disclaimer: this node is an opinion based on my observations. if you feel strongly defensive of your religion and would be offended by a different interpretation, please do not read this or be mean because you dissagree.

in the beginning... people spent most of their time just barely hunting or gathering enough food to sustain themselves as the roamed from place to place. during this time, resources were scarce and the religion of anamisim was common. i believe that this is primarily because it helped them to survive. if they believed that every bit of substance was sentient, wasting it would be more difficult.

looking at christianity and buddhism in the present day, we see many common threads. both provide guidelines for living which will not upset the community and hopefully lead to personal happiness (the 10 commandments and the 8 fold path,) both dictate what happens when you die (you go to hell or heaven, or you are re-incarnated,) and both provide incentive to follow the guidelines that they set forth (if you dont follow, you go to hell, or if you do follow, you will be released from suffering.) these are very common aspects of nearly all major religions today. finally, they both provide a role model who illustrates that it is possible to attain true happiness by following the teachings of the religion.

from the earliest primative wisdom to what is common today, nearly all successful religions benefit human progress*. i have no doubt that religions evolve, as civilizations with more beneficial religoins flourish while those whith less productive ones die off.

thus, i put forth the idea that religion is a tool of civilization, often protecting us from primative human nature and that it changes as we do. imagine a religion of the future, perhaps when computers are completely ubiquitous and our dependance on them is total. might it not then be a sin or bring you bad karma to hack?

* i am very aware that religion causes a torrent of intercultural problems, however, on an evolutionary scale, this is beneficial.

The above is, of course, utter nonsense.

The purpose of true religion is to glorify God and to encourage the righteous to eliminate undesirable elements, such as for example the Satanic packs of wild dogs even now devouring your kin. As a radical atheist, you probably don't even care. What are they to you, or you to them? A source of food at most, and that only in times of famine or when they're in an abnormally weakened state.

Certainly, false "cult" religions do "evolve" (this is not a pure absurdity when said of those cultural institutions left by the Almighty to fend for themselves; "evolution" is an absurdity only when "applied" to the immutable species created by God), in a very cruel "Darwinian" sense: Those which tend to create an unhealthy society will die with the malfunctioning polity they've destroyed. Anti-Christian false religions do not have a "purpose", any more than the Democratic Party has a purpose: They exist to perpetuate themselves, that's all. They are human institutions, and therefore both worthless and meaningless. If they perpetuate themselves successfully -- if they are benign or even beneficial parasites, and their hosts survive -- then in retrospect they may appear to have a "purpose", but that's an illusion. There is no intent there to serve the "purpose" of which you speak. It's an accident. There are those which just as accidentally turn out malignant; the "abortion religion" of the radical liberal left is one such "religion". It will destroy its host, and in centuries to come it will be forgotten, along with dozens of other catastrophic failures such as Heaven's Gate and the whole Jim Jones thing. They will be forgotten, and the surviving false religions will appear to support your claim. Your claim, in that far distant time, will again be advanced, and it will again be softlinked with that "Your radical ideas..." thing -- which, be it ever so valid, is getting a bit long in the tooth.