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The purpose of any religion is to offer individuals a way to obtain eternal life. Accepting the reality of death is so abhorrent to some that they often purposefully hurt the feelings of family members and close friends and sometimes ignore, condone, or commit heinous acts against others in a desperate struggle to preserve the pretense they might not have to experience it.The question of why so many otherwise educated, intelligent people are driven to believe, or pretend to believe, and irritatingly promote irrational religious beliefs has been debated ever since man began to think. Could it be that they try to disguise their own weak faith in these beliefs through their persistent public assertions of them?
On this Web site, I offer some of my opinions. In About the Book, I discuss how morality, spirituality, and religious beliefs developed in humans. In my Blogs and the FAQ, I discuss other controversial topics concerning religion vs science.
Soon after humans began to form and join groups, leaders selected some of their group’s most popular myths, legends, and superstitions and sculpted them into a coherent story that, in time, became the group’s religion. This religion was learned and practiced by each new generation. Some of the original test-marketed stories were passed to descendants and to conquered peoples. These, in time, became the foundations for other religions.
For instance, stories found in ancient Egyptian religious texts eventually became major pillars of Judaism and Christianity. Egyptian historical records (Papyrus texts), written thousands of years before the claimed births and miraculous feats of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, clearly contain detailed stories later adopted by these later religions as their own. Except for the names of the characters the stories are virtually identical.
Detailed stories about the life experiences of the Egyptian god Horus and his teachings were almost exactly adopted by Biblical writers 3,000 years later in their accounts of the life of Jesus and His teachings.
What a tangled web! How to untangle it? Untold millions have been tortured and murdered in the attempt. In my opinion, education is mankind’s only hope for sustainable peace. Education might foster enough religious tolerance in the world to allow science the time to prove whether or not a supernatural world is real.
After reviewing this site, I invite you to order and read my book, Settled Science. This is my attempt to explain how, to anyone who wants to know, the vast majority of research scientists presently understand our universe formed, how life began, and how man evolved with a brain capable of inventing a supernatural world to help him cope with the very dangerous natural one.
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