Well if we didnt have religion, then there would be less manipulated people and less wars. If you read a bit of history, you will find out that the main purpose of many religions were to control and manipulate people, just like if it was a form of government. I do have to add that religion besides controlling, has also helped some people so I am really not against it entirely.

t's hard from my perspective to imagine a world where morals and ethics could be mandated by anything but religion - at least in society's evolution. Belief of divine justice and retribution kept a lot of society together throughout the ages. Medieval Europe would have turned out very different without the Catholic Church, and our own history is tied intrinsicly with religion and theology.

A lot of the ethics and morals that keep the western world's justice system intact stem from Abrahamic faith (Christianity / Islam / Judaism), and it's difficult to picture what the impact of removing these three faiths (alone!) would do to the world.

Having said this, there's a lot of problems stemming from religion. Because of the increasing chasm growing between beliefs, it's hard to work out whether religion is doing more harm than good.

It's human nature to keep those nagging thoughts of reasonable doubt in thier head. In a world where people can't even agree whether the moonlanding happened or not, people can't work out whether creationism or darwinism is the more likely candidate. In a world where we can't even agree what the right thing to do about Iraq is, we have millions of people from different faiths telling us, in complete certainty, what the right thing MUST be when it comes to this situation.

I don't think the world is ready for removing religion. Too much is still connected to it - particularily politics. I'm also pretty sure we'll never be able to give belief up. I've also got into arguments with people about this connection to human nature. My argument, that if the entirity of universal knowledge was placed into everyone's head at the same time it would cause world chaos as people came to terms with the completeness of existance (and the lack or proof of a diety existing), is shot down by people who claim that belief still holds sway and that people would still be able to disbelieve certain parts of univeral knowledge even with no doubt of the credibility of the source.

I did not vote as I did not find the option I wanted

My honest opinion is that religion is not the villain but the human is the reason for all the destruction that has been caused.

We tend to forget that when religion was born, it was born to help not be the reason for war or terrorism. The people who make religion the scapegoat are not fighting for the religion but are merely fussing because their ego does not agree with some thing another person does.

If we look at all of the religions in the world, none of them "actually" encourage murder or so on. Yes, there are some religions that have sickening beliefs but we cannot judge them as the beliefs were written centuries ago when people were still raw in their thinking

If Religion is treated like a coin with 2 faces "black" and "white". One face clearly tells you that the world would be really beautiful and peaceful without it but the other face would remind you how uncultured , ignorant, lost and mainly individualistic we would be without it.

But if Religion is treated like a weapon then you are already seeing the result, people who proclaim that "their" race is better are already letting us know that they are ignorant about their religion for all religions ask us to be "humble"

The time when Religion started turning ugly was when people started thinking that religion was for their disposal.

I mean come on.. Same caste marriages, my race is better than yours, God Demands we do it, We'll get virgins if we die as martyrs.. Who will disagree that they were designed for a particular period or was being done for man's own selfish reasons..... Not aimed at any one as this is only my opinion.

But if people focused on helping each other rather blowing up the brains of a supposedly "retard" I think we could do better...

When I say retard, I mean the expression we use so loosely to describe people who are supposed to be dumber than the smart jock ...

Hopefully I made some sense in this topic