"May God have mercy on you"

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That was in approximately 1500 BC or so. Times do change.

The fact that "times do change" precludes a "literal" interpretation of any religious work from having any credibility.

The "definition of God" is so individual.....that I don't believe it can ever really be precisely defined.

God (as in gods), to me, is an entity which was created because people wanted to account for the unaccountable.

I also see God(s) being created out of humanity's need for some sort of authority figure. I mean think about it, why else do we have kings and presidents or obey our parents?

We obey our parents because we, as kids, need help navigating the world. We need to be taught right from wrong. And taught right from wrong from a common sense, as well as a philosophical, perspective.

Not that parents always provide that help!

^Exactly. Gods are like a combination of parents and kings.

I'm not sure what I really believe though. I'm all confused about the great spiritual truth. Lol

I tried the whole wiccan thing but came to find out that they actually have different beliefs than me and some of them like to put others down too.

I believe in the notion that each individual person "has his/her own religion."

And I kind of believe that every religion has some truth to it. The rules that each religion lays down exists for a reason.

Like take the rules about eating pork in Judaism and Islam. It may seem silly to modern people who eat porkchops and ham sandwiches regularly, but pork was considered a very unclean animal and had diseases like Trichinosis which could make you very sick if you ate pork raw or undercooked. So maybe that rule was set in place to keep people from getting sick?

And then there's the whole marriage thing along with prostitution being highly frowned on. Deadly STDs like syphilus and hepititus are very real and one of the worst examples would be AIDS when it was spreading very fast. Keeping people in a monogamous relationship and punishing them for adultry or prostitution may have been an attempt to combat STDs from killing the human population back in the days before condoms and penicillin.

Atheists like to think that religion is about nothing but superstitous idiots killing each other for dominance but they never stop to think that there may actually be practical reasons for the seemingly cruel and archaic laws they laid in place a long time ago.

Yep. Absolutely. There were practical reasons for some of the practices of many religions which were relevant in their time, but not relevant today.

The rise of atheism could be taken as a success of science to provide us new rules that banish the things we fear, much like banning pork reduced disease so to does adherence to mathematical rules act to banish e.g. the collapse of a building through ineffective engineering. There was a time before when eating pork was banned and the reaction to the traumas suffered by disease caused us to create that rule, and there was a time before the collapse of a building caused much death (yurts don't really kill people when they collapse) but when that started to happen it created traumas which we reacted to by crafting detailed architectural design and construction rituals.

In a certain way you could see atheists to have their own gods whose principle deities are the names of the various branches of science and logic, and whose individual theories are minor deities. Much as the ancients had gods that were the personifications of various aspects of the world around them and whose narratives helped to organize the way those aspects worked. There is a certain sort of "lineage" of ideas encapsulated in the idea of intertextuality that seems a reasonable analogue to the notion of lineage present in pantheons of gods.

The scientific method could perhaps be seen as a mandate to abandon beliefs when they don't afford reliable and sufficient control over aspects of reality and craft new beliefs. All in the name of increasing our effectiveness in controlling for the things we fear and desire. And as the details of our desired control deepen so do the number and complexity of our theories.

In a way atheism could be the most domineering and controlling of all religions, never satisfied with the amount of control over reality it already has. Never satisfied with its current pantheon of theory-gods and the rituals they engender. Perhaps the views of its followers about other religions and notions of god(s) are a projection of their own shadow.

My problem with atheists is that they can be judgemental hypocrites just like those annoying religous fanatics. And many of them don't even bother to actually study science but they claim that not being religous automatically makes them a genius and makes everyone else stupid. Just look at that annoying hack Seth MacFarlane as the perfect example.