Religion has been part of society since the days of pre-human hominids. It does not exist solely because of belief. I am willing to bet that few Greeks literall

Religion has been part of society since the days of pre-human hominids. It does not exist solely because of belief. I am willing to bet that few Greeks literally believed that a god carried the sun across the sky in a chariot. Rather, religion fulfills many cultural and social functions that our increasingly secular world has not yet found good substitutes for. I went to church on Christmas to hear some carols, and I was struck by the fact that I was actually surrounded by people from different age groups and with different life experience from myself. The younger folk helped out the old when they got sick, and the older folk helped the people with little children when they needed a sitter. This kind of social cohesion doesn't exist in secular society, where I spend 99% of my time surrounded by people within a five-year age interval. If you want to explain the frequency of religious belief, you would be wise to look more towards the social functions that it fulfills, and less at its intellectual arguments. There was an interesting post on here the other day, which was dead-ed, about this very topic. See here: http://commentlog.org/bid/4527/Myth-and-Cult-How-atheists-misunderstand-religion http://commentlog.org/bid/4527/Myth-and-Cult-How-atheists-mi...