Best books on religion?

[Darwin1245]

What's interesting is that the common thread between all of these religions is that they all seem to search for a way to explain the world around us.

Yes! That was exactly what I thought when I first contemplated why would people come up with religions. People were not retarded; they were just trying to figure out laws, just as scientists today are trying to figure out physical and chemical laws. It is likely the same thing. People back then did not have enough knowledge, so they came up with the easiest-of-all explanation: a living being (a god) "sends" rain to a tribe or a group of people living in a defined area when they do "good" things that please that god enough to reward them. Oh! And when those rituals did not work, they attributed it to god's "mood." Why not? Isn't he presumably a human-like being? How hilarious!!

To be honest, it seems kind of rational if you do not have knowledge about how rain drops form. They probably knew that clouds precede rain, but could not expect when clouds form, and there are times when clouds can be seen, but disappear without rain in a few hours or days. When anything is not understandable or behaves unexpectedly, we always consider the possibility that it is controlled or caused to behave that way by a living being, because living beings' behaviors are not completely predicted as opposed to, for example, a rock's behavior. Some natural phenomena are easily understood like gravity--while I am not sure if there are any religions that believed/believe that gravity is somehow caused be a god, but even if they did/do exist, they probably were/are not many. When anything is unsupported (provided that there are no upward forces,) it falls. It is just simple--well it seems simple in that sense--unlike weather, earthquakes and storms, which people thought that a living being must be controlling them somehow, and they associated some behaviors (non-sense rituals) they did when rain suddenly fell with rain, and that's probably how the non-sense rituals originated. You can also notice that what people think please a god are just the same things that please any other human being except for the non-sense rituals.

Today, we don't need religions anymore because we could find out that there are laws that control these phenomena, and that's why educated people are more likely to become atheists. If only people understood "holy" books literally, we would get rid of religions very soon. I think that one of the main reasons that religions will remain for years before their followers realize that they were and are just wasting their time praying and reading primitive-sense books is because some religions' texts are understood metaphorically. Understanding a text metaphorically means that the meaning would change to whatever they want it to be just to seem consistent with today's cultures. I think that Islam is the worst of them all because its book actually is written in a poem-like style; it contains many metaphors.