This post is inspired by the "official RRS defeats the way of the master" thread.

I started to think about how religion is faith based and what would happen if they didn't have their "documents" to prove the existence of their god.

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Here is the interesting thing about all people who believe in religion and the debate with Ray Comfort proves it.

They are all faith based, meaning that every thing they have is based on the bible, the qua ran or the torah (and I know the torah is only part of the jewish documents), but with out these documents, what do the have? Nothing.

Let's wipe the slate clean for a little experiment.

If there were no religious documents to give people of faith their foundation for the belief in a god how would they communicate to each other their belief? Let's say they all got together for the very first time at a conference for people of faith. What would they most likely do?

Most likely they would write every thing down so they could share it and store it. They would want to share their "experiences" with others. Some people would say "I saw god in a burning cat who spoke to me" and another would say "God came to me in a dream" or maybe "an angel came before me and told me I would get pregnant".

OK. Well, what happens today if some one says all these things? They will be thought of being crazy right? No one, well, maybe a really small number of people might believe them.

The next item which would come about during this conference was that they would eliminate "experiences" which didn't jive with every one else. This is like UFO experiences where people think they have been kidnapped and experimented on by aliens. Some people would say the "The alien was called a Gorn and they were lizards" but then another person would say "I met a Gorn also but they were a dog". So you have 10 people who say "I like the lizard Gorn" or "I also had that experience", so they exclude the "dog Gorn".

The person who experienced the Gorn who was a dog feels shunned so they leave the conference and start their own conference trying to get people to support their belief.

As the conference builds up their documents, they make refinements to it; they change a few things here and there to make it less scary and to make it more family friendly. Eventually you end up with a book of the collected documents and they present it to the world. They send people out to knock on doors and tell people the "good news" about how they now have all the answers for why the oceans have high and low tides or why the sun rises in the east or sets in the west".

While all this is going on, over decades, you have two other events happening. You have people who are scientists who study their environment. They figure things out and they rationalize math formulas and build new technology. Then you have people who are breaking off from the original conference because they had a fight with the leaders or they don't like the direction the conference is taking.

So now you have Gorn dog believers, Gorn lizard believers, Gorn cow believers, Gorn worm believers and scientists.

The scientists are saying, well who has seen a Gorn dog or Gorn worm? Can we test them? Observe them?

The believers say "no, the people who started this whole thing are dead and we only have their documents to follow".

The scientists say, "well with nothing to test it isn't real. it's only faith".

The people who believe in the Gorn worms (or what ever) say, "You can't disprove our religion because our Gorn is untestable. It doesn't follow the laws of this dimension. It is beyond your ability to rationalize or understand.".

Eventually Gorn followers get elected in to office and the become leaders of the nations and they start wars because one Gorn religion is threatening them or because the other Gorn religion has more resources.

Scientists are still trying to create new technology but when they talk to the Gorn followers the scientists are told that if they don't get in line with their "policies" they they will cut of funding for their experiments.

<blah blah blah>

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So... does this sort of sound like what happened with the human race? Isn't this the truth about how religion got started? All because some people, a really really long time ago, believed that supernatural forces had powers which they couldn't understand and eventually it was warped in to this mythological packaged pill which people seem to swallow because they can't understand what the world would be like if they had to actually face the reality?