What is religion?

Religion is totally subjective; it has no objective reality at all.

Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.

Black Elk

Religion is a defense against the experience of God.

Carl Jung

Religion is essentially just a belief in something out there which rules over your being and subjugates you at its pleasure. It can also offer you peace and comfort if you so desire.

And now a musical interlude from R.E.M.

I prefer to leave it up to the religious to define it. They made it up, so it's theirs to define and name.

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

Joseph Campbell

George defined it pretty well here, "Religion is what is done about belief, a set of formal beliefs and practices. "

Yes. Reread the first post.

As Bugs Bunny said, "If it's the captain's mess, let him clean it up."

Convenient.

What does that mean, convenient?
The problem occurs when religions turn their myths into facts with an objective reality. A totally corrupt religion 100%. The same thing happens to science when they lose their objectivity.
Religion must remains 100% a subjective experience, and science must remain objective.

That's what made Einstein great. Totally subjective religious experience combined with totally objective science.

An outdated attempt to give explanations for things we didn't understand.

Take for example all the six hundred plus laws in the Torah. A huge majority of them are related to disease prevention but they didn't know this. What they did was observe people do or not do something which resulted in an illness or even death then assumed it was the wrath of their god which caused the person to get sick or die. So then they recorded it as a law to obey or face the judgement of a god.

People still to this day believe natural disasters are the wrath result of their god as a means to punish people. But if you deeply explore these events you'll see that there is a cycle to them or natural elements which cause them to arise. Like hurricanes. We don't get them on the west coast of the US, but every year there are dozens that start off the west coast of Africa and work their way North West towards the Eastern seaboard. Some develop into massive storms and others fizzle out. But they are a annual cycle.

Same for tornados. They don't develop everywhere. There are only certain locations they can form.

Same for Earth quakes. There are places where none occur.

If god was involved surely there wouldn't be naturally specific locations for ONLY them to occur under. They would appear everywhere with zero natural causes.

Ignorance of knowledge leads to supertitious explanations.

Religious myths are metaphors and are not meant to be taken literally as facts. Myths are meant to explain inner experiences. We all know what happens to religions when the myths are interpreted as facts.

The following is from Joseph Campbell.

"So half the people in the world are religious people who think that their metaphors are facts. Those are what we call theists. The other half are people who know that the metaphors are not facts. And so, they're lies. Those are the atheists."
Joseph Campbell

Historically​, religion has been about control and explaining the unexplainable. I think now it's primary function serves as a "feel food" tool, at least here in the states.

As a disclaimer, I do believe in God and the coexistence of evolution and creation.

I know you guys like your food (sic) in the US but I didn't realise it had become an aspect of religion.

Ugh, stricken by the autocorrect!

Should read "feel good".

Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.

Alan W. Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

The mystics of any religion share the common bond of all religions: time is the mirror of the eternal.