Quote Originally Posted by Thorne View Post
While these private religions may not hurt others, they can, and do, harm the person believing in them. They can create emotional/mental problems, even physical problems, by allowing the believer to bypass reality. If you believe that prayer alone will solve your problems, you can reach the point where you do nothing for yourself except pray. That's a problem.
I do not see it that way. You seem to believe that all religions entail prayers of some sort, and that, if you pray, you are in danger of doing nothing. I think you are wrong. If you believe in gods, you might just as well believe that gods help those who help themselves.

So what's the point in worship?
The worship I talk about is more a love of nature and a realization that we live of her and need to not destroy her.

But she gave us barely enough to feed the small groups wandering the plains. And often not enough even for that, resulting in conflicts between groups for the scant resources left.
Why do you think there was 'barely enough'? There was plenty!
And not that many conflicts either..that came later, with much more people.

It's only when we began using our brains to cultivate the land, learned to protect our crops from weather and pests, became able to grow more than we need, allowing us to barter with others, that we began to progress. In spite of nature, not because of it.
The really bad thing was to go to farming. Far too many people, many of whom had a rotten and short life, and far too many people, resulting in far too many conflicts. We can now destroy ourselves in war, and we are busy destroying earth. That is not intelligence, that is greed and stupidity.

'Progress' is a manipulative word, meant to imply that everything that went before is worse than the new, and so that all new is good.

It's true, our technology allows far more people to thrive than would be possible if we were dependent solely upon nature. I don't see that as a bad thing.
I do. Because we are taking more than earth can regrow and using up resources that cannot be replaced.
We are on a wrong track.