by Tom Honest

Created on: January 25, 2010   Last Updated: July 19, 2010

A sensitive topic like this always requires a bit of an introduction or disclaimer, whatever you want to call it. First of all I want to establish that I am an atheist and that I have never been religious. Therefore I do not know entirely what it feels like to put faith in a higher power, not since I was an eight year old praying for his dog not to die. All I am going off of in this article will be observations of the many religious friends and family members that I have, as well as some of the atheist ones, in order to make a comparison and determine, if possible, which course of spirituality tends to attract people who might be considered "weaker" people. I will address the notion that religion is a catalyst for war seperately.

With that said, the first obvious error implied in the question, "is religion for the weak", is the assumption that every religious person is religious for the same reason. It would be arrogant to think that one mentality rules across the board for every single individual that claims a religion, a number that is in the billions worldwide. So we must put in the position that we must say we are going off of why "most" religious people are religious and why "most" non-believers do not believe. This is a tricky and easily blown process, so I am going to attempt to do it with great care for not taking any assumptions too far, and only drawing conclusions that I believe are warranted and legitimate.

I am of the belief that faith decisions are not made in ignorance. I believe people thoroughly think through their faith in their deity of choice and re-affirm it in their minds quite often. There seems to be an illusion among some lifetime non-believers that those who proscribe themselves to a religion only do so out of sheer ignorance, or that they have never thought about the logic of it all. This seems like a ridiculous notion to me. While some fair-weather Christians (or people of other faiths, although the lack of devotion seems less common among those faiths) may not give thought to their beliefs, it is hard to imagine that truly religious people do not think through the ideologies that they give themselves over to.

So for the sake of the rest of this argument, I am going to assume that our faithful masses have all thought through their decision to be religious. The somewhat slanted title of this group of articles suggests that religion is for the weak. However, if we are operating under the assumption that those who have made what we

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