Religion

[Rookie (Isaac)]

Yeah, if you blindly follow atheism because you're an "intellectual" and put everyone else down because they don't believe what you do, aren't you the exact same as the people you claim to be against?

Personally, I don't have a belief in any gods but I have a lot of experience with people who do. I plan on working in care and one of the core principles of that is respecting others and their beliefs, this isn't something that's hard to do unless you are honestly looking for conflict.

If you focus on the individual level of religious beliefs you'll find that most people who follow religion are very moral and kind to everyone. However, I'm also a sociology student and religion on a national or international level can easily be seen as a agent of socialisation and control. Looking at religion from a historical point of view you can see examples of this, such as small towns and villages in Europe which were likely to have one priest or vicar, this man would be highly respected in the community but would also be one of the few men that was literate and could read Latin, this meant he would be able to read the bible. The priest could "read" anything and say it was from the bible, no one could tell any different as translating the bible from Latin was strictly forbidden, this lead to the priest having almost total control over the community as they truly believed in God - there was no alternative to them.

You can see from this perspective how religion can be used to control the masses, however, religion also lead to extremely moral societies with values around sharing and goodwill. I really recommend staying away from the "is god real" argument and instead focus on the effects religion has had on the world - some positive and some negative.