First and foremost I wanna layout some ground rules, everyone has their own thoughts or opinions on religion; some of you believe in God some of you don't, some of you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Jehovah's Witness or you still pray to motherf*cking Santa Claus! Either way, at no point in my upcoming answer am I looking to change, convert or alter anyone's belief system. Now to understand religion you have to analyse it's origins, and not many people know its actual emergence, people argue incessantly about their religion being superior but they never explain how their religion started in the first place. While each religion has their individual beginning according to their own teachings, the foundation of religion is generally agreed upon a common principle by historians, which is starter religions in ancient times (well before current religions existed) were created by humans to explain things that couldn't be explained due to technological restraints at the time; the crux of how all ancient religions were created is due to that simple reasoning. For example let's look back on Ancient Egyptians, they couldn't explain natural events such as the sun and the moon so they were treated as Gods (Ra and Khonsu respectively), they didn't understand death so they had Osiris as Lord of the Underworld followed by Anubis as the Protector of Graves or how thunder occurred so Horus was worshipped. And in each instance, Pharaohs were chosen based on the self proclaimed ability to speak directly to the Gods, does this seem familiar? Of course it should as most religions have followed this structure throughout human history! All religions were created to explain certain phenomenons humans couldn't comprehend and each religion designated a leader or speaker if you will; someone who had the presumed capability to communicate with the God of that individual religion, that particular person typically had a major role in his/her respective religion and a large amount of influence over it's actions. Such as the Ecumenical Patriarch for Orthodox Christianity and the Pope for Roman Catholicism, relatively the same concept. As it stands now, historians have uncovered 1300 religions created by humans including the current ones that we have today and over 2100 different deities. Now think about these numbers for a second, for those of you who follow a religion in which part of your creed is the worship of only one God, why do we have over 1300 religions and 2000 other potential Gods? Are you gonna tell me YOUR God is real and the other Gods are fake? Are you gonna say that YOUR religious beliefs are true and the other beliefs are false? You believe YOUR religion is better just because other religions were wiped out? All for different reasons, whether it was war or civilizations just died out, what remained of the few religions were destroyed in following events: Various religions were destroyed by the Roman Empire during their conquests, Mayan culture was completely eradicated during the inquisition, Native American beliefs were suppressed by Europeans when they found America etc. Things that were considered Godlike during that time period such as weather, fertility, death, sun, moon, the four seasons. Are now relatively straightforward now thanks to science and technology, so ask yourselves this: What does your religion tell you as to how it got started? There's a good chance that your religion will tell you that your God created your religion, though he didn't tell you directly but your religious motherf*cker who tells you to pray everyday told you so and he has to be legit right? Meanwhile history proves (with tangible evidence) that religion was created by naive and primitive humans who couldn't explain something, and the ideology of a greater power being responsible for said thing. Whether you want to agree with this or not, whether you want to actually look at the reasoning behind religion, you can't deny the irrefutable evidence. From the most followed religions all the way down to groups we would consider cults: all formed on the basis of explaining the unexplainable. In addition, to all the people who refer to the Bible as sufficient evidence you do realise that the Bible had to be translated several times throughout history; you really didn't think there would be any discrepancies? Finally, I just want to say I don't give a flying f*ck what you believe in or what you don't, I really don't, you believe in whatever you want to believe in as it doesn't affect me. I don't even care if you think everything that I just wrote is a load of bullsh*t, though I can say have a very fun time trying to prove me wrong; you will be spending hours on Wikipedia alone motherf*cker! The reason why I am being so blunt, is that if other people had the same mentality as I did how many wars would have been averted? How many pointless conflicts would have never occurred? All caused due to the volatile nature of religions in which what they believe is true, and what other's believe is false. The reality is religion was never discovered or bestowed upon us by Gods, it was created by humans, and as a result it has influenced people drastically since the preconceived notion came to existence.