How Should One View Religion?

Contrary to the claims of many prominent atheists, there is incontrovertible evidence to the utility of religion. Religion acts as a framework to bring people together to follow some set of shared rituals and dogmatic beliefs. Many often, religions dwells in proving the veracity of its practices and customs. It is not uncommon to see clergy quoting verses from their respective holy books to prove that religion invented scientific truths much before modern science. This is at the best folly. Humans encounter unknowns everywhere. He doesn’t have answer to the ultimate philosophical questions. He need a solace, a comforting shelter to take refuge in. He is not courageous to toy with the idea that there are unknowns and must be comfortable to live with unknowns. He merely attribute the unknowns to The Supreme Almighty and be comfortable in the idea that he is a merely a subject of The Almighty. He invents new practices to please The Almighty. That’s how religion, in a nutshell is, has originated.
But the advent of technological revolution poses insurmountable challenges to the ardent believers. A single person with all the available information in this world at his fingertips, can simply challenge the presence of The Almighty and the institution of religion itself, for which the religiously enlightened clergies struggle to answer. A scientifically curious and technical mind still can engage in the dogmatic practises, but it is the spirituality that is in works. An extremely religious person disregards every other knowledge available to man and tries to subsume every progress in any walks of human activity into the supremacy of principles of his fundamental religious tenets. For eg, a fundamental Orthodox Christian believer believes in every word ever uttered and written by early church saints. He regards their teachings as sacrosanct and cannot question, ridicule or defile his saints. He goes on to defend his belief systems from other apocryphal church doctrines like Catholicism or Protestants. Yet he cannot comprehend more modern philosophers Bertrand Russel, Kant, Spinoza, Descartes, Adam Smith, etc. Intelligence of a person manifests in his ability to think critically. Thinking critical is logical in nature. How one subsume and integrate new information into a generally accepted rule framework and produce new knowledgeable statements, is clearly the hallmark of being intelligent. Thinking in first principles is something that has to be painstakingly acquired by engaging oneself in situations, where one endures losses, should he not think critically.

Any philosophy that came into prominence before scientific revolution, age of reason and renaissance must be taken with a pinch of salt. It shouldn’t be treated as indelible truths. Jesus converts water to wine. water is hydrogen and oxygen. where did carbon in wine come from? You need nuclear fusion level processes to make new atoms. Treat that account of miracle as a mere parable.