Sigmund Freud tackled religion in great detail and had several ideas about it.

One of his theories was that religion stems from the individual's experience of having being a helpless baby totally dependent on its parents. The baby sees its parents as all-powerful beings who show it great love and satisfy all its needs.

This experience is almost identical to the way human beings portray their relationship with God.

Freud also suggested that childhood experiences caused people to have very complex feelings about their parents and themselves, and religion and religious rituals provide a respectable mechanism for working these out.

Freud also described religion as a mass-delusion that reshaped reality to provide a certainty of happiness and a protection from suffering.


Religion comes from Emotions

Human beings believe in God because they want:
A father figure to protect them from this frightening world
Someone who gives their lives meaning and purpose
Something that stops death being the end
To believe that they are an important part of the universe, and that some component of the universe (God) cares for and respects them

These beliefs are strongly held because they enable human beings to cope with some of their most basic fears.

Even if this is true (which it probably is) this doesn't mean that God doesn't exist, but merely that we are psychologically likely to believe in God whether or not he exists.

Atheists argue that since religion is just a psychological fantasy, human beings should abandon it so that they can grow to respond appropriately to deal with the world as it is.

heaven or hell which one will you pick

well i guess in way they are dealing with it. everyone finds a way to deal with the world and if believeing in god is that way, then whos to say its wrong?
a good friend of mine said if its not hurting anyone, why should it matte? religion wasnt created originally to tell people believe in this or go to hell,it was created to give rules and stability to an ever changing world. it was created so that the world would become a better place by giving guidelines and ideals.
the matter of god exisisting or not is inconseuential in reality. its how we believe...wether figment of imagination or reality he is a figurehead for morality and ethics, as is every god, no matter how the religion has been distorted.

err ... neither ... Im a heathen and a non-believer ...

than you have made your decision

I'm not sure what your point is here. Can you please elaborate?

because it does hurt people. More people have been killed and more wars started in the name of God than for any other reason. In some religions, if you don't follow it just so... you get stoned to death. You can get shunned out of your family and community. One of the biggest problems is ( in my humble opinion) is that everyone seems to think their religion is right and all others are wrong. Take some of my family for example... if you don't believe exactly as they do, you will burn for all eternity in the depths of hell.

Fair points, but then when people choose to follow a lifestyle, surely it is a personal choice.

You are a Buddhist, Spider a Christian, I am an Athiest.

We made those conscious decisions based on our past.

But what you have inside you is personal to you. You do not go around shouting that all other non-believers will go to hell and die and suffer the fires of eternal damnation.

Christianity, Islam and Judaism has their followers doing that. This is what makes these three religions so unpalatable to me.

Its a gamble. "Have I done enough to secure eternal life?"

I dont care. If there is a god, then he will either forgive me for my past indiscretions (and I promise that she looked 30 ) or he wont.

There is nothing I want to do about it

Upside-down Red-head ... Does it get better than that?

I just reckon that there is pre-conditioning to being slave to religion and it takes strength to move away from it.

... and what is my decision?

Please dont tell me hell!! Im not sure if I could recover from falling off this stool with hilarity.

heaven, hell, valhalla, purgatory, olympus, father christmas and the easter bunny ... all the same.

imaginary.

That's not true, simply look at the statistics on Democide and you will quickly see that more people have been killed in the name of "progress" than any religion. I suppose that if you accept Ann Coulter's belief that Liberalism is a religion, then your statement is still true, but I think most people would reject that belief.

Are you asserting, then, that if you are religious, that you are therefor a slave to it...and that it is something that you must move away from by some stregnth that you must somehow find, preferably within yourself?

Spider... look at the crusades? Look at the holy wars still going on to this day... You say it's "progress", I have to disagree.

Yes, I do believe that's what he's saying

well ya...i guess my point is that instead of being so concearned aout people going to hell over a matter of elief they should concentrate more on the way they behave. i grew up in a christian household and was told if i didnt believe in god i wasnt a member of the family...that made me not want to believ all the more.
religion is man created as is personal beliefs. it isnt a bibles fault that men decided to go stone someone to death.
it was mans decison to enforce control. the scriptures werent written by god they were written by man, according to the culture and times.
what was true thousands of years ago isnt today and i think thats where a lot of people lose sight.

I agree people should be more focused on their own life instead of judging others... However, in a lot of religions part of being a believer, is spreading God's word. Getting more people to join your church and showing people how wrong they are by not believing as you do...

Liberalism is a religion - yep I reject (I think this is what you are asking us to reject)

War because of religion - I totally do not reject that.

The Crusades
Hitler's WW2 agenda

Come on Spider, you are smart. Europe in the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s.

The Middle East.

The Spaniards in South America ... the list is endless.

War is condoned in the bible. god tells people to kill others, so they do (based on their own twisted interpretation)

It used to be a crime punishable by death to work on the Sabbath... Don't even get me started on the witch hunts.

again, all man made religion.

Depending on your religious upbringings you will be a slave to your religion.

If you see that the upbringing has so many contradictions that make it impossible to live comfortably with then the strength you need is to break from you peer-group.

Humans like to be part of a group. We are very social animals and when we move against the tide of normality, our peers start to question us, as it is not "normal"