IOW, if all you have to say is how stupid religion is, please find another thread to say it in. I put this in The Crucible quite literally - so we can share ideas and perhaps distill them down into Truth.
Smart Aleq's reply in this thread reminds me of a meditation I had once after reading an excerpt of a Lon Milo Duquette writing about Alistair Crowley's Aeon theory. (The theory that all the religions of the world have shifted focus nearly simultaneously as our knowledge about the sun changes.)
Back in The Ancient Times (define that historically or mythically, as you like), our awareness was focused on The Earth. The Earth gave us life, via food. Mothers gave us life, by birthing us. And we thought that was really fucking cool, and so we carved statues of women who had birthed many babies (although not so much women who WERE pregnant, or even were lactating. Older women with saggy bodies, evidence of having given life and nursed probably multiple times, that was the respected body.) We may have worshiped the Earth and Womanhood as concept or deity. The sun warmed the Earth and it was a little disconcerting when it went away and days became shorter and shorter, but there was always some sort of life on Earth to sustain us through the dark months. She provided.
Then someone noticed that plants only grow where seeds fall. Not only that, but if you clear the ground a little bit and push the seeds into the ground a bit, they grow even better. And...wait a sec! Nothing really grows during the winter when the sun goes away. Maybe (and I can only imagine this whispered in shocked and sacrilegious tones) maybe the power comes not from the Earth, but from the Sun! And look, Seed and Sun both die, and then come back again. The Sun does it every night! Now THAT'S what's really fucking cool. Death and re-birth! And so death cults arose and, no longer cowed by the "power" of the Earth (which is obviously not the giver of Life, just some sort of repository for Seed and Sun to work their magic) convinced people that they, like the Seed and Sun, may die, but they will be reborn. But just as planting seed requires that you do everything just so if you want a good crop, attaining this rebirth requires a list of do's and don'ts for it to work. And just as you'd ask the most successful farmer for his tips and follow them exactly if you want to get good results, so should you listen carefully to the priest to learn the secret of rebirth. Trying to figure it all out on your own is a foolish waste of time and effort when spiritual salvation is the crop and you only have one season (lifetime) to get this right! The power is in the Sun to bring life to your seed, if you do everything the priest tells you.
Now, of course, we know that our Sun is just* a star. And there are billions of them. And about the same time this knowledge was really sinking in, this idea of individualism really raised its spiritual head. There isn't One Path any more than there is One Sun. Billions of personal universes and billions of Stars, all whirling around, doing a sacred dance, but never colliding, never really understanding one another except in brief, beautiful fleeting moments of Stellar Fire. And they never really die, either - they may transform, they may shift from red to yellow to black holes or however that goes, but they transform, they don't die. Energy and matter are never created or destroyed, but you can transform one to the other. So maybe we transform, instead of ceasing to be or being reborn, too.
And, as cool as this meditation and the awareness it gave me has been, it's also been a problem for me in my spiritual work. Because now I'm stuck. I can't, in good conscience, go back to being "a Goddess worshiper", because that's so 10 millennia ago! And I'm really not down with the death cult thing, either. But I don't know what this new view of the universe is telling me. What, on a practical level, do I do once I'm past the concepts of God and Goddess? I've been stuck here for about 5 years now. Any advice?
*I have a whole 'nother one about how all the secrets of the universe are hidden behind the word "just". I think I stole that one from The Seventh Telling. But I'll spare you.