Since the marriage thread is being completely derailed with religion, I thought it would be better to just make a religion topic where we can all duke it out.
What is your view on religion's place in modern society as well as deities'? Does religion and belief in deities still have purposes or are they merely relics of a time bygone?
In my opinion, the belief in gods and religion are relics of our ancestors. This chart summarizes my views succinctly:
As our understanding of the world has increased, the need for deities as an explanation for phenomena has decreased exponentially. Sure, we may not exactly know how the universe began, but it's a copout to just say that a god did it and fail to explore the topic any further. For all we know, the universe may not have had any beginning. The universe may be eternal, just existing in different forms throughout the eons. There could have been an infinite number of universes before our universe. The thing is, we must continue to explore it instead of being lazy and simply attributing the universe to a deity.
Also, religions claiming that the universe was created open a can of worms. If the universe was create, then we can presuppose that a more complex thing had to create it. But that begs the question: What created that more complex thing that created the universe? What created that more complex thing? And so on and so on. If we claim that, then we're only entering into the realm of infinite regression. So to make things simple, it may be better to observe Occam's razor in this situation. (Yes, I realize religion's say their god wasn't create and it/they are eternal. But if the deities can be eternal, why can't the universe?)
Moving on to our views of humanity, religions claim that humanity is special, but are we really? The universe is large—incomprehensibly expansive. We are completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Even if there were deities, there is no way all of this could have been created for only us.
Humans used to believe that Earth was the center of the universe, but astronomy has taught us that that is simply not the case. Hell, we don't know if there is even a center to the universe.
And ending with religious texts for now, if these divinely inspired texts can't even get basic science and math right, then why should we hold them on a pedestal for other things such as morality and history? Religious texts are nothing more than archaic books written by our more ignorant ancestors. And what makes scientific knowledge superior to religious texts is that scientific knowledge isn't static. If something is incorrect, then the science evolves to a more correct theory instead of claiming absolute rightness like religions and religious texts do.