I believe it may have been Noam Chomsky who said that God/religion is a useful device for short circuiting endless questioning. The example given was a child who ask why A is. Told that A is because of B, the child then asks why B is and so on, until the adult gives up and says ‘Just Because.’ God, serves to keep us from asking endless questions about the nature of existence and allows people to get back to leading their lives. Someone else, it may have been Dag Hammarskjold, said that people are born with a God shaped hole in their hearts that needs to be filled. I’ve seen some speculation that humans may have a genetic predisposition towards religious belief, which says the same thing essentially, in a much less poetic way. At its most basic level, I think that religion simply provides comfort for self-aware beings who know that their existence – as they know it – will end. Of course, none of this says anything about whether or not God actually exists.

The staggering array of religious belief that people subscribe to may be a refutation of God’s existence i.e. he can’t possible be all of those contradictory things. OTOH, by definition, maybe he could be if he wanted to. More likely, as Sam suggests, God would be beyond any human attempt at comprehension. If God is benign or beneficent, or at least not malicious, he would be hard pressed IMO, to impart anything of greater value to us beyond the Golden Rule of loving and caring for each other. Most of the rest of the trappings of religion seem to me to be too conveniently arranged to foster and maintain a particular social order, e.g. many religions seem to be patriarchal and male dominated.

Not all religions are hostile to inquiry and some even evolve their beliefs. A large segment of American Christianity went from supporting slavery to embracing, based on ‘Biblical truth,’ racial equality. If I’m not mistaken, the Catholic Church for instance, has no problem with evolution per se. Of course, they probably have long memories of getting burned by the whole Galileo thing. Both science and religion are, ideally, self-correcting. Science simply deals with easier questions. At the same time, there is a literalist strain of religiosity which is resistant to any questioning. I would describe those beliefs as being monolithic in that if you question one tenet, then all the others are open to question as well, and potentially the whole structure collapses. If you read Bob Altemeyer’s work, The Authoritarians, he suggests that certain personality types are naturally attracted to such belief systems.

For me, any religion worth its salt has to answer the classic and fundamental question of why a truly benevolent God allows terrible things to happen to the most innocent of his children. And no fudging about free will. There are certain things a loving parent doesn’t allow to happen to their children if they can prevent it. So God is either 1. A slacker, 2. A sadist, or 3. Nonexistent. I prefer to believe that God has his own limitations, perhaps self-imposed, and can’t help us out of every jam. That seems like a contradiction of the very definition of God as omnipotent, but it would explain a lot – and, I would argue that you really aren’t all powerful if you don’t have the power to limit yourself – which can become circular I suppose ÷) Still, I think that we would be better served by doing more to get our own act together, rather than depending on God to come riding to the rescue. He probably has his own problems to deal with.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken