I honestly don't know how religion in any shape or form ever begot to become a thing,
humanity didn't need it to survive dinosaurs or the ice age so why do we need it in
the modern world? isn't time we looked after eachover better instead of killing one another over trivial waste that nobody can 100% prove and be done with religion altogether.
Ok they might of prayed to the stars now again but that was because they where either bored shitless or going delusional from lack of food / water, further up the timeline people started worshiping animals as gods, see where i'm going with this?
And just for the sake of argument why do we even need religion if a god does exist are they that vain that they need to be constantly worshipped by some set out rules? rules more than likely setup to groom others by currupt bastards / secret societies, if I want to worship my god why can't I do it by on my own by my own rules it's my god afterall.
I guess some people are just easily lead and can't cope without feeling wanted / needed so they brainwash
themselves and others into believing in things that don't exist in a blind effort to keep sane.
Religion came about at around the same time humans began to develop complex enough brains to understand it. It's obvious that it was because of religion that early communities formed. The oldest known human structure is a temple after all, so in reality, the story of humanity is also the story of religion itself.
Religion is in one way, a community former.
It's not just religion that leads people to kill, it can be any belief or ideology. Nationalism was responsible for the deaths of 10's of millions in the 1900's. If you compare the number of deaths because of religion against the number of deaths because of nationalism you'll see a pretty large gap.
Actually, animism came before the worship of stars, it is the oldest known, although it's debatable as human history that has been primitively recorded only dates so far back.
The belief of Islam is that life is a test, that's why religion and those rules exist, to see if we can pass that test. I've always thought of us as mice in a maze and god as the observer who place cheese at the centre. Sure you can die in the maze but if you try harder enough, you'll get a bite of that cheese.