Be c a use every society started as a bunch of scared people huddling around a campfire?

I think it is human nature to want to have an explanation for things and religions have historically been a convenient way to create explanations. The fact that every society has a religion is glaring indication that gods are man made.

Because we are still children and have a need to debit and credit something other than ourselves. And simply because I don't believe in a higher power and you do, doesn't make you right, or wrong. Just different.

If there was a God, surely there would only be one religion as he/she would make their presence known to avoid any doubt and to stop all the fighting about who said what and when.

It's also easier to go down the supernatural/magical explanation route than search for answers, especially when you run the right of being regarded as a heretic/blasphemer/apostate.

To have answers with no evidence but harass/torture/kill anyone who dares disagree has been what has kept religion going for so long.

Because we have a need to feel there is something bigger out there than ourselves. The earliest humans naturally thought the sun was the thing to be worshipped as without it there is no light or heat, so no life. This would be the most logical thing to worship. Other deities were invented later by different cultures and civilisations and in fact Judaism then Christianity and Islam are relatively new inventions.

every society is somehow in an evolution of the ones that came before it. and of those that came before today, they all looked up to the sky and saw stars and could not explain it. they looked at fish breathing in water and drowning on land, they looked at illness and disease, they looked at death, and they could not explain it.

This is a startlingly compelling argument to many people. My late / prior wife, who was otherwise a very bright person, asked a version of this question -- to wit, there must be an afterlife because so many people now and throughout history believe in one. Basically, "so many people can't be wrong". In her case, she was dying anyway, and if it was important to her to think she wasn't headed for dissolution, I wasn't going to argue against it. But I did not agree.

Many people once believed the earth was flat and you should bleed sick people with leeches and a whole lot of other things and that didn't make those things true.

This is a standard "argument from popularity". Anyone with a basic grounding in critical thinking will not be impressed with it.

The real question is why is this particular delusion so compelling?

Basically because people want to be immortal when they're not. They want life to make some kind of sense even when it doesn't. It's arguing from what you want rather than from what is.

Society created religion as soon as someone realized that it meant CONTROL over the rest of a group.

Earlier people had the same fears we do now about dying/the unknown, etc, and having a ''hotline'' to a BIG SKY DADDY meant you had power and comfort about those fears.

To the ''congregation,'' it meant that THEY had something special....the ''ear'' of the B.S.D. and the knowledge that THEY were BETTER/SAFER than anyone else.

So...when the ''shaman'' told them to do something...they did it. And they believed they'd have a big pay-off/eternity in paradise, so they did it without complaint. (Not to mention the fact that all those pesky and worrisome philosophical questions were simplistically answered and they didn't have to work to answer them.)

Just as morality and love and our special human ability to think and reason are inborn, so is a sense of a source for life and love. Ancient people, like people of today, had a long way to travel upon our shared road to expanded knowledge.

As we recognized our own overall functional superiority over other known creatures as 'Earthbound' gods of sorts, it was entirely natural for us to imagine our life source as human-like. Earliest gods were actually goddesses and it also made sense that since females in all species were the 'source' of new life that the human 'images' we formed of our creator/s were primarily female.

About 6,000 + or - years ago, there was a shift and in my view, a pathogenic one. Males began usurping female status and power to dominate; gods, and fierce ones, replaced goddesses and each generation since has gotten sicker.

Many causes are theorized for that change and most of them make sense. Such a fundamental change in the structure of human societies probably had more than one cause and some really unfortunate timing.

A person who, also in my view, was the greatest, misunderstood scientist of the 20th. Century said this:

"In the act of thought, life comprehends it's own essence." One consideration this inspires in me is that we are evolving agents of life and love with no end to the path of expansion in sight.