How often do your beliefs change?

[Spongebob]

You trust society way too much. 

That's where you are dead wrong.  I don't trust "society" at all.  I don't even trust individual scientists or officials explicitly.  I trust the scientific method and hold individuals accountable to it.

 

Religion is more apt to explain how a person should think than society is, I believe.
 There are by far more so-called normal people causing problems within society than there are outcasts causing problems.

I most certainly don't trust anyone with religious credentials with anything other than religious advice and I don't have much use for that.  You aren't being objective here because you have no data on this subject.  How do you know this?  You don't.  Have you considered things like the number of Catholic priests and other clergy who have engaged in sexually assaulting children?  What about all those individuals who knew about the assaults and acted to cover them up and protect the offending clergy?  What about all the religious people who did atrocious things in the name of their god, or despite knowing better because they were in fact religious people?  If you go to any prison and poll the convicts there, you should ask how many of them considered themselves a believer in god when they committee their crimes.  You'll see the percentage is high.  I'm not saying this to validate atheism as a protection from being a criminal; it's not.  But you clearly have no idea what the objective facts are.  This is where your reliance on your own subjective imagination fails you.

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On the contrary. Religion spends a tremendous amount of time and effort to get people to not think. This is why they call it ‘faith’.

Boru

Nah, religion teaches people how to think in the right ways, minus all the extraneous societal brainwashing.

Religion does try to persuade people to think and do in a particular way, but Boru is pointing out that it also pressures people to reject objective truths in lieu of something called "faith", which is defined as belief despite lack of evidence.  This is why Muslims few planes into buildings on 9/11.  You won't likely see any atheist doing that.