moondoong writes: "In the end, for me, faith is about putting your trust in Jesus, asking for forgiveness and strength, and trying to live a good life, knowing that failure, disappointment, sickness, and then eventually death, will come to us all. "
First of all, this Jesus concept is irrelevant to the real reason for religion, it is just another tool to help connect the victims of religion ( true believers ) to a feeling of belonging.
In the beginning, religion is necessary to maintain control over a large population which would otherwise be quite unmanageable using fear of lethal force alone. This is why religion as our cultures practice it is alien to hunter-gatherers. To them, all of the world is holy and control by leaders is necessarily personal and direct.
Even the Romans, adept as they were at the use of lethal force, realised that it is insufficient on its own to control an empire. Why do you think that the heads of state are usually the heads of the local religion, if not the god itself? Germany and Russia have in living memory fallen under the spell of exactly the same system of religion as the ancient Egyptians endured, and the Romans after them when there was a “Holy Roman Empire” or a “deity emperor”.
As we all know, when religious leaders feel their power in the slightest threatened, there is a graduated scale of sanctions leading up to the last resort of killing. Only this scale is somewhat attenuated in desperate times. The religious leaders will maintain control at all costs.
Religion cannot be allowed to fall into disuse because the powerful will not allow it, or at least they will try not to. If the ruling classes lose control too much, then society will be overthrown, and new rulers will emerge. This situation is now developing in most countries with the new knowledge of the realities of the world and existence spread so quickly by modern technology and education.
I hardly need to point out the efforts being made by some religious enforcers to prevent access by the majority of their subjects to the new knowledge. Some Christian sects have been practicing ignorance for centuries too.
In the end we are all as blades of grass in the summer sun, for a while we thrive, then we die and it is as though we never were. Get over it!
