Originally Posted by
ragnarok
This is a partial truth.
That's not to say there aren't major problems that are inherent to religion. Clearly there are, some of which you have identified. Humans are inherently corrupt and fallen creatures and increasingly science is confirming this (GIRFUY Descartes) which is one of the key messages of Christianity. Modern religions are basically anthologies of ancient stories. Some of those stories are universal in their applicability. Some are probably not relevant if you aren't an inhabitant of a 1st century desert culture. Why did paganism cease to be relevant? Because as society became more technologically advanced and there was an increasing division of labour more people were living in cities and we became less dependent on annual crop cycles and the like. More advances societies require more advanced narratives to keep them functioning. So yes, religions were partially a necessary form of social control and are one of the things that bound societies together and kept them functioning. Their "truth" value can largely be derived based on their cultural success. Christianity is a very successful religion - whether you agree that it gave birth to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment or hindered it, it nonetheless created a society in which the conditions existed for their emergence.
The human mind desires certainty which leads to the development of dogmas. Some dogmas are nestled in truth, others are 'superstitious' in that any link to reality has since been forgotten. I'm very pessimistic that dogmatism can be overcome with 'rationality and reason'. That's not to diminish the important of rationality and reason which has had a huge impact on humanity. It's more that those who espouse it greatly exaggerate its significance in human affairs. Rationality and reason are ultimately slaves to our more primitive urges. We don't rationally choose our moral or ethical values as free agents in a vacuum. We adopt values based on those of our society, community and finally that which reveals itself based on our own experiences of reality. Freud described this quite well with the Id-Ego-Super-ego. Religious traditions are part of what influences the super-ego. We can say that Christianity has outlived it's usefulness (or that God is Dead as Nietzsche put it) but we need to take the question of what comes after Christianity very seriously. We can already see how fractured our societies are becoming in the absence of a unifying narrative and belief system. In Communism and Fascism we have already seen the emergence of totalitarian ideologies as a taste of what might replace religious traditionalism.
As for God, I think the best way to think of it is as a kind of allegorical metaphor for the ultimate nature of reality (which is basically how Spinoza saw it). No matter how smart, rational and powerful humans become we will always be constrained by our limited and finite state within the infinite. God represents the infinite. If God is portrayed as cruel and arbitrary the correct question is not "why would God create such a world as this", it's "why wouldn't a God who created such a world as this not be cruel and arbitrary?".