Because religion provides comfort, community and a meaning to people’s existence that goes beyond “we were born of chance on an insignificant rock somewhere in the universe”.
(I’m not religious BTW)
It also exists to control people, and it still works.
Organised religion is always about power and money.
Both talking about capitalism here, right ?
Existence is meaningless and we just wobble around here for a little while and then we die. There’s nothing to it. Everything that happens is just a logical consequence; beauty is nothing but a tiny chemical reaction in your brain. Once you rot it’s all worthless.
Science is great at giving explanations, but not so good at providing meaning. For a lot of people, meaning is probably more helpful in order to facilitate a happy life.
Nietzsche writes at length about this stuff, most famously in the anecdote about the madman coming down from the mountain to inform the villagers that God is dead and that we have killed him. Everybody knows the three words “God is dead”, but I think it’s worth reading at length:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
Nietzsche, whose father was a priest, recognizes that “God has become unbelievable”, but he does not celebrate it as the progress of science. Rather, we lost something that was fundamentally important to humans, and which science cannot easily replace.
Here one could start talking about the Free Masons, who attempted learning from religious rituals without the added layer of religion. Or one could dig deeper into the works of Nietzsche, and the contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian. It’s all fascinating stuff.
In short though, spirituality used to offer people a sense of meaning that is not so easily replaced by science alone. How do we bury our dead now that we know our rituals are pointless?
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”-Voltaire
Childhood indoctrination is a big part of it. I have been told by my 8-year old niece that she’d like to save me from drowning in a lake of fire. She was genuinely scared for me. It’s literal child abuse followed by Stockholm syndrome.
Religion has certain self-reinforcing properties. Kind of like genes that make it more likely to propagate against other forms of information.
- Believing without question is better than questioning
- Not believing will be punished
- Virtue will be rewarded
- Spreading the belief is a virtue
- You should obey your parents
Combine that with young human brains being malleable, and religion tends to continue against all odds.
Have you heard of the fireplace delusion? Burning wood is horrible for our health and the environment, but most of us have fond memories of sitting by a fire. Religion is the same. Holiday traditions with family, organized events marking important life events, it’s hard to break away.
Because recent AI and cloud development proves that genesis was right, god trained multi model transformer neutral network to simulate earth in 6 days on the cloud. God (the lead developer and co-owner of company) created earth branch and he was working in agile environment because the tasks are clearly explained in the genesis book sprint with day numbers so everything was estimated during planning.
At the end of sprint god deployed earth to development environment to test if everything works ok so he can continue with his changes next week. Adam and Eve were naked subprocesses without firewall and edge case errors but it was fine because whole thing was just a draft PR and god wanted to see what happens during weekend.
When god went home for weekend from now on everything got fucked up, eden was unstable and satan junior developer and son of co-owner uncle was on hot call during weekend. On Sunday satan was having barbecue and got a call that he need to redeploy eden. He was so drunk that not only he deployed god’s branch to production but also he merged this branch into main tree. Unfortunately the Snake was online that day, he broke into eden and changed all the code on main branch introducing many errors and exploits, stole all the data from gods company.
When god got back on monday he god fucking mad. He said fuck you satan from now on you will be working on earth alone despite you don’t know programming at all I can’t fire you because me and your uncle are best friends. What I will do I will push main with earth into dev and let you fix it and I will rollback eden to where it was. Untill all the bugs from earth branch are resolved don’t fucking dare to make a single voice about merging earth into production branch.
So here we are satan knows nothing about programming so he causes more evil than good to this day. Couple thousands earth years later god’s kid went into intership for couple of months and tried to fix earth branch but fucking exploits grow so big they manipulated humans and killed his fix patch, now we wait until he finish his masters and come back to fix all the bugs.
Once per day god runs Holy Spirit CI/CD that automatically merges eden into earth and validates if earth passes all eden unit tests if it’s not it rolls back and marks all people that pass the tests on green and all those are not to red. That fucking simple because dev development cloud have unlimited computing power.
Recent studies in AI shows that merge with eden will happen sooner than later despite all the errors because Jesus said that when he will be back all dead will come back to life and now you need only couple pictures, couple seconds of voice and chat history to clone anyone and deploy this person to cloud (see AI Girlfriend) without their constent. Probably what will happend is that all the people will be put in freeze ( there was test freeze during covid - no get out from home rule) so all of us can be patched when we are in front of computers. So we’re waiting for those patches and we can go back to eden.
If you don’t believe me go work as a developer for a year
