Do people have religion for hope?

[BlAzInIt4:20]

Why does it seem to have hope or any kind of guidence in life you need to be religious in some way. Why can't i jsut be me and be one with the world without people dogging on me about going to church, and saying my prayers.

I do not believe that a man created this world. I do not believe we are the only ones in this world. I do not have faith in god.

I beleive in faith for life and love. I beleive in faith for forgiving.

To be happy in life it starts with you and only you.. why do so many think it's the religion that makes you...:wtf:

[Oneironaut]

Because they're religious, and they honestly think it's the religion that made them. They think, like hundreds of generations before them, that their God infuses the world with meaning and morality. They can't comprehend the idea that meaning and morality can exist without an invisible magic man to put them there. The people who invented the idea of God had no knowledge of evolution, psychology, sociology, advanced moral philosophy, or epistemology. You can't blame them for not knowing better. It was an easy explanation for a complex issue that they couldn't have possibly understood. Unfortunately, the wealth of human knowledge has not caught up with the lay public, who still prefer to explain things with simplistic mythologies than hard-to-understand but well-supported science.

Of course, meaning and morality are human concepts that exist only in our own heads. They don't exist out there somewhere in some objective, ethereal form to be absorbed by certain righteous individuals. They are thoughts in our heads formed by our beliefs, our experiences and our brain structures. That doesn't make them any less real or any less valid. Contrary to the claims of the religious, an atheist can find meaning and morality without the help of religion.

In fact, I think I have significantly more freedom in deciding what is meaningful or moral. I don't need to rely on a priest or a holy text to tell me that. I know that my life is inherently meaningless, in the sense that the universe has not attributed to me some meaning that I had no choice in deciding. The only meaning my life has is the meaning I decide for myself. It's the greatest freedom the universe has to offer.

To me, that's real hope. Hope that can actually make a difference. If you're hoping for something inane, like Jesus coming down and solving all the world's problems, or Allah coming down to answer your prayer not to die of cancer, you're screwed. That's not going to happen. Real hope comes from realizing one's place in the world, coming to terms with it, and moving forward with all one's might, not from persisting in childish delusions that some cosmic father figure is going to clean up your problems for you.