Red Herring

Religion, and by extension the God concept, contains a red herring that prevents the human race from problem solving.

A distraction and a diversion is what metaphorically constitute the concept of a red herring or as Dictionary.com says it:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/red%20herring
Red Herring:
2. Something that draws attention away from the central issue.

When it comes to religion, and the concept of God, there is little doubt to me that humanity’s attention is being drawn away from a central issue and given that the subject is as far reaching and overshadowing in its scope of influence as religion and the concept of God is for most humans, that distraction or diversion must be both complex and deeply rooted. It is obvious to me that Fear is the most complex and deeply rooted of human emotions. It is more pervasive than Love and plays a major part of the driving force of human experience.

One is born virtually without fear. Fear is an emotional response which can manifest itself in physiological form; so while the response to fear is mostly genetic, the object of the fear is learned through conditioning. We are conditioned to fear certain things either through direct experience or by teaching. If one is given something to fear which is readily associable with previously conditioned fears one is most likely to accommodate that new fear. Everyone is born in the default atheistic position of having no belief in any god or gods. When one is taught the concept of God by adults from the local cultural or familial perspective it begins the conditioning process also known as indoctrination or inculcation. This conditioning is perpetuated by the surrounding culture and the driving mechanisms of that culture. One of the strongest of those mechanisms is religion whose power is self-sustaining. Its main method of maintaining its power is to literally demonize critical thinking and evidence, and by perpetuating and exacerbating basic human fears; fear of the unknown, fear of death or non-existence, fear of abandonment, and one fear that is often ignored due to society’s dependency upon it for maintaining law and order, the fear of punishment. While at the same time hypocritically and most paradoxically appealing to the human concepts of vengeance, justice, forgiveness, love and/or compassion. It is said by believers of gods that they have less fear in their lives because of their faith. I have little doubt that is true from their perspective and given the teachings of most religions. That especially applies to the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. They do this by providing false problems which generate unfounded but easily associable fears. It then proceeds to solve these ‘problems’ with equally false ‘solutions’ thereby giving the believer a sensation of the alleviation of fear. This is where the red herring comes into play. If one is preoccupied with problems that do not exist one cannot concentrate on finding solutions to problems that do, especially when religions disguise, hide, or dismiss valid problems and when the ‘solutions’ provided by religions pretend to apply to the real world.