I was born and raised in a Pentecostal church and have heard people “speak in tounges” and “prophecy” my whole short life. Speaking in tounges in my opinions is just gibberish and anybody can do it while propheycing is not someone actually saying a prophecy but a person saying out loud what God had spoken to them. It is sometimes a promise like God would send healing to someone in the place, or that God is in this place and will send the holy spirit down. I for the longest time have been adamant on the point that God was speaking to them during the meeting but now just believe they convince themselves it’s God when it’s just themselves.
The first reason why I don’t believe in religion anymore is when I learned that different races have vastly different iqs and athletic abilities. Thus indicating that they are at different stages of some type of evolution. Why would god make some peoples less human and others more, if religion is a human concept which needs human thought and clarity to follow. It makes literally zero sense.
Another reason is that some people are born as inherently non religious. Psychopaths are literally hardwired to be evil while others are literally born without the cognitive abilities to understand anything about religion.
Another reason is that religions influences on the world is insignificantly small. The Jewish god literally started out as a tribal war god who claimed that his people would be an example to all the world. Even if the Israelites were able to conquer the whole western world. Millions of people still wouldn’t have even heard about heard or even cared about the Hebrew God. Christianity has also been around for 2,000 years and millions still haven’t heard about it. It wasn’t even close to being the worlds biggest religion for many of those years. Meanwhile the god up there has also let religions such as Islam which deny claims central to Christianity to gain at times even more followers than Christianity. Why would God allow religions which literally claim the central points of Christianity to be false to become that widespread? It literally makes zero sense.
I sometime ago read on here about how an Italian translator interpreted the Bible saying that humans were a creation of life from an alien species which lived for 1000s of years. Some of these aliens led different people groups and became known as Gods. I honestly believe this theory because it makes sense how the localized actions of the Israelites were driven by an alien and not an omnipresent God. If anybody can link me to articles about this theory, please do.
Many have used religion for selfish purposes. People have done the same with Science and yet it dies not cause an existential crises, why? People are selfish which is self limiting. The only way we accomplish more is by collectively learning to overcome this limitation. This is why Christianity is uniquely equipped. Is it a tool, yes. But it's more than that and you have the opportunity to experience that. So if we acknowledge that it's useful, what's to stop us from receiving that benefit?
Religion does have benefits and fulfills a need in man of solving our existential crisis and also enables us to become productive by following its principles. Selfishness is still there, but takes form in people in the church. Pastors care about money and there lavish lifestyles while believers and members form cliques inside the church instead of outside it. People only start caring about people inside of the church and cut off people that aren’t apart of it.
The premise that if you don’t follow its principles, you will go to hell is simply false though because religion itself is false. You also don’t need to be religious to follow these principles.
Religion still causes an us vs them mentality and causes problems such as suicide, wars, family problems, and broken friendships,
There are both positives and negatives to it, and either way, religion is false and you don’t need to be religious to follow a religions principles.