Religion: What it means to you

I am personally an atheist. I was once a muslim, but there are too many inconsistencies for me to be able to reconcile myself with the belief. I must be able to reason him to at least a certain extent in my thoughts. Once can say that God is beyond human reason, but reason in the only tool with which I can analyze and understand the world. If God is beyond reason, then he is incomprehensible, and I cannot pledge myself to something I cannot understand. If God is within reason, that would place limits on his infinite nature, and thus remove from his the status of God.

That being said, I believe that religion is something that mankind devised to give themselves a measure of control over what was previously indomitable
(i.e weather, natural disasters, the future.) People use it as a crutch to give them hope, and a scapegoat when they fail. It also provides a ground to which people can unite or be divided. Religion is an extremely important part of man's psyche, because it is the last idea that keeps man from being powerless. The stereotype of an atheist is someone who is "anti-religion", one who seems to hate religion and deems it the reason for many of the world's evils. I disagree. While it is true that religion is the banner flied as armies plunge into war, I believe that religion is merely used because of its unifying power. It is not the religion that is inherently flawed, but the fact that people can interpret religion to their own ends. The fault lies with the person. It is within the nature of any piece of information to be interpreted, so to say that religion is the cause would be as valid as saying the spread of intellectual enlightentment is the cause for all wars. I don't think that religion is a cause of evil, I actually believe the opposite. Man needs religion. Although it is probable that without religion another thing may rise, but hope is one of the strongest emotions of man. It is the faith that they will be able to control their destiny. Thus, some form of religion will always exist, whether it be faith in God, or faith in something else. It's not that I hate religion, I just haven't found a religion that I believe in (aside from atheism). However, I still identify myself as an atheist because I simply don't believe in the tenets of a deity or supernatural power that drives most religions.

Jam it back in, in the dark.