aren't you guys forgetting something crucial? Religious figures (namely the pope) rejected darwin's theory of evolution. Only until later was it accepted by the church, which implies that originally the two were quite the opposite...

Also, religion has been with human beings as long as we've existed - which for me proves nietsche right ( i think it was him who said this) that if god didnt exist, man would create one.

The religions we have today are thus an evolution of the pagan religions that we invented by interpreting the stars.

When looking into it, we see that the egyptian pagan religion had a sun god, who was born of a virgin, had 12 followers - the god Ra, in short had many characteristics that jesus himself had.

The book of the dead (the egyptian pagan bible) had a list of "criterion" that one would have to pass in order to ascend into the afterlife - this was reduced to what we know now as the 10 commandments.

Jesus' birth is simply a star sequence : study the stars and you will see that on dec 25th (jesus' supposed birthday) the constellation called "the three kings" aligns with the star in the east (called "bethlehem" pointing towards the sun, who subsequently had not risen for 3 days. (23rd, 24th, 25th of decemeber - the shortest days of the year). The new "birth" of the son would mean the promise of spring, longer days and warmth.

The connections are endless: we also see that jesus died, and three days later rose again, just as the sun does every year.

The sun is the reason that life is on earth, it gives heat, helps thigns to grow etc, and thus it makes sense that we were to worship it as "early" human beings.

But religion itself has evolved, and different "schools" have arisen, even though they all have the same source. Religion now has become an endless war, (what with terrorist attack in the present day, and all of the other religious wars seen throughout history.

If you ask me, evolution is the realisation in humans that religion is simply something we latch onto because we'd rather think we understand our existence than being utterly clueless.

"faith" and "the power of god" is in all of us, but it is not necessarily what we've labeled it. We've just been misinterpreting it as religion for too many years, causing petty differences in each other, which leads to wars etc.

Religion is therefore an element that holds us back from evolving, or at least, is a crutch that humans thought they needed in their first "stage" - because remember, religion is basically an evolution of pagan rituals.... think of sunday mass etc...

we haven't really changed that much (in the grand scheme) as human beings.

Evolution is getting over religion.