of a higher power is a construct of discussion between multiple people in order to explain the inexplicable.

The difference being that mankind's governments were invented as a way for the needs of the many to be looked after by a few individuals, who are also men. We have moved past the necessity of God's protection and begun to take care of ourselves.

Perhaps my previous statement was too bold. I would like to retract to the point of mankind is on the brink of freedom and the time has come, in my opinion to take the societal plunge. We can protect ourselves now, we don't need daddy anymore. God has a way of telling mankind exactly what it needs to hear. We are now old enough to tell ourselves what we need to hear.

Which, almost ironically, is how religion started. Man telling itself what it needed to hear.

No, the presence of homework does not turn kids into mass murderers.

However, if the teachers were doing their jobs, homework would not exist.

Their beliefs are what gets them through the day. Some people need religion, some people don't. Some can operate on faith, some need proof. All Atheists really have is a calculated way of PROVING things. We lack all of the answers, but we attempt to understand the questions beyond the simple "It is, because God wills it" philosophy. Atheists desire to know WHY something happens. Religion shuns the "why" and replaces it with a simple "God did it" and the people who subscribe to that don't require an answer to "why", they only care that it IS. Faith is a very beautiful concept, organized religion is a scourge. I sincerely hope that those here can understand the distinction. Too much evil has been done in the name of one God or the other for any but the ignorant to forget.

Remember, before you decide to flame me:

What I said is "God is good, the Church is bad." and that goes for ALL churches. When a church becomes powerful enough, they fear the loss of that power and attempt to destroy all opposition. That's human nature, not the nature of a God.

Atheists lack common sense?

Mankind, at it's birth, is alone and scared. The world is so large and they are so small, when they look into the night sky, they only see lights. They don't know what those lights are, either. Actually, they don't know a whole lot about anything.

So, mankind decides, subconsciously, perhaps, to try to explain their world, define it. So, an idea from one, the idea that all mankind is protected by a larger force (God, for the sake of argument, because at this point in society, arguing that Zeus protects you is... outdated.) This force watches over mankind, says the man. People like the idea that their lives lie in the hands of a benevolent force, unseen and unheard, but always present. It gives them comfort. From there, many people spread the stories and as anyone who has every played "telephone" as a child knows, the stories get distorted through time until the same race that believed one thing so long ago now believe many different, but fundamentally similar, things (Christian vs Islam vs Judaism, essentially)

Eventually, mankind's arrogance and fear come to a boil, resulting in wars over whose version of the same comforting tale is correct. Those men pray to their God for strength in proving their truths and slaughter each other over a story that was told thousands of years ago to comfort people.

Fear bred Religion,

We invented God.

-common sense-

edited for clarification

That, by no means, implies that God is not important. I believe that mankind invented God as a place to house a Well of Courage that was, until then, inaccessible. For a time, God gave man strength. But, as a child will grow and leave the nest to make it on their own, I believe that mankind, as a whole, has seen enough and understands enough about our world to access the Well of Courage without the need for God to guard it. The time has come for man to take ownership of it's Well. It is time for mankind to be it's own Gods.