[Skybird]

The fearmongering of religion. C'mon, August. Even little children of pre-school age usually all by themselves arrange their playful interactions according to golden rules and fair bartering. And I bet it was not that different with the 5 years old a thousand years back, two thousand and four thousand years.

Heck, even Bonobos, when seeing one ape of their group suffering, or sitting aside, come and look at him, check his injuries or whatever it is, touch him, stroke him gently, show signs of compassion, caring and tenderness. And there are many other higher animals doing similiar things as well. Do they do this for religious reasons?

You do not need a religious framework to see people showing social acting, seeking justice in their relations, and behaving according to what we describe in this motto: "what you do not want to get done to you, don't do to somebody else". The Golden Rule, that is.

But quite often, religion has and still does violate this golden rule, in the name of its own "moral" dogma. History, until the present, is full of examples for this.

And quite often, when religion wants to define what is moral and what not, in the end it wants only one thing: control over the people and its actions.

As I explained, there is a hunger in man for adding meaning to his life, many people cannot stand to not have that, become mentally deranged, ill at their heart, desperate, whatever. Any artificial conception of a belief system serves them the purpose to achieve this: seeing a meaning in their lives, a kind of control they have over their fragile, short, vulnerable existence. Viktor Frankl, founder of the Logotherapy school of psychotherapy and survivor of the KZs (his complete family was murdered by the Nazis), put it plain and simple in words: "He who has a Why to live for, is able to bear almost every How." ("Wer ein Warum zum Leben hat, erträgt fast jedes Wie.") Its a fact known in research since long, that in the KZs those who had not such a goal, aim, belief, sense of meaning even in this horror that surrounded them, that these people died earlier and at dramatically higher rates than those who were able to keep somethign in their heart that made them wanting to live for it, or due to it. Or as Jesus has put it: "Man does not live by bread alone."

Its highly subjective, of course. The hunger for meaning however does not automatically mean that just any belief system and what it claims, tells the truth, states facts, is right. It only means that for the believer, it serves his subjective purpose. He falls out of his belief, when it does not serve its purpose anymore (=spiritual crisis).

This all is more about psycho-hygienics than about anything else. Some years ago they erratically wrote in the media that a gene was found that made people believe in God. That is Quatsch, the results were not claiming such nonsense. What they meant and what often intentionally was misinterpreted is that due to the psychological base function of adding an imagined order to the world as we perceive it, the brain may be genetically predetermined to favour the forming of artificial mental orders/structures into which we sort in our witnessing of the world, and this categorizing, to name it as that for the moment, create these "illusions" of religious beliefs and then make people prone to take them for real.

It may be an illusions - but it may be one that keeps us from getting insane, desperate, feeling lost; it may fulfill a function vital for our mental and biological survival. It may be essential for maintaining a psychohygienical homeostasis.