Another copy and paste job. It's so much easier to quote other people than write stuff myself.

The rest of this post is a copy and paste job. It was written at another website by somebody with the internet name "John". Many thanks to John for this excellent explanation for the god disease.

Here's how the mental disease known as religion works:

1. People are afraid to die: they exist but don't want to not exist. That's natural.

2. Charlatan come along who can profit from this fear. These are so called "religious leaders" like priests, rabbis, shamans and other con artists who know they can make a living from people's natural fears so they do all they can to increase those fears and other worthless emotions like "hope" and "faith." Science and the scientific method is the exact opposite of what these charlatans are selling.

3. In order for the newly "converted" to prop up the illusions that the religious charlatans have sold them, they desperately need to surround themselves with like minded believers. Of course this includes their own children. They are helped in this by children's natural desire to believe what their parents tell them. This allows adults to make themselves feel better and numb themselves to reality by programming their children with their own beliefs sold to them by the con men and charlatans.

4. Fear is one of the best emotions for con men and self-deluding parents to sell others with, so they tell their children they'll go to hell if they don't believe the same lies they believe.

No one is born a Christian or a Muslim or any other brand of cult. It has to be programmed into us by liars and those trying to delude themselves into thinking they'll live forever against all the evidence.

Religion is based on cowardice: it's putting fear and emotionalism ahead of the evidence. Why should anyone believe what iron age illiterate nomads thought about how the universe works? We don't still believe them about the Earth being flat, or rain being caused by sacrificing children... so why should we believe their other failed ideas?

Religious people are simply afraid of death and they'll go to any length to delude themselves into believing that they don't actually have to die. To make sure the illusion stays in tact, they must delude their children into believing this same nonsense. It's a very emotional thing: to question their beliefs is a threat to this illusion so they'll go to almost any length to defend the illusions they've bought into.

All the evidence we have suggests that we are like all the other animals which in turn are like all living things which in turn are like all things: We all obey mechanistic laws which govern the natural world. There's no evidence that this isn't true. You "go" the same place when you die as where you "were" before you were conceived in your mother's womb... the same place your spreadsheet goes when you don't save it ... it simply does not exist.

No scientist anywhere has ever found even the slightest shred of evidence that anything in this universe does not obey mechanistic laws. No one has ever recorded any evidence of a god, or a soul, or a ghost or any so-called "supernatural" phenomena.

This is a mechanical universe. It's time we put down the fairy tales that we use to prop up our self delusions which we use to make us feel better and start telling our children the truth.