Why was religion created? Are all beliefs man made?

Thought I'd start a little debate here.

A few weeks ago, my theology professor assigned the entire class to write a paper. The questions were simple. They were

"Do you believe in God?" "Why?"

Simple enough, but it really got me thinking. First question was an easy answer, I thought to myself "Yes." . Second one kind of hit me though, why? Why do I believe in God? I haven't seen any proof that he exists, and all my beliefs surrounding him were taught to me by my parents & my teachers.

To bring this to a more general standpoint & as not to form a debate about Christianity, I got a quick question.

Why was religion created? And are all these beliefs actually man made & therefore, possibly fake?

As you get older, you begin thinking for yourself and no longer need to rely on everyone for answers. You think to yourself, "Maybe religion was created as a means for humans to escape the fear of death?".

I find it weird how people are questioned about their beliefs, and get so defensive about it when they have absolutely no proof to back up their beliefs. If the topic were anything but religion, claims without evidence are simply claims, and cannot be taken seriously. Yet we have millions of people who have religions despite the fact that there is no evidence backing up their beliefs.

What if all these beliefs were created by a couple of extremely convincing men, who were able to trick billions of people into believing something that wasn't there? An example of this would be the suicide bombers, who are brainwashed from an early age and told that blowing themselves up & killing people for Allah would assure them of a spot in their version of heaven. It amazes me how humans are easily deceived.

I'd like to end my point here, hopefully you guys could offer some value to this thread by stating some opinions of your own.

 

This doesn't necessarily exactly answer your question, but it's close enough that it applies a bit.

What we (Christians) believe is that we were born incomplete. There's a part of us that yearns for something it can't get. Something just out of reach that we briefly get when we participate in sacraments and prayer with God.

While I don't agree with everything I was taught about my religion, this is something that I do believe is true and one of the reasons I believe in God.

As for being deceived, what proof do you have that God doesn't exist? I know that the burden is on whoever is making the claim to provide proof, but you also can't say for certain that he doesn't exist if you don't provide proof.

 

A lot of religions were started by extremely charismatic people, true enough, but consider that virtually every society that has ever existed has had some form of religious belief. To me, this suggests that religious belief is something that arises from the way we are biologically set up, perhaps as a side-effect of something else. Example - The human brain is great at detecting patterns, and sometimes it sees patterns where there aren't any.

You can't prove a universal negative, but you don't need to for it to be accepted that something doesn't exist. Example - I cannot definitively prove that there are no naturally occurring striped pink ravens, but it's reasonable to believe that there are none based on what we know about ravens.

 

But based off of our knowledge of ravens, which is a lot, you can deduce that. To deduce that there is no God, you have to have preexisting knowledge of the origin of the universe and life itself.

 

The thing is, why would you need to deduce that there is no God, if there is no proof that God even exists? How can you possibly prove something doesn't exist when there is no evidence of somethings existence? Shouldn't the lack of evidence be sufficient enough to disprove?

 

You have no proof that any of my parents exist. From your point of view they may as well not exist. However something must come from something, and as I'm probably not a robot, you can deduce that I do have parents. If you were to disprove that I don't, you would have to prove that I don't have parents. You'd have to do this despite you not having sufficient proof my parents exist.

 

Fair enough, change the example to aliens living deep in caves on Pluto, then. There's no evidence for it, so why would you believe it?

This goes back to your earlier post about ravens. Based on our knowledge of humans, all humans have parents.

 

Personally, I'm a man of science. I follow the understanding that it takes can take a hundred different pieces of evidence to prove something to be correct, but only one to prove piece of evidence against it to prove it incorrect.

I find that religion conveniently falls in a part of the past that cannot be proven to be incorrect, nor can it be currently be proven to be correct (possibly because it was man-made, possibly because it would require intervention by a God that does not wish to visibly intervene). That situation makes it perfect for explaining things without valid scientific evidence as being an act of a higher power.

You can be a believer of any religion, agnostic or atheist but it really doesn't matter. Most people find comfort in it and although it's the cause of wars and terrorism in many cases, one could argue that mankind would find another motive instead if religion was never a thing.

You can't prove if God exists or not, but similarly you can't prove or disprove the simulation hypothesis. I'm sure the cyclical argument will continue until modern day religion moves on.

 

When it comes to death and the afterlife, humans are typically very naive and so hopeful that something else comes after this that they will genuinely believe in something otherwise viewed as nonsensical or ridiculous. There is a theory that exists that states, in its most simplistic and reductionist form, that everything humans do -- chasing wealth, seeking fame, creating religions -- is all to spite our innate fear of death. People are so afraid of dying that they will do just about whatever it takes to either distract themselves from it or convince themselves that it's just a passing through to some other magical existence beyond this Earthly realm.

Moving on to your second question: Are all beliefs man made? Yes and no. This is a tricky and interesting question in my opinion, because while everything on Earth apart from the inherently natural (trees, animals, biology, etc) can be seen as created by man... you can look deeper into a few select areas and see that man did not CREATE this things, he merely discovered them. For example, we like to pride ourselves on the invention of music. However, while I firmly believe the advent of music is one of (if not THE) our greatest achievements, the did not create sound. We did not create the musical scale. All of these noises, scales, and tones already existed within the spectrum of sound - we merely discovered them and put them to use.

So, I think a better question to ask would be: Are all religious beliefs man made? Which is another tricky question in my opinion, because it more or less boils down to whether or not you believe in a God/Higher Power. For example, if you believe in God and that he has always existed, you can say we merely discovered him and therefore our belief in him is justified and not man made. Conversely, if you are, say, an atheist, you would be justified in believing that religion is the mass propagation of a fairy tale created by man and used to deceive and exploit billions of people for thousands of years.

 

I think religion was made up to keep earth peaceful so that people actually followed rules because back in the day people feared god and what he could do. I also believe it was created so people weren't scared of death.

 

Idk why anyone would be scared of death tbh... since there is nothing possible to avoid it, religious or not. I'd be more concerned about the way or dying then death itself. One of those isis guys torturing you for a couple months before you finally die, yeah I'd be scared of that lmao.

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I just think these religion threads are pointless though, because no one will ever, ever 100% know for fact, until you are dead. None of us were here thousands of years ago when all the "miracles"/"religious things" happened where we could see for ourselves.

 

Most people in today's world are so worried about whether God exists or not, and the answer to all is that we have had to come from somewhere, but what does that exactly stand at? Growing up in a Catholic household there was no debate whether God existed or not, it was an obvious answer of "Yes".

As I aged out of High School I've noticed that I've drifted away from Catholicism and headed towards the road of becoming agnostic (We don't believe in the Bible, but we do believe that there is a God out there).

I look at your question as impossible due to the fact that if religion was never created, then at this exact moment, everyone would be wondering how we were created, why we are here, and what's our purpose? Believing in the God that is displayed in the Bible seems quite odd for me to grasp around. One of the commandments are "Thou shalt not kill" but people do it anyways? Why does God simply not smite them? (Sorry for going off topic on that area, but my answer is mainly in the beginning)

 

I feel religion derived from mythical gods of ancient civilizations which were a way to explain things that were not able to be explained at the time. Add in the commandments, which attempt to keep the public honest and pure at heart, it acts as guidelines for people to follow to keep us behaved. I feel that's why it was created: to make us good people by giving us sound guidelines to live by.

 

All beliefs are made and religions were made old time to get people together to get money from people,

 

To inspire fear and promote order. Yes, doctrine is man made. A physical being had to write the words of god.

It was institutionalized for power and money. It's the reason why most governments are still not completely secular, and hold fundamentalist ideals.

 

Do you believe in God?: Yes
Why?: Faith

I believe in God, I am willing to be damned for it. No person has been able to give me a "Evolutionary" theory. Charles Darwin, the evolutionary entrepreneur was born a Christian, he was even a minister, a preacher. He went astray due to the unfortunate death of his daughter, and directed his attention away from God to the evolutionary thinking (which can easily be proven to be a myth).

Here is a little joke: "If we all came from monkeys, you didn't spring to far." - ?? ??

 

I do not believe in god, although i use to. I grew up in a religious family. My dad always use to tell me to question everything. So naturally when i got a bit old, i started questioning the religion they taught me. Pretty quickly i found alot of things that didnt make any sense at all.