What's going on here? You guys seriously believe there's no purpose, charity or peace of mind without religion?

Also, it'd be fun if you guys can list all the benefits your religion has given you. It'd help others understand your viewpoint better.

You can derive all of this country's laws, for example, with a combination of respect for persons, utilitarianism, and kantian philosophy, among others, without the need for religion. Our constitution was based on ideas that arose from the enlightenment, eg right of the individual, the social contract, representative government, etc. I believe religion has been an overall net negative throughout history. It's simply an unnecessary construct.

As for peace of mind, well, if you need a creator and promise of an afterlife to have peace of mind, you simply have a weak mind.

What has God done for us?

....only everything

Which God? And this thread is about religion, not about God. Even if I accepted a creator existed, it wouldn't change my contention that religion has been a net negative.

...including Naziism, natural disasters and disease, I presume?

Unless by "everything" you mean "only the good stuff" excluding the evil that our omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator allows to survive for his omniunknowable reasons....

...ding...

Pletho is correct in that "religion" is man-made. I would add that it is also the opiate of the masses. One finds God first and foremost through His revealed truth, i.e. the Bible, not self-appointed quasi-political intermediaries (as helpful as they can sometimes be).

dcs, this thread is about religion, not god. There is an important distinction. Religion is a man-made historical evil and all around net negative.

Social cohesion, peace of mind, comfort in the face of adversity, plenty more.

The fact those things can exist without religion doesn't mean religion doesn't provide them. Also, religion is easier than science and philosophy (or whatever it is which provides you with those other things) so it's no surprise to me that it used to be far more necessary. Nothing to do with a weak mind, in my view - it just takes a certain level of education to derive secular meaning, without that there isn't any choice.

Religion has for example proven to be a great gap-filler. The ancient Greeks weren't able to explain thunder and lightening so they created the image of a god, namely Zeus, being responsible for this natural phenomenon. Almost every god in human history has in some sense been a god of the gaps.
The Christian god nowadays fills the gap of the uncertainty of how the universe came into existence. Many people are willing to accept god as an answer to their questions concerning truth. Therefore their minds are in some sense soothed and brought to peace.

This is one of the reasons why I disregard religion but that's another matter....

You're right, this is another matter entirely. Why did you decide to put it in this thread?

Pretty much. I think the other atheists would do well to acknowledge this. A lot of people really do think that religion provides their lives with meaning that couldn't be found without it.

So the cliffs are basically that religion makes people feel good?

Cool story bro.............

Well I'm probably not indicative, but I was also speaking historically as well as to people alive today. I think religion was also a first stab at understanding the world. I don't think it was easy for us to come up with the scientific method, rational analysis and the various schools of philosophy together with the inherent error checking that goes along with those. Religion may not be necessary now in order to provide meaning, social cohesion and answers to why the world is the way it is, however I think it used to be, prior to all that intellectual work. I don't think anyone here would have been an atheist were they born 5,000 years ago.

Personally, I think it's better to make a bad attempt to understand the world than to make none at all.

Why should we expect that the universe owes us a purpose or meaning to our existence? You need to consider the possibility that you may simply exist in the absence of those two, and that this seems likely given that no objective purpose is evident to life.

The simple fact that we want and seek out a purpose and meaning to our lives does not in any way imply that there is a purpose or meaning to our existence. We are not owed anything.

I think it's okay to question if we still need religion post Enlightenment, but I'm not sure Western Civilization would have found it's way out of the Dark Ages without the Church. Both scholasticism and universities are heirs of the Church, so it's a bit of conjecture to think there would have been an Enlightenment without religion and religious institutions.

I'm comfortable with the possibility that meaning is a purely subjective thing, with the universe having no objective purpose and life being one complicated but ultimately insignificant facet of how the laws of physics work. My point was that I (and I claim you and everyone else) are only able to accept such a view thanks to the intellectual work of the last thousand years or so. Prior to that we were too primitive and unsophisticated to overcome our love of teleological explanations.

Pretty buildings. That is all.

Even if we grant your claim, it wouldn't answer the question in any meaningful way.
"why'd you tear all the tiles off the roof and nail them across the opening? what good did that do for us?"
"to keep out the draft."
"couldn't you have just closed the door?"
"Come on, you're just quibbling you have to admit it stopped the draft."

Questions about "what has X done for us" imply "sole producer of effects, good or bad." or "that wasn't more easily attainable elsewhere, and/or without the excess cost/risk/damage".

whiskey works just as well and the witches just stumble into the wells without all the effort on our part.

First of all, this thread is not only about Christianity, which you seem to be referencing. Certainly some institutions owe their origins to the church. However, the church has stood in the way of a huge number of intellectual and scientific advancements throughout the last 2000 years. We are significantly behind where we would be today without the church's interference.

Many pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment philosophers were inspired to develop an understanding of the world through their religion (eg Descartes), but others did it apart from a religion perspective. Meanwhile, you had protestants and catholics bickering, people being thrown in jail for attending the wrong church, depending on their country, witch hunts and other nonsense derived from a book of fairy tails. The catholic church maintained itself as the only source of truth and all geo-centric and universal understanding required them. This is hardly the attitude of a useful institution. Many Enlightenment thinkers attacked the Catholic church specifically.

You had many prominent thinkers turning away from religion and towards a more universal deism (eg many of the most important founding fathers of the US) in large part due to its irresponsible obstinacy. You can point to a few useful things the church accomplished, but taken as a whole, I don't think there's much debate it's been a net negative on society from a secular point of view. If you think the church is necessary for your salvation, you undoubtedly believe it's a net positive regardless of the countless harm it's caused. However, the faith is useless to me and the secular world as a whole, especially when I think of what could have been accomplished without the interference of centuries of ignorant church leaders.

I think the point was, although religion may not exclusively provide some of the listed items, it does so at a relatively lower "cost" (in terms of intellectual commitment, strength of authority, etc). As a package deal, religion is a lot "clearer" than more intensive philosophies.

And also that 10,000 years ago we didnt have the intellectual sophistication to employ science/philosophy/rational analysis/etcetera. As I understood the initial question (not so much this thread but the progenitor thread) it was hypothesising not only that religion is unnecessary now, but that it always has been. In my view, we have only recently been able to overcome our teleological biases.

I don't think that implication holds. However if it does, amend my posts in this thread. The only thing it did in that context was give us a starting point (my contention is that we'd never have got science/philosophy without other, more primitive attempts to understand the world).

Oh absolutely. To even talk of "secular culture" before about 1700 is profoundly anachronistic.

I think religion has, and continues to be, a benefit for billions of people, and if religion were to suddenly disappear, it would be a really scary and dangerous place to live (I mean, how many times have you heard religious people claim that if there was no God they would go on a murderous raping rampage, or that there would be nothing to live for and would kill themselves? I really think a good percentage of them are serious)

That said, I believe *most* reasonable theists and atheists alike believe that a slow, but sure, death to organized religion can only be a good thing. It's something we are seeing already, and we can only hope the trend continues.

??? There have already been millions of people killed this century alone in the name of religion. As I said in my first post, you don't need religion as a morality base, and I refuse to believe modern society would collapse without their superstitions and fanciful mythologies. Religion has been a net negative taken as a whole throughout history. If you'd like to dispute that, then perhaps we can start competing lists of pros and cons, but I don't see how you could win.