My views on God and religion

[FrustratedFool]

I agree.  

I think most people have a psychological predisposition to certain things, like ascribing agency to events, believing their mind is separate to their body, being scared of death, thinking of morality as being something objective and external or absolute, desiring meaning and purpose, finding patterns, a strong desire to see justice enacted, a desire for altered states of consciousness, magical thinking, assuming freewill, and so on.

That sort of stuff tends to lead people into religion, I think.

It's hard to think of a way to gain the psychological benefits of religion without its drawbacks and falsehoods.

I think free will is just another means for God, or at least the people believing in God, to get a hold of people and, say, brainwash them into following religion. With how the human mind works, brainwashing can be easy to do to humans. Still, we are not unlike animals, and with that, we may seem to be different; and we may have some differences mentally altogether, but not to the point of having actual free will, which is an illusion in the end, is it not?

What does God mean in the first part of that paragraph?

If you mean that people are generally easy to manipulate, especially given their psychological predispositions, then I agree. We are.