Religion has morphed has man as prospered. We began with tribal religions.
The two most prominent religions on Earth, Christianity and Islam, as well as their progenitor, Judaism, are still tribal. You're mistaken if you think there's been any transcendence beyond that. The Abrahamic faiths reinforce mankind's tribal instinct of "us versus them," and exacerbate our differences rather than bringing us together. Not only do their adherents make war upon each other, but when they can't find an enemy handy they split into sects whose differences are so slight that the rest of us can't even understand them, and begin warring among themselves. Sunni vs. Shiite, Catholic vs. Protestant, even Reform Jews in Israel have had rocks thrown at their
ambulances by Orthodox Jews for daring to operate on the Sabbath. The Abrahamists demand "tolerance" from us but they don't even understand the meaning of the word. The inherent tribal nature of Abrahamism must be conquered if we are ever to have world peace, or else we must find a way for the religions themselves to decline into well-deserved obscurity.
Religion seems to speak to a significant core of mankind. It is in all places and has been at all times.
In Jungian terms, this is called an "archetype": a motif, idea, story, ritual, belief, etc. that occurs in all societies in all eras. An archetype is a type of instinct, something that is hard-wired into our synapses by the twisted pathways of evolution, and a religion is nothing but a codified collection of archetypes. Each archetype arrived via its own route. Some were doubtless survival traits in an era whose dangers we can't imagine, so only those who had them survived to reproduce. Others were doubtless mutations that a genetic bottleneck like Lucy made universal. Still others are doubtless the manifestations of the randomness that underlies evolution until a condition prevails that makes them hostile to survival.
We
believe archetypes unquestioningly because they
feel true. That's what an instinct is. This is the same way we
believe that we should not step off the edge of a canyon, long before we are old enough to understand the equations of linear kinematics and the physics of gravity. The same way we
believe that we don't have to run from an unfamiliar 60-lb animal whose eyes are located on the sides of his skull, long before we've taken Biology 101 and learned why those are the eyes of a prey animal rather than a predator.
Nonetheless, what elevates us above the other animals is our ability to override instincts with reasoned and learned behavior. Many people can step out of an airplane so long as they're wearing a parachute. Almost all of us do not panic when a St. Bernard walks into the room. Quite a few of us have overcome our religious instincts, after discovering that the scientific model of the natural universe as a closed system has been serving humanity well for half a millennium, and especially after seeing the chaos that the Stone Age throwbacks among us with their irrational supernatural model routinely cause with the tribal rivalries that inexorably accompany that model.
Therefore it's not unreasonable to hope that eventually the entire human race will overcome its instinctive embrace of religion and move on toward a more rational and harmonious world. After all, civilization has been a ten thousand year struggle to overcome one of our most fundamental instincts: the pack-social instinct that our hunter-gatherer ancestors shared with our closest cousins, the gorillas, chimps and bonobos. We have made great strides toward becoming a herd-social species, living in harmony and cooperation in communities of total strangers. Religions keep digging up that pack-social instinct and making war between those communities. We can transcend that because we have the power of reason that allows us to overcome the power of instinct: the power of religion.
According to Jesus Christ it will never happen. You already lost.
Jesus Christ is a textbook example of an archetype: the creature who rises from the dead. This is a common motif throughout human culture: an instinctive belief with no rational substantiation. There is no respectable evidence that Jesus was a real person. The last shred of that evidence was in the writings of the Roman historian Josephus, and in the last century those portions of his writings were proven to be forgeries.
Jesus is a metaphor. Metaphors are useful because they encapsulate important lessons that must be passed on through the generations. However, metaphors become dangerous when they are misinterpreted as factual history. Christianity, the belief that the Jesus myth is literal truth, has been one of the most dangerous belief systems ever to bedevil this poor planet.
