[fourthdan]

@Baltar

Baltar, I think you're a relatively intelligent and free thinking person, but probably need to do a little more research on religion. I follow hinduism, which is probably the oldest religion in the world.
And I can tell you that our religion:
-- gives guidelines, not absolute rules
-- says that everything should be questionable, and not just allows - but encourages questioning and searching for knowledge
-- allows for change depending on the times

I know where you're coming from. Most people just follow religion based on second hand knowledge... without thinking. It's almost ignorance
there are two kinds of people who result as the wrong way of following religion.
-- The first are the kind who have never read anything about religion, but just do what thier moms and dads have told them to do and are following what has become something that has been diluted over years into a sequence of traditions and chantings
-- the second kind are the people who are not able to be convinced by this. who think that that is all there is to religion, and give up on it. Instead of finding out more about religion, they believe they know all that needs to be seen, and become athiests.... or some rare people (once in a few hundred years) make a new religion that does not have the things they disliked in the religion they saw around them.


If this has been covered in the previous posts I shall re-iterate it here:
1)religion allows people to surrender thier worries, thier problems to a higher power. From a psychological point of view it allows them to accept that they are not in control of everything in thier life, and that things go unplanned (because it is part of a divine and higher plan - or because of thier past karma)
It allows them to pray - which is a sort of intention manifestation
2) if you look at religion from an anthropoligical point of view, it makes a great deal of sense too. Humans, along our history needed guidelines. guidelines at the personal level and at society's level.
religion was what helped us become civilised and organised
it was the first thing that achieved a sense of morality - a sense of right and wrong in the official way. even before Law and the police were established
3) I can say this about hinduism (and others can probably vouch for thier religions too):
Everything had a reason. those belief systems were formed over tens of thousands of years. If you dig deep enough you'll find a logical reason that we sometimes even have scientific evidence for.
(Hindu scriptures have details of everything from supernova stages and universe age and area to secrets on unlocking higher brain functions)


I'm not even gonna go into "because you feel God in your heart" part. But religion at it's most dumbed down is something that enables us to be better people. it's the oldest and most tried and true PD system known to man.