Quote from: frisco2 on April 06, 2012, 02:27:43 AM

... in Russia. People were afraid to say something in their kitchen that is against the government. The walls had ears.

Actually, it was said that the kitchen was the one place where people could speak freely. It was in public where you had to keep your opinions completely quiet.

About religions, it's true that they are the cause of much suffering, but they were often an improvement on what came before. The prophets brought new laws, new ways for humans to regard their relationships to one another. If the people saw that the new laws were better than what they had, they converted.

Sometimes conversions were forced, but those were not genuine conversions; the victims just pretended to convert to keep the threatening maniacs happy. Religions can only spread far and wide if there are many genuine converts, who really do see something better than what they had before.

And the prophets who brought the new laws marked significant points in human development. The transitions from human sacrifice to no human sacrifice and from eye-for-an-eye to forgiveness of sin and love-thy-neighbor, as well as the prohibitions of slavery and usury were religious developments that improved humanity.

You might say that it was religion which put the human sacrifice, eye-for-an-eye and slavery there to begin with. True, but there was nothing else available. Early modern humans who had to find a way to understand what was happening did the best they could, and produced the religions to represent their understanding of humanity and its relationship to consciousness, death and the material world. If you took away their religion, there wouldn't be a better alternative for them to default to. There wasn't a better law that came before. The state of humanity before was worse; humans were more lawless and cruel.

I'm an atheist but I can see that religion isn't just an evil monstrosity which humanity would be better off without. It's a part of human culture, a process through which humans consider their relationship to the cosmos and conceive of moral and legal principles which can elevate them above their failings as selfish and finite beings.