Originally posted by @apathist
I appreciate that you are not a casual thinker. But.
There are other ways to weight a keelboat. Have you wondered, why religion? Why, throughout history and even before and across virtually all cultures - why gods?
It is difficult for humans to accept that life is meaningless and that the universe is really nothing but sub-atomic particles jittering. Humans have an abiding need to believe that life makes sense or has some purpose. Humans have from time immemorial read 'omens' and 'signs' into natural events, thus giving events a meaning or purpose. E.g., a plague is punishment for man's sins, etc. But if humans were fully conscious that such a meaning had merely been projected into events by themselves, then the events wouldn't really have the meaning, only the humans would. This is what Lichtenberg called "transcendental ventriloquism."
So, why religion? For man to
really believe that events really have meaning and purpose, man must believe that not man has read meaning into events — man must believe that events really have meaning
in themselves. However, humans can scarcely imagine what a meaning or a purpose would be if not in human or human-like form (i.e., the form of an
intention); "God" is the hypostatisation of the idea that life has meaning and purpose, God is the deux ex machina whereby events come to be invested with a meaning and purpose believable for man but not obviously projected by man into events. Of course, one has to believe in God first for that minor diversion to get off the ground … belief in sky cranes, as one philosopher put it. (Some) humans will sooner believe in a Reason they don't understand, than that there is no reason at all, why the universe is so. That's religion: not a body of metaphysical truths, but 'balm' applied to an abiding need in humans, "God's mysterious ways," "there is a grand plan known only to God," etc.
There is a notable exception: Buddhism. Buddhism postulates a meaning or purpose which is non-theistic and non-anthropomorphic, namely the law of karma. There is no Big Tooth Fairy in Buddhism; everything that happens in life is simply the playing out of prior consequences. There's no god punishing us and no devil tempting us. We suffer only because we are ignorant of causes and pass erroneous judgements on them (e.g., by imagining that 'bad' consequences are gods punishing us). The 'purpose' in Buddhism is to learn to stop attributing our suffering to anything but our own mis-judgement of those consequences.
Some theists deny that Buddhism is a religion, a) because belief in gods is optional in Buddhism, and b) because the Buddha did not claim any divine providence (as Christians do for Jesus and Muslims for Mohammed). Some theists claim Buddhism is more like secular humanism. I disagree that Buddhism is like secular humanism, because Buddhism does make claims of a transcendent nature (e.g, about past lives) for which there is hardly anything like scientific evidence. I consider Buddhism to be a non-theistic religion. It is
religion in so far as it applies a similar sort of balm to a similar sort of need, but it does not require belief in deities to do that (hence, non-theistic).
And, yes, there are other ways to cross a body of water, quite without a deadweight under a keelboat. A catamaran or hovercraft, for example. Or learn to swim. Or befriend a dolphin and hang on. Or drain the lake and walk. Or build a bridge and charge toll to pay for the cost of construction. Or just be satisfied to live on this shore and look across in wonder. Humans are inventive creatures, are they not? But once people have gotten it into their heads that a keelboat is the only way to get across a certain body of water, it is extraordinarily difficult to persuade them to drop the deadweight and try something different. You confront people with a sort of existential panic if you suggest to them that their deadweight is not necessary, that there is another way. The vehemence with which theists defend their faith, and the abuse they heap on people who demonstrate how flimsy their 'arguments' are and how their pseudo-scientific 'evidence' fails, are signs of that existential panic.
Panic must be taken seriously. A large segment of society running around in a panic can literally sink the ship for everybody. That is why I do not dismiss religion out of hand as utterly useless lies. It
does have a use, both social and individual.