To me it seems faith is not a fullfillment, but a wrapper to cloud reality. The urge to believe in something is there, but to me it seems to me that faith is a drug and we're born addicted to it.

Religion is to me a breeding ground for intolerance and violence and resisting it is a sign of personal strength.

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Belief brings hope and that's too cruel a thing for the human mind to bear.

Don't mind the terrible grammar, I have just awoken with a terrible hangover.

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Belief brings hope and that's too cruel a thing for the human mind to bear.

No points off for bad grammer.....hungover or not. . Yeah, that's the issues I've often had with faith in general. It's not as 'free' as one thinks it is. After all, most kids in a religious family are taught from day one to (and this is either/or) fear/love/feel loved their deities, so there's this ingrained foundation that's placed there rather artificially by the parents/community. Granted, there's the option that one can reject their chosen religion later in life, but it's usually after a great struggle of some inner dilemma one has with one's god. One has to discard their faith, as you've mentioned, almost like a junkie needs to go through withdrawal.

Frankly, if faith or the choice of was truly free, it would be offered to children as an option as an adult, not ingrained in their very psyche as children that see their parents as gods anyway.

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Input........I need input!

It is. Sorry for the lack of time/response, but the truth of life is that it's not something one owes to some god, it's a thing we're given . . . what we do with it isn't some acheivement or failure, it's just life. No prize comes at the end of it all, it's just how happy we are, and maybe how fulfilled we are. That's it. Like you said, we're bred to compete, simply because that's what life wants us to do . . . strive. Religion simply gives us an excuse to do things we shouldn't do, but because God gave us the permission, we can do it with sadness, but permission nonetheless. Rock on, my friend.

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Input........I need input!

I was risen with an agnostic attitude, which is not a bad start, I think. My parents like the concept of a god, but they do not think that any church is entitled to represent this deity. However as a teenager I started to think that if there is a god, things aught to be done properly and I went religious for a while.

However I spent too much time thinking and some night I applied logic to the whole thing. A crushing move to my faith. I figured that I was not willing considering gods inexistance (is that in- or un-existence one wonders, it's in- in German), because I am afraid of death. All that kept me believing was that I want to have an afterlife.
I consider the next thought an important step in my maturing, that the world is not a fairy tale bound to my wishes. Nearly everything I see around me can be explained without bringing god into the equation. And it is presumptuous to think that god is behind all the rest instead of just admitting that our minds are limited and we do not know all that is to be known.

The world in my opinion just works all by itself and we are just a chance existence. So why did we come into existence a lot of religious people ask me at this point and my answer is that everything that has the necessary intelligence to ask that question would probably do so and invent an answer that made them feel special.

I think I understand why people want to believe. Often I wish I believed in a deity to pray to. But to abandon reason just to feel a little better just doesn't feel right. And I still want to have an afterlife. But I don't think I or anyone else will have one, so we better make the best of this life.

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Belief brings hope and that's too cruel a thing for the human mind to bear.