I think culture is just a fancy way of saying that its ok to be born fortunate and its not ok to be born lacking. The end. Therefore, culture has no roots in a reality that speaks louder than culture. Culture is a fancy word for nothing other than a celebration of the fittest. Yawn, how boring.

On the other hand religion has some really good advice for the many culturists. Be still and remember that no friggen cultured, rich man ever passed through the eye of the needle. Or something to that effect. Much more interesting than culture and its lame response to the miracle of this universe and its complexities.

As the educated and culturally advanced people look on with either empathetic pity, or horrified contempt.
As the case may be.

(CNN) -- A profanity-laced video of middle school students in upstate New York verbally abusing a bus monitor is sparking an outpouring of support as strangers worldwide rally to her side.

Probably culture can advance, going by the evidence of history, but history also tells us that these supernaturalists will resist, with more or less violence, as they seek to promote their particular 'All Loving God' thing in preference to the other ones.
History tells us too that they'll ultimately be left behind, on virtual, or sometimes real, islands - still kneeling before their 'Holy Relics' and muttering magic spells, begging and beseeching the sacred holy-man / witchdoctor / priest / dead ancestor to have a word in Gods ear on their behalf.

As the educated and culturally advanced people look on with either empathetic pity, or horrified contempt.
As the case may be.

Probably culture can advance, going by the evidence of history, but history also tells us that these supernaturalists will resist, with more or less violence, as they seek to promote their particular 'All Loving God' thing in preference to the other ones.
History tells us too that they'll ultimately be left behind, on virtual, or sometimes real, islands - still kneeling before their 'Holy Relics' and muttering magic spells, begging and beseeching the sacred holy-man / witchdoctor / priest / dead ancestor to have a word in Gods ear on their behalf.

As the educated and culturally advanced people look on with either empathetic pity, or horrified contempt.
As the case may be.

As a matter of reality there is already a track record established for the "educated and culturally advanced people",
China has a long, proud, and continuing, history of "reeducation" political imprisonment, torture, and brutal enslavement presented to the world in the cause of secular government and atheistic ideals.

recent anecdotal experience where someone I had met had entirely replaced a God with politics. It isn't the first time I have noticed this. Recently in New York there is a case of a school bus monitor that was severely harassed by teenagers. They, without question, joked about sticking a knife in her and raping. I looked up where it occurred and it was a public school. No signs of religious influence. Only association was the intolerance of fat people which is a common political target in New York. They are constantly banning or trying to put down the 'evil fat' making industries such as soda and fast food.

must be heartbreaking for you

The fact is - culture has advanced and left behind many of the more obviously primitive superstitions of religion. The fact is, 'modern' christianity has tried to distance itself from its obvious pagan origins - though not very successfully. The fact is, to the extent large religions have, in the past, had military or civil power they have exercised it in trying to either violently suppress dissent or violently spread their message of 'peace'.
The fact is, secularism has been slowly growing, accumulating speed, for a long time because religion is steadily being deprived of all its foundations due to the spread of education.

Do you think there is a physiological reason for the ability of cultures and people to have faith?

If so than what did you do with that and how do you know you haven't filled that space with something else? What things do you hold 'without question'? Many people have never felt any reason to question a belief in God. It just seems part of what they would consider reality without question. So, they never noticed that they hold God in a place without question. How would you know you haven’t filled in that space with something else?

No,
Culture has changed not advanced.

And yes Christianity has left many of its fundamental values (the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.) in an effort to combat the onslaught of nonsense misdirection from the unfaithful, but the focus of faith was never a scientific analysis of the origin of man, but his spiritual condition on earth and thereafter.

And you attempt to talk out of both ends at once, when civil and military authority exercised power in the name Christianity you say it was following Christian ideals instead of political hijacking of the faith, but when civil and military pursues atheism's stated goals its simply following a political agenda.
...
You cant have it both ways, to paint all faith black with the broad brush of association and try to maintain purity for atheism stating their "ideals" were not represented its murderous adherents, is misdirection and obfuscation worthy only of a lying cheat.

Education and knowledge are the cornerstones of religion

.....misdirection and obfuscation worthy only of a lying cheat.

You cant have it both ways, to paint all faith black with the broad brush of association and try to maintain purity for atheism stating their "ideals" were not represented its murderous adherents....

And you attempt to talk out of both ends at once, when civil and military authority exercised power in the name Christianity you say it was following Christian ideals instead of political hijacking of the faith, but when civil and military pursues atheism's stated goals its simply following a political agenda.

Education and knowledge are the cornerstones of religion,
All of the foundational discovery's of science were made by devoutly religious men whose struggle with entrenched political power has been misrepresented by the heathen as a conflict with faith, almost to a man they defended their discovery against those entrenched powers with an intimate knowledge of scripture.

Copernicus, a Prussian, about the year 1507, had completed a book "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies." He had journeyed to Italy in his youth, had devoted his attention to astronomy, and had taught mathematics at Rome. From a profound study of the Ptolemaic and Pythagorean systems, he had come to a conclusion in favor of the latter, the object of his book being to sustain it. Aware that his doctrines were totally opposed to revealed truth, and foreseeing that they would bring upon him the punishments of the Church, he expressed himself in a cautious and apologetic manner, saying that he had only taken the liberty of trying whether, on the supposition of the earth's motion, it was possible to find better explanations than the ancient ones of the revolutions of the celestial orbs; that in doing this he had only taken the privilege that had been allowed to others, of feigning what hypothesis they chose. The preface was addressed to Pope Paul III.

Full of misgivings as to what might be the result, he refrained from publishing his book for thirty-six years, thinking that "perhaps it might be better to follow the examples of the Pythagoreans and others, who delivered their doctrine only by tradition and to friends." At the entreaty of Cardinal Schomberg he at length published it in 1543. A copy of it was brought to him on his death-bed. Its fate was such as he had anticipated. The Inquisition condemned it as heretical. In their decree, prohibiting it, the Congregation of the Index denounced his system as "that false Pythagorean doctrine utterly contrary to the Holy Scriptures."

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....telescopic discoveries tended to the establishment of the truth of the Copernican theory and gave unbounded alarm to the Church. By the low and ignorant ecclesiastics they were denounced as deceptions or frauds. Some affirmed that the telescope might be relied on well enough for terrestrial objects, but with the heavenly bodies it was altogether a different affair. Others declared that its invention was a mere application of Aristotle's remark that stars could be seen in the daytime from the bottom of a deep well. Galileo was accused of imposture, heresy, blasphemy, atheism. With a view of defending himself, he addressed a letter to the Abbe Castelli, suggesting that the Scriptures were never intended to be a scientific authority, but only a moral guide. This made matters worse. He was summoned before the Holy Inquisition, under an accusation of having taught that the earth moves round the sun, a doctrine "utterly contrary to the Scriptures." He was ordered to renounce that heresy, on pain of being imprisoned. He was directed to desist from teaching and advocating the Copernican theory, and pledge himself that he would neither publish nor defend it for the future. Knowing well that Truth has no need of martyrs, he assented to the required recantation, and gave the promise demanded.

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The invention of printing, the dissemination of books, had introduced a class of dangers which the persecution of the Inquisition could not reach. In 1559, Pope Paul IV. instituted the Congregation of the Index Expurgatorius. "Its duty is to examine books and manuscripts intended for publication, and to decide whether the people may be permitted to read them; to correct those books of which the errors are not numerous, and which contain certain useful and salutary truths, so as to bring them into harmony with the doctrines of the Church; to condemn those of which the principles are heretical and pernicious; and to grant the peculiar privilege of perusing heretical books to certain persons. This congregation, which is sometimes held in presence of the pope, but generally in the palace of the Cardinal-president, has a more extensive jurisdiction than that of the Inquisition, as it not only takes cognizance of those books that contain doctrines contrary to the Roman Catholic faith, but of those that concern the duties of morality, the discipline of the Church, the interests of society. Its name is derived from the alphabetical tables or indexes of heretical books and authors composed by its appointment."

The Index Expurgatorius of prohibited books at first indicated those works which it was unlawful to read; but, on this being found insufficient, whatever was not permitted was prohibited—an audacious attempt to prevent all knowledge, except such as suited the purposes of the Church, from reaching the people.

The two rival divisions of the Christian Church—Protestant and Catholic—were thus in accord on one point: to tolerate no science except such as they considered to be agreeable to the Scriptures.

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Though in so many respects (Pope) Gregory was far in advance of his age, he was at once insincere and profoundly superstitious. With more than Byzantine hatred he detested human knowledge. His oft-expressed belief that the end of the world was at hand was perpetually contradicted by his acts, which were ceaselessly directed to the foundation of a future papal empire.
Under him was sanctified that mythologic Christianity destined to become the religion of Europe for many subsequent centuries, and which adopted the adoration of the Virgin by images and pictures; the efficacy of the remains of martyrs and relics; stupendous miracles wrought at the shrines of saints; the perpetual interventions of angels and devils in sublunary affairs; the truth of legends far surpassing in romantic improbability the stories of Greek mythology; the localization of heaven a few miles above the air, and of hell in the bowels of the earth, with its portal in the volcanic crater of Lipari near Messina in Sicily.
Gregory himself was a sincere believer in miracles, ghosts, and the resurrection of many persons from the grave, but who, alas! had brought no tidings of the secret wonders of that land of deepest shade.

He made these wild fancies the actual, the daily, the practical religion of Europe. Participating in the ecclesiastical hatred of human learning, and insisting on the maxim that "Ignorance is the mother of devotion," he expelled from Rome all mathematical studies, and burned the Palatine library founded by Augustus Cæsar, despite that it was valuable for the many rare manuscripts it contained.
He forbade the study of the classics, mutilated statues, and destroyed temples. He hated the very relics of classical genius; pursued with vindictive fanaticism the writings of Livy, against whom he was specially excited. It has truly been said that "he was as inveterate an enemy to learning as ever lived;" that "no lucid ray ever beamed on his superstitious soul."
He boasted that his own works were written without regard to the rules of grammar, and censured the crime of a priest who had taught that subject.
It was his aim to substitute for the heathen writings others which he thought less dangerous to orthodoxy; and so well did he succeed in rooting out of Italy her illustrious pagan authors, that when one of his successors, Paul I., sent to Pepin of France "what books he could find," they were "an antiphonal, a grammar, and the works of Dionysius the Areopagite." He was the very incarnation of the Byzantine principle of ignorance.

Throughout the 1970s I had been mainly studying black holes, but in 1981 my interest in questions about the origin and fate of the universe was reawakened when I attended a conference on cosmology organized by the Jesuits in the Vatican. The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down the law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went round the earth. Now, centuries later, it had decided to invite a number of experts to advise it on cosmology.

At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the pope. He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God.

I was glad then that he did know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference -- the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death. (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time 1988, pp. 115-16.)

THE MURDER OF HYPATIA. The bishopric thus held by Theophilus was in due time occupied by his nephew St. Cyril, who had commended himself to the approval of the Alexandrian congregations as a successful and fashionable preacher. It was he who had so much to do with the introduction of the worship of the Virgin Mary. His hold upon the audiences of the giddy city was, however, much weakened by Hypatia, the daughter of Theon, the mathematician, who not only distinguished herself by her expositions of the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, but also by her comments on the writings of Apollonius and other geometers. Each day before her academy stood a long train of chariots; her lecture-room was crowded with the wealth and fashion of Alexandria. They came to listen to her discourses on those questions which man in all ages has asked, but which never yet have been answered: "What am I? Where am I? What can I know?"

Hypatia and Cyril! Philosophy and bigotry. They cannot exist together. So Cyril felt, and on that feeling he acted. As Hypatia repaired to her academy, she was assaulted by Cyril's mob—a mob of many monks. Stripped naked in the street, she was dragged into a church, and there killed by the club of Peter the Reader. The corpse was cut to pieces, the flesh was scraped from the bones with shells, and the remnants cast into a fire. For this frightful crime Cyril was never called to account. It seemed to be admitted that the end sanctified the means.

So ended Greek philosophy in Alexandria, so came to an untimely close the learning that the Ptolemies had done so much to promote. The "Daughter Library," that of the Serapion, had been dispersed. The fate of Hypatia was a warning to all who would cultivate profane knowledge. Henceforth there was to be no freedom for human thought. Every one must think as the ecclesiastical authority ordered him, A.D. 414. In Athens itself philosophy awaited its doom. Justinian at length prohibited its teaching, and caused all its schools in that city to be closed.

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Originally, Bruno was intended for the Church. He had become a Dominican, but was led into doubt by his meditations on the subjects of transubstantiation and the immaculate conception. Not caring to conceal his opinions, he soon fell under the censure of the spiritual authorities, and found it necessary to seek refuge successively in Switzerland, France, England, Germany. The cold-scented sleuth-hounds of the Inquisition followed his track remorselessly, and eventually hunted him back to Italy. He was arrested in Venice, and confined in the Piombi for six years, without books, or paper, or friends.

In his "Evening Conversations" he had insisted that the Scriptures were never intended to teach science, but morals only; and that they cannot be received as of any authority on astronomical and physical subjects. Especially must we reject the view they reveal to us of the constitution of the world, that the earth is a flat surface, supported on pillars; that the sky is a firmament—the floor of heaven. On the contrary, we must believe that the universe is infinite, and that it is filled with self-luminous and opaque worlds, many of them inhabited; that there is nothing above and around us but space and stars.

Bruno may hence be considered among philosophical writers as intermediate between Averroes and Spinoza. The latter held that God and the Universe are the same, that all events happen by an immutable law of Nature, by an unconquerable necessity; that God is the Universe, producing a series of necessary movements or acts, in consequence of intrinsic, unchangeable, and irresistible energy.

On the demand of the spiritual authorities, Bruno was removed from Venice to Rome, and confined in the prison of the Inquisition, accused not only of being a heretic, but also a heresiarch, who had written things unseemly concerning religion; the special charge against him being that he had taught the plurality of worlds, a doctrine repugnant to the whole tenor of Scripture and inimical to revealed religion, especially as regards the plan of salvation. After an imprisonment of two years he was brought before his judges, declared guilty of the acts alleged, excommunicated, and, on his nobly refusing to recant, was delivered over to the secular authorities to be punished "as mercifully as possible, and without the shedding of his blood," the horrible formula for burning a prisoner at the stake. Knowing well that though his tormentors might destroy his body, his thoughts would still live among men, he said to his judges, "Perhaps it is with greater fear that you pass the sentence upon me than I receive it." The sentence was carried into effect, and he was burnt at Rome, February 16th, A.D. 1600.

Culture has changed not advanced.

And yes Christianity has left many of its fundamental values (the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.) in an effort to combat the onslaught of nonsense misdirection from the unfaithful, but the focus of faith was never a scientific analysis of the origin of man, but his spiritual condition on earth and thereafter.

In general terms, the commission of the Inquisition was, to extirpate religious dissent by terrorism, and surround heresy with the most horrible associations; this necessarily implied the power of determining what constitutes heresy. The criterion of truth was thus in possession of this tribunal, which was charged "to discover and bring to judgment heretics lurking in towns, houses, cellars, woods, caves, and fields." With such savage alacrity did it carry out its object of protecting the interests of religion, that between 1481 and 1808 it had punished three hundred and forty thousand persons, and of these nearly thirty-two thousand had been burnt! In its earlier days, when public opinion could find no means of protesting against its atrocities, "it often put to death, without appeal, on the very day that they were accused, nobles, clerks, monks, hermits, and lay persons of every rank." In whatever direction thoughtful men looked, the air was full of fearful shadows. No one could indulge in freedom of thought without expecting punishment.

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(Much respect was shown to Jews in Spain during the 500 year occupation by the Moors, but when Christianity took back control, things changed...)

To escape the persecutions that arose, many of them feigned to turn Christians, and of these many apostatized to their former faith. The papal nuncio at the court of Castile raised a cry for the establishment of the Inquisition. The poorer Jews were accused of sacrificing Christian children at the Passover, in mockery of the crucifixion; the richer were denounced as Averroists.
Under the influence of Torquemada, a Dominican monk, the confessor of Queen Isabella, that princess solicited a bull from the pope for the establishment of the Holy Office. A bull was accordingly issued in November, 1478, for the detection and suppression of heresy.
In the first year of the operation of the Inquisition, 1481, two thousand victims were burnt in Andalusia; besides these, many thousands were dug up from their graves and burnt; seventeen thousand were fined or imprisoned for life. Whoever of the persecuted race could flee, escaped for his life. Torquemada, now appointed inquisitor-general for Castile and Leon, illustrated his office by his ferocity.
Anonymous accusations were received, the accused was not confronted by witnesses, torture was relied upon for conviction; it was inflicted in vaults where no one could hear the cries of the tormented. As, in pretended mercy, it was forbidden to inflict torture a second time, with horrible duplicity it was affirmed that the torment had not been completed at first, but had only been suspended out of charity until the following day! The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin.

Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burnt at the stake ten thousand two hundred and twenty persons, six thousand eight hundred and sixty in effigy, and otherwise punished ninety-seven thousand three hundred and twenty-one. This frantic priest destroyed Hebrew Bibles wherever he could find them, And burnt six thousand volumes of Oriental literature at Salamanca, under an imputation that they inculcated Judaism.

...misdirection and horsecrap

One is tempted to suppose the disinterest in examining the actual thread question is nothing more than what an earlier poster was talking about, an unwillingness, or even inability, to examine ones own 'beliefs', particularly when some of them may turn out to have no foundation.... Gosh! One might discover one has been lied to, and cheated out of an honest connection to reality.
How disappointing that would be...

Believing in religion for people is not a mis-step. It's a cultural heritage that has a very long and powerful history that also has many deeply rooted psychological components which at its core defines the very basic human issues with authority vs society, self, and struggling to find a balance. ... It is faith in the words of others that they find faith in their leaders.

It defines rules over feelings. In life, and law it reinforces the idealism of correct adherence to law over weakness of wants. It is at it is core authoritarian rule.

Believing in religion for people is not a mis-step. It's a cultural heritage that has a very long and powerful history that also has many deeply rooted psychological components which at its core defines the very basic human issues with authority vs society, self, and struggling to find a balance.

There are a few contributors that question/reject the ongoing value of religion as a means of social coherence.

Some make the point that secular values ought to be enough. They won't be without a unifying ideology that submits the will of the individual to the well being of the society.

And there in is my criticism of many other contributors. They are rejecting the authority of a religious based society because they resent authority and accountability to others or to a higher power...

...without promoting anything to take its place.

They are the social equivalent to Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
They resent being held accountable..... they are social anarchists.

It may be true that religious concepts represent, or once did, "deeply rooted psychological" needs, but there's no evidence to support links to the other issues you mention. They appear to be justifications straight out of argumentsfromgenesis.com.

These are the Islamic Laws according to the Fatawa of Ayatullah al Uzama Syed Ali al-Husaini Seestani.

I have no idea what you mean.... Are you saying there is no evidence to support that religion promotes law and good behavior over desires?