How can we still follow mythology (RELIGION) when science and common sense has proven human origins?
407849
Beck, it's called blind faith.  Like these christians that keep sending money to 500 clubs so Jesus will help them.  Get real, get off your ars and do something about your problems already.  Or better yet, send ME your money and I will prayer for you.  These narrow-minded people also made a big deal out of Dan Brown's books.  It was a freaking novel.  It said so on the front cover.  \nI don't discuss religion or politic with friends and family because I want to keep my friends and family.  \nIf you want to believe in the Bible a book that was written 2000 years ago that's your problems.  You can't disprove something that happened 2000 years ago BUT you cannot prove it either.  Let's keep in mind there are older religions than Christianity.  All religions (except Buddhism) claimed that if you believe in something else other than _______ then you're going to hell.  If that's true, there are going to be a lot of freaking people in hell.  Okay, I'm done.
473054
In a sense, superstition is natural.  Gods and goddesses are fictional characters created by the human imagination. People have invented thousands of different deities throughout history - It's a common flaw in human nature, rather like the way we see optical illusions.\n\nScience has shown us that all biological life - including the human species - is the product of unthinking, undirected natural processes. As part of our evolutionary 'toolkit' of survival strategies, we have a highly developed awareness of other entities in our environment - We often notice human faces in carpet patterns, rabbit-shaped clouds and so on. There is more survival value in seeing what really *is* there, and also seeing some things that *aren't* really there, than in missing things that really are there and going hungry, or worse, ending up as someone else's lunch.\n\nThe consequence of this undeniably true aspect of human nature is that we have a natural tendency to imagine entities behind natural phenomena and events in our own lives that aren't really there - i.e. gods and goddesses, demons, angels, spirits - a whole menagerie of supernatural characters. Society and culture binds up these characters with our wishes and fears, our desires for dominance and submission and shared identity, and we end up with religious belief and ritual and dogma, in thousands of different flavours, with the vast majority of people broadly following the religion of their upbringing.\n\nReligion is a biological phenomenon, not a supernatural one.
793581
Yes - and no.\n\nReligion is a by-product of evolution. As we developed into thinking humans, our brains developed an interesting trait - it will beleive ANYTHING it is told if it is told so by a parent or an elder. This served a certain survival mechanism. When a child was told by its parent not to stray too close to the lion's den, the child did one of two things - he either listened and lived, or he didnt listen and ended up lion food. Those that survived passed on a good survival tool - listen to your elders...\nProblem is, your elders can also tell you things that arent so useful to survival. Such as "You must sacrifice a goat to the sun god to ensure it rains." Now, we all know this to be false, yet beleifs in deities still persist. \nThe reason for the persistence is because the human brain STILL listens and beleives what it is told by its elders. And nowadays, people have no respect for their parents - but they listen to their pastors. So the myths persist.\n\n\nSo you are corect in your assumption that religion is an evolutionary mechanism - but not for war. Thats just another by-product of religion as well.
746690
Excellent question.  It is my belief from the teachings I've received and have pondered growing up, that all knowledge or truth comes from God.  In that sense, science is an offshoot of God's knowledge that He has imparted to man.  Unfortunately, man does not have a perfect understanding of what God has revealed.  Therefore, we create the discrepancies between what He has revealed to us and what we make of that knowledge.  We should be able to learn about God and nature by studying both what God has revealed as well as what man has learned.  I believe that much of modern medicine has come from inspired doctors receiving knowledge as they have sought it and needed it.  When we return to His presence, we will see that it all fits together.
523246
Using same method that we do to learn.\nAncient people are not stupid, they are not like Medieval Age Europeans. \nThey did observations and with little bit of method, they increase their responses and arrive until a good method. We are talking about something near to 3.000 years of evolution. With method and respect for the science. (Thoth) Religions works helping science and not against it. \n\nModern world has less than 2.000 (once dark ages kill all practical knowledge about science and everything else).
1166369
Knowledgeable people are well aware that Genesis 1 through 11 is NOT scientific or historical but largely mythical, metaphorical, poetic, theological, and moral. All people are not knowledgeable, however. Recent Gallup surveys reveal that 50 percent of adult Americans believe that Adam and Eve existed, 44 percent believe the earth was created directly by God only ten thousand years ago, and 40 percent believe that the Bible is inerrant. No doubt an equally high percentage believe in Noah's ark.
12062
In adventures and religious myths everything is possible. Don't try to give rational reasons for it. Many things could have inspired the storytellers: metheors, comets etc.
19380
Wikipedia is a very good start for this. This page summarizes the beliefs behind many different creation myths. It is sorted by culture / ethnic group / religion and provides external sourcing.
1112161
FYI I'm a Christian...if you read any history at all, religion has been around since humans became in existence.  Every culture discovered by archeologist's has had some form of a God.  From the ancient Aztecs, ancient Egyptians, and the Mesopotamians. The Majority of humans on this earth (87%) believe in one God or another...their "religion".  It is only the Atheist who do not believe in any power greater than themselves.  Pretty weird.
46320
According to the theory of evolution, which is strongly supported scientifically, we are not decended from apes, monkeys or chimpanzees.  We do, however, share a common ancestor with them.  Humans evolved from that common ancestor to become what we are today, and the others evolved to become what they are today.  However, there are other viewpoints on this matter, which, though not scientifically supported, are in wide belief in many cultures.  These ideas are based on religious belief systems. These belief systems contend that humans have NOT evolved, and were created just as we are today by a diety or dieties.  Whether this is true or not, is a source of much debate.
17751
If God is a myth then he cannot be from any planet since mythical characters by definition are not real.\n\nIf "in ancient myth" is removed from the question the answer is yes, if he exists, unless you believe God originates on this planet, which would seem to contradict most if not all deistic beliefs.\n\nMy point is that really, almost all conceptions of God are that he does not originate on earth, is therefore "from another planet", and thus an alien. The next question is, "are we aliens too?"
811447
Religion doesn't change. It stays in its ancient mindset regardless of how the world around it changes.
393420
Gods are creatures of myths, but most ancient cultures had some form of higher being looking over them. So gods are common conceptions.\n\nHowever, mythology is usually based on older civilizations, so if it's a modern day Deity it is considered religion or urban legend, as opposed to a myth.
515279
*laugh* I'm sorry, but this struck me as funny. I'm not sure if you're serious or not. But try http://www.beliefnet.com, maybe the Belief-O-Matic (First link on the top left) will give you a starting point. \n\nYou don't have to travel. The Gods are everywhere and in all of us. It is simply up to each person to select which one(s) to pay homage to, or not.
332031
The bible is based entirely on mythology.\n\nConstantine's version of "Christianity" is mostly pagan and adapted from his childhood & lifelong religion, Mithraism.\n\nConstantine invented his universal pagan religion, that included Hebrews' religion, in an attempt to end violence inspired by the different religious factions that existed throughout the Roman Empire.\n\nIt worked for a quite a while until protestants were invented.
785053
And how are you any different from us? Do you have access to information that did not come from mortal men? And what might that information be?\n\nTry this hypothesis on for size: the Bible is just a book, written by mortal men, who lived at a time when written language was only recently acquired. Their culture was still based in oral tradition. The books they wrote that became the books of the Bible were just those oral traditions. The God of Abraham is just a very successful camp fire story. The Bible is a collection of myths.\n\nNow consider your theistic hypothesis. The God of the Hebrew Bible is the real God who created the universe, as described in Genesis. Every word of the Bible is his word.\n\nFinally, consider the evidence you have directly available to you, aided by all knowledge that mankind has been able to accumulate by working together, making observations about the natural world, creating hypotheses to explain those observations, creating experiments to test those hypotheses, and publishing their results so that other people can independently verify their results.\n\nYour task is to take the two hypotheses above (the Bible is myth vs. the Bible is the true word of a real God) and see which hypothesis makes more sense.\n\nI was raised Christian. I've studied religion, and I've studied many branches of science.  To me, the Bible is myth hypothesis is much more consistent with the evidence.
421998
The adherents of Darwin's principle of evolution say Yes, those that believe in creation by God say No, but common sense teaches that we are human being and we never change from anything or to anything. Man is unique in nature and has always remain man since existence. Also since we have not been able to identify any being that has changed to another since men have been keeping records (apart from process of metamorphosis)my conclusion is "Man did not descend from apes"