And you shall become Prince of Voided Bushes.

zodiac, In answer to your first paragraph, comfort is, I believe, the primary benefit religion gives to believers. If they truly believe, they have more comfort in times of bereavement and sickness than I do while contending with my unanswered questions. In your second paragraph, I think you miss the meaning of “Discrepancies are expunged for them by faith.” When I mention to a religious person some discrepancy about heaven or about God’s personal caring for their condition, the usual response is that God is greater than our feeble understanding of these things, and they will trust Him even while not understanding. Your third paragraph introduces the restraint people have on killing each other, a topic not much related to the above. DA’s “innate sense of guilt” argument makes sense here. Religion can go either way on this. It might, as you say, restrain those who would otherwise kill you or take your wife. But it could in other times and conditions encourage killing, such as in the Crusades or recently in the Iraqi resistance, or within Al Kaida. You and I abstain from “lewds” as DA calls them, “for perfectly sensible reasons” most of the time. I wonder how well those reasons would have held up in some of the historical settings where religion has held groups of believers together in winning good causes against enemies who claimed to be reasonable.

nentwined, i appreciate your existence.

Thank you, Sir. May you live long and thrive, and enjoy a lucrative position on the Board for Controlled Ingenuity.

I, Dovina, have personally approved this message.

err... no. It was being born a man.

I'm afraid I disagree awfully. I don't think religious people, on the whole, refrain from slaughtering people they dislike just because their religion says it's wrong. And I don't think non-religious people refrain from slaughtering people they dislike for purely practical reasons. In both cases, the majority of people feel guilt, partly through upbringing, but also because we have an innate sense of guilt at doing such things. If you did an experiment in which a human colony was left to develop on a desert island, totally isolated from the rest of humanity, and in particular from religion and people who told them killing was wrong, would they end up slaughtering each other? It is to the species's advantage that we feel guilt when performing certain lewds, since shame at lewding upon others promotes cooperation. Before we all evolved, humans who felt no shame at performing lewds upon others would have been shunned by the rest of the group, and left to wither and starve on their own. The main difference between religious people and normals is that religious people can end up believing in wallyish morals just because their religion says so. These are the morals for which the only justification is "God says so".

Was that "horrible accident" congenital virginity stemming from prenatal unattractiveness?

In all seriousness, does worrying about death and some vague and sort of unpleasant-sounding Hereafter keep you from being comfortable? And is it really fair or very well-informed to propose that people with religion feel, on average, more comfort than nonbelievers? As far as "Discrepancies are expunged for them by faith" goes, well that's a load of wash, isn't it? There wouldn't even be a sense of there being "Discrepancies" if there weren't a religion saying things are or should be some way and anything else is a deviation. In short, I think you're going about it kind of backwards. Even here, within sight of Palestine and a 5-hour bus ride from Iraq, I'd say religion mostly keeps most of the people in the world from killing me whenever they feel like it - or, say, taking my stuff or my wife. It does this by making them feel bad about nearly anything harmful they might consider doing to me. Since I do (or keep from doing) all of these things for perfectly sensible reasons of my own which don't have anything to do with guilt or conscience or whatever, it's likely that I'm slightly more comfortable than most believers, isn't it? Why shouldn't it be for all non-believers, including yourself? Please, please take this comment seriously. I'm sorry for making fun of you so much before. Thanks, zodiac