<p>And yet rational men throughout history, men who have given us science, have professed belief in god. I don’t think it is right to say that religion poisons the rational mind. If you’ve read anything by Pascal Boyer on the evolution of religion, you’ll be impressed to find that the reason religion is so important because the mind has an affinity for accepting it; the same mental processes that govern our religious behavior also govern our rational behavior. Man is, you might say, adapted for religion. Religion isn’t for the weak, rationality is not for the strong (science still consists of a very small body of individuals whose beliefs and practices run very contradictory to those of society). Who is to say what is weak and strong anyways? Religion can be a very beautiful aspect of humanity. “Rational” people should start seeing the many similarities between them and religious people before they condemn “religious” people. We are all very much the same kind of people in the end…part of the discussion here is about the afterlife. We all have a concept of the afterlife, the subsistence of man even when he has physically passed away; we just each have a different way of thinking about it, based on personal experiences and influences. To say that one has liberated oneself from the chains of religion is to overlook the way you got there, a way that very closely resembles the liberation of a believer in Jesus Christ from the death of sin. The two represent a similar achievement, but we put so much emphasis on the differences of the outside instead of embracing the sameness of the inside.</p>