Thread:Comments:Gay couple elected prom king and queen in Maine's Sanford High School/Silly/reply (67)

Religion performs an evolutionarily useful function in the human psyche: We've evolved instincts that presumably promoted our selfish genes but that contradict each other, and our rational minds don't like the contradiction. We have a moral instinct to be good to other human beings, but we also have an instinct to hate those different from us. Religion provides a solution, by claiming that all morality comes from God, and God says we should hate those who are different from us. Naturally, in order for religion to be evolutionarily successful, religions should exhibit similar morality/xenophobia toward other religions. For a religion, atheism is the ultimate foreigner.