Religion

Heritage

When I was a kid I knew only one religion - the one of my parents. Because I was born in country which is religiously uniform, whole my childhood I believed there was only one religion and one god. I liked to read bible. I treated it as a history or adventure book. Jesus Christ was like a hero for me - with his super powers he was like Superman or Spiderman for kids today. God itself was for me wise old man with appearance similar to Santa Claus.

Doubts

Later, after few years of education, when my knowledge about world was increasing, I noticed that religion is in contradiction to science. The Bible is full of paranormal events, that can't be explained by science. My first suspicions were raised by The Book of Genesis and creation of the world and woman. Even with my primary education I knew enough to be sure it couldn't happened. I also found out that there were more religions - so I realized that it was a pure coincidence that I was brought up as a catholic. In other country I would be a child of other god!

Reasons

I can imagine that people invented God because they had to explain things that they couldn't explain in a rational way. It makes totally sense. At the beginning we used our whole knowledge which was derived from observations of other people and animals. So we created human-like gods who were responsible for all good and bad things. An interesting thing is how given religion or ideology gains new followers. Even nowadays, in Silicon Era new religions are created (like Scientology) and people still believe in complete nonsense and take it without any proof. Probably people need to belong to some group or community to feel some kind of support and understanding from other people.

Science, bitch!

Now, when we have enough knowledge and this knowledge is constantly growing, we can explain things ourselves, Science is the only way to get reliable answers. We see its proofs in everyday life.
It's distributed and verified every day, so it can't be faked by any evil scientist. We could go a little bit further and imagine that we create new form of life in the future. Then we will be gods for them. Will we ask them to pray and make churches for us?

but...

Beside all of absurdity of all religions, there are still some positive consequences of having them. As a codex with rules that should be respected by believers, it imposes some ethical norms. Bible is transforming very slowly so those rules are quite conservative. Which can be a good thing as evolutionary way of changing things is more predictable than revolutionary way. Some completely new secular law can make more damage to people than religious law used by hundreds of generations.