I really like your point that religion and God can be separately debated.

I think that if there's a validity to worshipping any specific version of divinity, it's in seeking or realizing what is godlike within yourself. Outside of that there's a mess of reasons to be religious, and some of those reasons are utter crap (ie, you go to synagogue because we've always done it, and maybe you might meet a nice Jewish girl there. I hate that bullshit!).

If one's an atheist, of course, hope and responsibility both get dumped on your shoulders; I feel like in that sense, belief in God is a shortcut, but using a shortcut isn't always going to be spiritually rewarding. I feel like once you start spouting really pat succinct answers about the One True Faith or whatever you really aren't getting anything out of the deal. Yeah, the superficial approach makes some people happy, but ultimately it creates bigotry and dumb bumper sticker slogans, rather than any true attempt to comprehend the universe and one's place there.

God or no God, ultimately religion is a tool. It's there to understand the universe and suggest our place in it. Or it's there as a crutch (crutches are useful enough as long as eventually you aren't abusing 'em, like you said). Or it's there as a way to set out guidelines for how to live.

So; tool. The more dogmatic the tool, the less useful it is - the difference between having a general all purpose theological wrench, and having very specifically a .3 mm (or whatever) theological socket wrench. I still think the tool might be useful for me, so I'm exploring whether that's the case. Obviously it's not a very useful tool for you at all, so why should you use it?

And (a little less philosophical, and more about how people use religion a lot in this country), once one starts using any wrench to bludgeon people, its use as a tool for anything else becomes debatable.
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