Religion/god is just wishful thinking.

[frz]

While I can understand your sentiment as an atheist, your assessment is overly simplistic.

I had to give you kudos for this, Chad. I think we atheists do a disservice to ourselves when we try simplify the motivations behind religious belief and claim that there is only one influential factor. It seems only to reinforce the stereotype that atheists just don't "get" religion.

Do I think that fear of death factors into religious beliefs? Absolutely, I do, but to simply assert without evidence that something as complex as the motivations behind religion can be boiled down to one factor is, to me, counterproductive.

People often add things to spiced up and or sugar coated their argument to derailed it from its main purpose all the time. I've seen it happen a lot. There's a word for that I can't remember at the moment. Any who, doesn't it come as odd that amongst the religious, the elders tend to be even more faithful to their belief than the young? That even though they were not that into it while they were younger but now, years later into their life, some of them can hardly separate themselves, even for a minute, away from their holy book.

Then there's those, as we've read here on the forum, had some life tragedy happened to them and suddenly they can't phantom the idea that a god does not exist. They don't want to. It pains them just to think about it.
This also why they make claims of atheists to have death bed confessions. They think that, at the end of the day, we are probably like them, wishing their was more to life.