From talking to people, the remark that I usually get as to why people gravitate toward the Judeo-Christian God (or really any god) is that they can't fathom that there could ever be a reason that we'd exist without some overall purpose or meaning.
Well of course. People want there to be an explanation, they want life to have a meaning and they most assuredly want more than 80 years or so or life before turning into worm food, gone forever, completely forgotten. That explains why mankind invented gods in the first place, gods were an answer to the fears. Can't understand weather, get a rain god. Why do your neighbors have a hut full of kids and you can't have any? Get a fertility god. Crop failure and starvation a worry? Get a god of the harvest, etc etc etc. That's how early "pagan" multi-god religions began. As mankind got a little (and I mean a very tiny tiny tiny) bit smarter they abandoned the pantheons of gods devoted to one fear and replaced them with a single, all-purpose god who covered everything. That explains the move from the Norse, Greek, Egyptian religions to simpler Abrahamic religions.
And it's easy to explain why people drink the kool-aid. When you're young you believe whatever your parents tell you. If they say a giant feathered flying snake is the center of the universe, you believe them. And until recently, it was almost impossible to get away from being indoctrinated. Information was hard to come by. There was no internet, few libraries, education was sorely lacking and the information about how and where the major religions were invented was beyond the reach of most people. Your great-great grandparents were indoctrinated into their little cult as a child and never had a way to learn better. They passed it onto your great-grandparents as children and they kept if for life because they could not learn better. They indoctrinated your grandparents who could never learn the truth. They passed it onto your parents and they too just kept it for life. It's all perfectly reasonable for how people managed to be stupid for so long. If generation after generation is taught that things fall because of a giant green panda living in the center of the Earth sucking them down towards himself, it takes a special individual to come up with the idea of gravity and almost nobody would believe him even when the math gets proven beyond the shadow of a doubt.
But things are different now. We have science, we have history, we have, at least in the civilized world, easy access to information. We know where and when these religions were INVENTED. We know where they came from, we know how they spread and for the most part we even can trace the fairy tales backward. Almost none of the backstory of the Abrahamic religions is even original. It can all be traced back to earlier myths and folk lore, fairy tales told for generation after generation after generation before finally being written down and codified into a single belief system. The complete life story of Jesus is lifted pretty much word for word from other minor gods that had been worshipped in that region for centuries before the name of Jesus was dreamed up (and yes, it was dreamed up). The major books of the major religions are proven to be complete shit. Every word of the bible that explains the history of the world, the lineage of the people, the geography of the earth and heavens, etc, is wrong. 100% proven categorically wrong. Believing even a single word of the bible is akin to taking a science class on gravity and then willfully choosing to believe in the giant green panda instead. It's all bullshit. It's all proven to be bullshit. Even the origin of the bible is bullshit. The bible was passed like the US congress passes a farm subsidy bill. It's not the word of god, it's fairy tales that a bunch of goat herders sat down and bargained on what they would choose to believe and what they would try to pass off to their followers as being true.
"You give me the chapter on selling your enemies kids into slavery and I'll let you keep the part about the burning bush, deal?" "Deal!" Spit on the hands, shake and poof, that's how the word of god got into the book in the first place.
And none of that is a secret anymore. The origins of the myths are clear, the history of the beginnings of the religions are clear and prove that the stories are just that, old stories invented by men. So yeah, the
desire to believe in an all-powerful god is understandable, a person has to be monumentally and willfully stupid to actually do it in this day and age. The Abrahamic gods are no more real than the feathered snake or the green panda. That's why we atheists look down on the wannabelievers. It's not that they were hoodwinked by being indoctrinated into religion, that could happen to anyone. It's that they choose, they demand, they insist upon remaining stupid. They've got all the information about gravity at their fingertips and they purposefully ignore it so they can go on believing in the green panda instead.
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