Asklemmy

No, the concept never really made any sense to me. The idea of god doesn't actually answer any questions about the world, and I find it fundamentally offensive. The idea that our world is created by some higher power that just fucks with humanity for its own amusement and that gets to judge us effectively denigrates humans to sims in some sick and perverted game.

The idea of god introduces lots of questions as well, such as where does god itself come from. Given that we can explain the whole universe through natural phenomena, seems weird to introduce something there's no evidence for that needs whole lot of explaining itself.

The explanation for tendency towards religion due to a quirk of natural selection makes the most sense to me. Basically, the theory is that there is selection pressure to err on the side of seeing agency where there is none. If the grass rustles then maybe there's a tiger hiding there or maybe it's just the wind. If you think it's a tiger and run away then you survive, but if you think it's the wind and it is a tiger than you die. Thus the trait of erring on the side of agency was selected for over many generations, and hence why people tend to look for agency behind our world and the universe itself.

Furthermore, the notion is laughably anthropocentric. we now know there's a vast universe out there with countless billions of galaxies each having countless billions of stars. We are like a dust mote in vast ocean, and to think that we are somehow special and that there is some deity that cares about what we do individually seems absurd.

Religion made sense when humans didn't understand how natural phenomena occur, and it provided useful traditions that helped groups of humans survive. The rule against eating pork in Islam is a great example of this. People noticed that those who eat pork are more likely to get sick. They had no idea what bacteria and parasites were, but they saw a pattern and attributed it to some higher power not wanting people to eat pork. This improved people's chances of staying healthy. The mindset of memorizing a bunch of rules and following them blindly helped keep society going.

Today, we understand how natural phenomena work, and more importantly we have a tool for expanding this knowledge in an effective way that lets us discover and understand phenomena that we currently don't have good understanding of. This tool is science and it works reliably and repeatably. The mindset of following blind rules that religion promotes has long stopped being beneficial to society and has now become a hindrance.