Why religion should not vanish

[Ravenshire]

The single largest charitable organization in the world is the Gates Foundation. No gawds required.

Uh...You do realize Bill Gates family are Catholics (he seems to be more of a deist or theistic inclined agnostic) , and he's even confessed it's Catholic morality which inspires his charitable works? http://www.christianpost.com/news/bill-g...od-116166/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/bi...-work.html

Religion's got a pretty big hand in that it would seem.

Our prison system, where atheists are severely under-represented, would seem to indicate that we can manage our "killer urges" quite well without gawd.

Not really, professed Athiests are such a tiny proportion of the population it's hard to really compare a few hundred Athiests to the millions of Hispanic Catholics. Sheer size of samples kinda screws that unless you can condense it to some sort of equal ratio.

Ethics and morality are not an invention of religion, no matter how many times your local shaman tells you that his special voo-doo sky-fairy handed them down.

Indeed they aren't, but why is religion still the vehicle of choice for instilling ethics rather than philosophers? Aristotle's had a lot more airtime compared to the Guru Granth Sahib and yet far more people turn to that than they do any of his treaties.

It's simpler to digest (especially with a clergy to ritualize and make it more glamerous) for average joe.

Bullshit. The "outside aggressor" is the greatest unifying force in history. Religion has historically divided, not unified. Put a giant space rock on a collision course for earth in 1980 and watch the US and the USSR dismiss all of their petty bickering to cooperate to deflect it while the churches bicker about which is the true faith and how all the others caused the fucking rock in the first place.

Thats true for some occasions but not always. Take the fall of Constantinople for instance, Europe knew once Byzantium fell they would be next on the Ottoman hit list and yet they still didn't raise a finger to help. Why? Because they didn't trust the "effeminate" Greeks.

There are no logical reasons for keeping religion around. Of course, it's not like it's going to die off overnight next Thursday, but it does seem to be dying. I just hope I live long enough to spit on it's grave.

If there's anything my studies have shown me, it's that religion is as strong as ever. Certainly, belief in Christianity, Islam and the like may be dropping but that's being swiftly replaced by Wicca, Hare Krishna and "Spirituality". All three of which are encouraging a whole new area of commercialism and mercantile interest.

1st point:
Bill Gates, regardless of upbringing, is an atheist. Kinda hard to give credit to god or the church there.

2nd point:
Professed atheists (atheist, no belief, nonreligious, pick your name) are 15-20% of the population according to recent studies. Atheist populations in prisons, less than 1%

3rd point:
Religion is less and less the "vehicle of choice" for teaching ethics because more and more people are seeing that so many religions are so anti-ethical.

4th point:
You pick one aberration, where the aggressor wasn't common, but likely to become an aggressor to a non-involved party, and use that? Really? History is replete with examples of one group of people not helping the other guy, even against someone who may become their enemy but try to find an example of a common aggressor not unifying people at least long enough to fight them off. The enemy of my enemy...

By raw numbers, religion in general may be growing and I'm not sure I
even buy that. By percentage, it's dying. Even the "growth" is pathetically lukewarm, spiritual, "feel-good" bullshit growth. There are relatively few "devout" believers of any faith compared to even 30 years ago.