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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Maybe because they like it.  It feels good.  Most everyone else they know does it.

Do they really believe?  I doubt it.  I can see why people believed it 2,000 years ago, but how can anyone these days possibly believe that long ago, a guy who was actually God, had a mother who was a virgin.  He was later died by hanging on a cross, then came back to life and ultimately went up to the sky (heaven) to live with his father (God) and if you believe that, you’ll get to live forever just like him.   If you don’t, then you’ll burn forever, instead.

It’s a story, obviously.

There’s a great new 15 min video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrdgVM0WGKg  on “Why intelligent people are leaving religion”. You can play it at high speed.

Here’s how it starts: “It’s becoming more common now.  You meet people who followed every rule and custom and they tell you ‘I don’t really believe anymore.’   They’re not angry about it.  They just tell you:  ‘I just left.’ Many are well read and curious people. People who ask questions.  People who listen carefully to the answers.”  
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I stay religious because I think it’s true. A few points:

1. I do not the modern quasi-consensus that “science” is sufficient to explain the nature of reality. Scientists tend to be really smart, so much so that most of the population is incapable of joining their ranks and understanding the things that they understand. If human intelligence is a continuum (and it is) and if only some people are smart enough to understand the stuff that as a global community currently understand, wouldn’t it follow that there are some truths that lie beyond the aptitude of our best and brightest? Assuming to the contrary is an exercise in faith.

2. Much of religion feels absurd, but that is a side effect. The world it purports to explain is absurd. We wake up here and depart, never to return without any way of testing what (if anything) lies beyond.

3. Humans appear hardwired to seek out a divinity, food, water, sex, and sleep. Four of those things are exist beyond dispute.

4. Most of the world sensibly assumed that, just as most things are made by multiple people, so too were we made by multiple gods. Virtually the only countervailing hypothesis was Abrahamic monotheism. Call it luck if you will, but that other hypothesis branched out from one held by a loose confederation of tribes in the ancient near east into a millennia-enduring global religious force to be reckoned with.

I think Christianity is true, and I actually, really believe it. [/quote]

Obviously people aren't "hardwired to seek out a divinity." Educated people don't. The vast majority of people who are religious were brainwashed at a young age- they didn't seek it out. And education significantly increases the chance that someone will drop their religion later in life.[/quote]

The “educated” (often just an English degree from Tufts) spend their days dunking on Christians on DC Urban Mom. They absolutely have a divinity-seeking impulse. [/quote]

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