The Ball and the Cross

[Inqwizitor]

Hi everyone. I'm a Roman Catholic interested in atheism and atheists. Lately I've listened to some Sam Harris on YouTube and I like the man, though I don't entirely agree with him, obviously. I'm looking for a forum that discusses what people actually believe in though, not just deconstructing other people's beliefs, which is what I've found at most secular/atheist discussion forums.

One thing I noticed that I wanted to ask about: Why are there twice as many threads in the "Religion" section of these forums, compared with the "Atheism" section?

The title of this post is a reference to the book by G.K. Chesterton, which is one of the best stories showing the value of friendship between believers and freethinkers.

My current thinking is that atheism is the default position for the rational mind and that all religion is simply the evolutionary programming for primate societies (and many others) to organise themselves into a hierarchical structure with, usually, a powerful alpha male.

Many humans simply cannot shake this powerful and overriding instinct gifted by evolution and still seek out this hierarchical structure and of course, being far more intelligent than other primate societies, although sometimes I wonder, have elevated this angry alpha male to the ultimate that their imagination can conceive, i.e. the supernatural.

Not my intention to deconstruct anything but simply to proffer an explanation that seems to fit in with the natural world.

It may well be that with this forum you will discover more about what people don't believe in although I haven't been here for a while (over three years) so maybe things have changed 

It's possible that religion has an evolutionary advantage, or at least it did. Given that religious people tend to out-breed (to put it crudely) irreligious people, that might still be the case. In that case a universal religion that aggressively seeks converts and mixes different genes would seem to have an evolutionary advantage over tribal or ethnic religions that are limited to a certain ethnic or cultural group and does not seek converts. I think Prof. Richard Dawkins has a theory about this, doesn't he?