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> Should we approach religion the same way we approach mythology.

Yes! Daniel Dennett takes this approach in Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

What is it about human brains that makes myths and religions attractive to us? Do they serve some important function? How did they arise? Could there be an evolutionary advantage to such beliefs?

(1) Stephen Hawking might have something interesting to say about that in his lecture The Beginning of Time.

First, you have to think of space and time as a unified field: spacetime. We know this is true because we can time someone moving at Mach 5 on their craft and on the ground, and the timers are out of sync due to time dilation. And because we experience time dilation, we know that relativistic effects on spacetime have a very real impact on causation.

Second, if you consider "pre-big-bang" to be a world in which causation exists, you can't really justify that. Because we see spacetime wrapped up in a singularity at the beginning of the universe, you're talking about events "before time", which is meaningless. There are no events before time, just like there are no phone calls before telephones.

Also, on that study, we've found isolated cultures who are atheistic as well, who recognize pantheons, who believe in animism (worship of spirits inhabiting everyday objects, especially in Japan), Dreamtime stories among Australian Aboriginals, a whole host of cultures that deny monotheism. Seeking justification for the "naturalness" of monotheism is actually a pretty common Orientalist trope, especially because work contradicting monotheism as "natural" is unlikely to be received well by a largely-religious establishment.

(2) Why would you ascribe thoughts and feelings to a means of causation? An earthquake is powerful, but that doesn't mean it has rage. Sunlight is powerful, but that doesn't mean it has sorrow. It's not uncommon to try to ascribe emotions to things we observe- some people believe that every object, event, and idea has its own spirit. You could ascribe a nature to something which could just as easily be inanimate, but it would be entirely your own doing.

(3) Watching someone defend something you believe in tends to be exciting. However, be careful not to fall into the bias of choice. Sometimes, we're cheering for our own side as much as we'd like to try not to.

(4) The inclusion of facts in a text does not make the whole text credible. Newton laid out significant facts about gravitation, but declared that "God causes gravity"- he was close, it was the God particle. Is Newton wrong? Partially yes, partially no.

Similarly, the Bible and the Qur'an declare "eating pork is forbidden". Some people claim that this is because of trichinosis, but most Jews and Arabs would cook their meat thoroughly anyway (or they'd get similar parasites from kashrut/halal meat.)

The real reason that they forbid pork consumption is that pork is delicious. There is a high demand for pork among the average person without dietary restrictions. And this is good- if you can raise pigs. They're actually quite clean as long as they're kept in conditions below 80˚F. Once you go over that, they start rolling in their own filth to keep cool, and die of heatstroke in the 90˚F range. If Jews and Arabs of ancient times were to raise pigs, most of them would die (loss of money for the farmer) and the ones that didn't would give horrible, disease ridden meat from the pig spending its summers rolling in its own excrement. This law saved a lot of resources up until about 1902 with the invention of the air conditioner. See http://www.amazon.com/Cows-Pigs-Wars-Witches-Riddles/dp/0679724680

(5) "Corruption" depends entirely on your own definition of "corrupt" messages. In Jesuism, they believe that the introduction of Pauline Epistles corrupted the entire Christian religion. Zoroastrians likely view every other religion as a corruption, since their tradition dates back almost an entire millenium before Judaism.

So what's the "standard"? If it's the one most people believe, then you're kind of harkening back to a Might Makes Right hypothesis- that the conquerors and the caliphs who won the wars get to make their religion the standard. The history of nearly every religion is a military history, including Christianity.

(6) Is a lot of stuff that makes it attractive to a person having a "spiritual crisis" to turn back into the arms of organized religion.

But here's my conclusion: If the ritual works for you, why not take part in it? If the belief helps you, then believe it.

However, if you find yourself suffering because you don't want to believe- if rather than a bitter pill, you're finding yourself drinking a sweet poison, don't be afraid to hold yourself to a high standard of proof. Do what you need to do to be satisfied that your beliefs stand the test. If you're tempted to blame yourself when they don't, consider the possibility that it's the beliefs themselves that are to blame, for being unable to mesh with modern facts.

If any prefer the physical edition and I have an explanation for the price differences from my blog.

Update: Due to popular feedback, I decided to make split versions of the ebook edition for anyone who found 2554 pages too daunting but are still interested in reading my book. In case any of you are still interested.

Part I Only.

Part II Only.

Explanation on pricing can be read here.

To me religions are an idea that has helped civilizations thrive through protection in numbers under the banner of that common idea(meme).
I cannot think of one society today that is not based on some sort of religious ethos and that has a remarkably strong way of banding people together and of even greater importance, the need to document ones idea.

Religion is one of the main influences and causes for art, music and language throughout our history and there is no denying its influence on us today no matter who you are.

I think there is a basic need for us to feel that there is a reason for us to belong to this super-organism that is the human race and religion is a very appealing idea to get behind, especially given the fact that they almost all offer passage to some sort of everlasting bliss and in most cases suffering or damnation to all non-believers. They also offer a social group that supports one another within the religious group that aids in their survival.

We have evolved enough now to develop these ideas into more complex ideals which has allowed the ideas or lack thereof behind atheism and other non-religions to flourish and to be documented for others to reference without fear of conviction for heresy. We now can oppose, study and/or question religious views without fear of persecution (although still not openly in some parts of the world). On the flip side this has also allowed mainstream religions to split into many variations of the same belief system some of them to the extreme.

I urge you to read The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore
http://www.amazon.com/The-Meme-Machine-Popular-Science/dp/019286212X/ref=pd_sim_b_1
or even the Lucifer Principle or The Global Brain by Howard Bloom are books that offer insights into this evolution of ideas.

Thank you for asking questions and not just blindly following doctrine.

http://www.sbts.edu/southern-project/

> Our relationship to African-Americans has been hindered from the beginning by the role that slavery played in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention; many of our Southern Baptist forbears defended the right to own slaves, and either participated in, supported, or acquiesced in the particularly inhumane nature of American slavery; and in later years Southern Baptists failed, in many cases, to support, and in some cases opposed, legitimate initiatives to secure the civil rights of African-Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention#Divisions_over_slavery

> Rather than challenging the gentry on slavery and urging manumission (as did the Quakers and Methodists), they began to interpret the Bible as supporting the practice of slavery and encouraged good paternalistic practices by slaveholders. They preached to slaves to accept their places and obey their masters.

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/13/676333342/southern-baptist-seminary-confronts-history-of-slaveholding-and-deep-racism

The full 72 page report can be found here

> The founding fathers of this school — all four of them — were deeply involved in slavery and deeply complicit in the defense of slavery," writes school President R. Albert Mohler Jr., in a letter accompanying the report. "Many of their successors on this faculty, throughout the period of Reconstruction and well into the 20th century, advocated the inferiority of African-Americans and openly embraced the ideology of the Lost Cause of southern slavery.


https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/jim-crow-civil-rights-and-southern-white-evangelicals-a-historians-forum-matthew-j-hall/

> white evangelicals—particularly those in the South—were deeply invested in efforts to either uphold Jim Crow or to try to slow down its dismantling... The unfortunate reality isn’t that evangelical theology in the South was muted when it came to racial justice, it’s that it was actively used to undermine justice and to perpetuate a demonic system. And that’s the cruelest historical irony of it all: those who loved the “old rugged cross” were often also those who torched crosses in protest of desegregation.

I highly recommend this book as an introduction to the history of american slavery.