You’re right, I’ve mainly addressed the type of Christianity that I came from. That’s because I don’t really feel qualified to address specific claims made by other religions that I haven’t spent years studying. Perhaps the title of the essay should have reflected this, but I think that many of the points can be generalized across religious belief in general.

I’d agree that religious sustains people because it attempts to answer the “why” questions of life. And I think some of them do a better job than others. The religion I came from sought to explain it using nothing but ancient stories; it says in the Bible that God did these things, and that’s why the worl is the way it is today. And I hope I explained why I think that this category of “why” answers can actually be harmful to people.

But a religion like Buddhism is more of a practical philosophy: we can observe right now that everything is changing and impermanent, and that our attachments bring suffering. It doesn’t seem like a direct answer to the “why” question, but more of a re-framing of it, which I find more valuable personally. I actually don’t have a problem with a lot of the Buddhist philosophy I’ve been exposed to. But like always, humans build it up into a dogmatic thing, they deify the Buddha, they bring supernatural elements into it — and that whole process is what I find unpalatable.

Perhaps in the future I can explore this in a more satisfactory way. Thanks for the idea.