tl;dr religion is spiritually optional. god is truly within. you are your own church.<p>What people really need to acknowledge is that humans are naturally spiritual animals. I like to theorize that we evolved spirituality as a mechanism to cope with being lonely intelligent beings. Imagine being a feral yet intelligent, self aware, social being with few others like yourself wandering the land, surviving as wild animals. We knew nothing of how anything worked. What made the lightning and thunder, what fire is, what volcanoes are, disease, predators, earthquakes, drought, floods, etc, and the most scary of all, death. Then throw in more layers of emotional complexity thanks to that big complex brain. What a lonely and terrifying existence. Who do you talk to in a time of great need? Who do you cry out to? For a near infinite number of reasons, we can't always express our feelings to others so we created internal people to listen to us. Those people are gods.<p>So remember, religion fulfills the humans natural need for spirituality. Religious leaders are nothing more than personifications of our inner gods we can both speak and relate to. So think of religion as a form of spiritual food. And I can see the benefits of religion in the social sense where a common inner voice brings people together based on common spiritual grounds. It also introduces another very important concept which helps reinforce diciplice and even learning: ritual. This was incredibly important in the early days of human evolution, it's probably one of the first forms of casual social bonding we developed. Of course there are those who seek power over others. And what better way to socially hack groups of people via exploiting highly vulnerable built in behaviour? This is where religion and spirituality diverge, when it's used for control. Religion has been corrupted.<p>I grew up catholic but don't like religion because I don't find its dogma spiritually nourishing. However I do pray, not to a god but to the ether or friends and family who have passed. My church is whatever brings me inner peace, though stereotypically I'm naming nature, the wilderness away from society. I'm not sure on an afterlife, and I've half come to peace with accepting that there may be nothing beyond this life. So I mix in ritual, spirituality, philosophy and disciplines into a sort of mini religion for myself. Life is a complex maze and having something to listen to your woes is incredibly comforting, and that's what god(s) really are, comfort. Admittedly I'm still hungry. But that's part of the spiritual journey: finding good spiritual comfort food.