Nice alternate topic.
Hmm... If I remember any of my world history correctly, some of the oldest known of civilizations didn't use deities to outright control people. Life depended on luck, more or less. A population could be thriving at any one time and famine or diseases could rear its ugly head not long after. They had no explanation for the reasons, and thus...
The deities of the earlier periods were particularly cruel, and probably "created" to give a civilization some sense of control. If you could appease a certain deity, a catastrophe could be avoided, or perhaps you would gain divine favor/good fortune in some aspect of life. Even if these offerings failed, they still had a reason for why such a tragedy took place. If I had to choose a reason for why religion "exists", it would be to give people a sense of control and to conquer fear of death (both through prevention and afterlife). It would only be when after religion became important in everyday life that someone could use it as a mechanism of control (naturally).
With advances in science we can easily explain and prevent many of the problems of yesterday. People live secure and happy in lives in comparison to the people of the past. We may have our problems, but we (the more prosperous countries) aren't dying of widespread food shortage and other terrible things. I think a movement toward a less spiritually-guided lifestyle comes with this as we don't have as much of a want/need for some of the guarantees a religion claimed to have afforded.
There are still two issues, however. The first is that we still can't escape death. It is very hard to accept the reality of it. So we look outside of ourselves for the answer to this "problem", toward religion. Or we may look inside ourselves and find other abstract concepts that also afford us some level of comfort. Concepts of souls and the like are fairly cemented into our culture, so it is very possible (and easy) to do that now. Not to mention that people are able to live well past the age of 35 nowadays, so we can put off this pressing issue until much later on.
The second issue is government and the security it provides. In wealthier countries it may have very well usurped the role of religion. Sure, it can't answer the "big" questions like, "Where do we go after we die," but it addresses immediate concerns that affect our everyday lives. You don't even need to like the "government," you just need to rely on its infrastructure. You go to school or work everyday at a company that operates within its bounds, when you're sick you visit a hospital that does likewise, and if there's an emergency you call the the proper authorities to assist. If the system satisfies the needs of the people to some extent, they will most likely adopt at least some of the practices of that system. We may disagree with what "it" does on certain issues, but we normally think in terms of how we can improve it and not how to strike out against it. That is, working within the system. We may even look the other way even if we disagree, thinking that overall it is for the so-called "greater good." Similar to religion in many ways, I'm sure.
Which isn't to say that a religion can't be real. If you, whoever you may be, believe in a God or Gods then a lot of what I'm saying may not really work. Which is fine too!
Originally Posted by Andromeda
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