You wrote: “Religions use symbols, rituals, and myths to connect practitioners and believers to something that’s supposed to have ultimate value.”

… I think this is what they’d like to believe, however, because religions have a dark agenda, their use of such ideas is without cohesion. Religious ideas (except those of Buddhism if we were to call it a religion) employ poorly constructed and incomplete myths. Small parts of Christianity, for example, make sense as a myth, but because it’s a construct of uneducated men, there are no complete and cohesive myths in the religion. To make matters worse, nearly every religious leader and follower takes the religion's stories literally, which reduces the little that is of value into complete absurdity.

Here is my blunt observation: Religion’s primary goal is to control people’s minds. To do this they use whatever they can that they think will work. They speak of love and compassion, but teach about an angry, jealous, and murderous god. That's just for starters.

Religion is a divisive institution with a built-in hierarchy (as you mentioned) threatening followers to color within the lines, or else. If you do not behave according to your religion’s standards it has some ready-made punishments waiting for you. There's no art in any of this nonsense.

To elaborate on what you wrote, it’s difficult to separate a religion from a cult except to say that the former is older and established. But the same basic structure exists: There is at least one main leader who is in some way divine or connected to the divine; there is a set of rewards and punishments for followers; there’s a hierarchy of administrators; there is a social enforcement to keep followers in line; and there are special words and languages used by the in-group that are not commonly used outside the religion.

Without going through all of your excellent points, I want to address a part that I’ve thought a lot about. You wrote: “They followed their intuitions in presuming that there’s only one main planet, the one we’re on, and that all that exists is what we can see from our terrestrial vantage point.”

This presumption held back science and progress for millennia; it’s still ongoing right here in River City. It explains what went on with Galileo, DaVinci, and Copernicus, as well as Descartes’ surrender of the mind and spirit to Christianity as a trade for the advancement of science.

I have heard several retirees who had top secret clearance (including a few I’ve personally known over the years) say that there’s far more to the UFO story than our government will officially and publicly admit to. It’s getting to the point, however, that too many people are seeing UFOs and reporting alien contact and abductions — enough for Harvard psychiatrist and Nobel Prize winner John Mack, MD, to risk his reputation and career by bringing such accounts to the public. At present, scores of officials continue to come forth saying it’s all real. What happens now, regarding religious beliefs, with such information threatening to lay waste to people’s religious foundation? So far, a number of religious leaders of the Christian persuasion have come up with typically uncreative religious explanations — it’s all the work of the devil, aliens are actually demons, and so on.

There’s not much good that I can say about religion, but it does provide an emotional refuge for those who do not want to face reality and are driven by their insecurity to believe in something outlandish because it’s better than believing that this can be a cold, confusing, unfair, and harsh world. And this may not be the world that people believe it is. Religion provides concrete and unchanging answers in a reality that is always in flux, unpredictable, and surprising to a mind that doesn’t want surprises.

You wrote “the great religious myths were surely insightful for their time. They may even tap into universal themes that can teach us much about human experience, millennia after they were first proposed.” I wouldn’t agree that this applies to the Western religions, because their religious myths began as incomplete and tainted myths.

From my understanding, the original myths predating religion arose organically as an expression of a particular culture and way of life. Thus, an effective myth cannot be invented or cobbled together and still retain its import. Of course we’ve had some amazing writers who have created mythic stories and movies, but these do not work the same way; they don’t affect an entire, usually insulated, culture struggling to make sense of reality; and they are not inextricably woven into the fabric of any culture or people.