when you look at other religions from around the world, including those that are not around any more, you realize the Judaic-Christian-Islamic religion is not any different or any more unique at all. Why is it that all those other religions are mistaken or wrong or fake but this one (take your pick, Judaism, Christianity, Islam) is the right one, the only one that is real? The creation myths, the moral lists of do's and don'ts , the justification for conquering and slaughtering other humans who are different - just like all the other religions.

All of them are ancient and, in most cases, are simply a matter of primitive, ignorant, superstitious people taking their particular fears, morals, prejudices and ideals and putting them into structures and books and backing it up by saying “God said so!”. Religions are typically based on two things: the fear of death and what happens to you after, if anything, and the need to control the primitive impulses left over from the days before agriculture and sedimentary societies evolved. If you can't control them society falls apart. But they were hard to control and having Gods invented to back up various law givers helped sacare people into complying.

These impulses include killing each other for personal gain or out of primitive rage, relying on brute force to determine who runs local groups, and the need to contain and control the sexual impulse so that large groups of people can co-exist without being preyed upon by others, and children can have longer periods of mental development before they start to have their own kids - not to mention the male desire to know his kids are HIS so they also invented the whole thing about only sleeping with the one man you were sold to as a wife.

The other aspects of the major religions such as philosophy and so-called spiritual enlightenment don’t actually have anything to do with believing in mythical deities, or not. The same goes for morality. Without question the most truly moral and least hypocritical humans I have ever encountered were either atheist, such as Carl Sagan and Stephen Gould, or they were pantheist types like Joseph Cambell. Their immense compassion for the welfare of all humans, and in most cases, all living things, completely outweighs any so-called saint.

Many of those Christian saints burned women to death or promoted the act, simply because they were female – not unlike what we now condemn happening in the more backward Islamic countries like Afghanistan. Organized religion retarded the true enlightenment and progress of the human race, by at least 1,000 years in the West during the Dark Ages, and for similar periods of time in China and the Middle East. It is ironic that Islamic scholars were so far ahead of Europe in terms of medicine and science and free expression of thought and ideas during the middle ages, but are now so far behind it today.

People say truth is objective, but actually it is not. Only perspective is relative. Either the person now referred to as Jesus (no actual historical evidence he even existed in real life) was the living God walking the earth, or he was not. He was either the son of God, or he was not. Either this is the only place with life in the entire Universe, or it is not. In nature, Gold is only made in the heart of super-heated stars, or it is not. Only one is true, the other is not.

Here is a true fact: Every atom in your body (except some of the hydrogen and traces of a few other elements) was made in a star – billions of stars, millions of years ago. In fact, every atom making up the world you live in was made inside of stars, that is where atoms heavier than the first few come from.

For me that fact is more awe inspiring and makes me feel more at one with the cosmos than anything man-made religion can come up with.

Does that mean there is no God or otherwise intelligent force at work in the Universe? Nope. But when you really look at what the people believed who came up with the Bible or the Sanskrit, etc. (demons living in the air cause the common cold, drought is caused when God is punishing you, being as naturally sexual as all advanced primates are is wrong or bad or perverted – when the only perverse thing about sex comes from people thinking it is perverted and warping themselves and their children with such beliefs – lighting is God killing people who were bad, the Earth is flat and the center of the universe and the planets and stars go around it, our collective memory only goes back a few centuries before writing was invented so that must be as far back as the world and we go) one must ask if they were so wrong about so much, what makes you feel they were right about ANYTHING?

If there is anything like a real God, no human religion has a exclusive admission to that god or inspired by that god beyond a desire to claim that exclusive connection and somehow try to understand the unknowable.