Very few people pick their religeon. It is generally a part of their upbringing.
Santa, the Easter Bunny and The Tooth fairy do indeed create a community but areare primarily for children and do not deal with issues such as morality, marriage, child rearing, fidelity, citizenship and neighborly-ness the way a religeoen does.
TV and Hollywood do establish a set of common values, but these are subject to the mores and changing beliefs of men. Religeous values are much more enduring.
The False promise of Hope by the empty suit is not the same hope people have in being re-united with their loved ones in the here-after.
I agree. But at some point, people have to decide whether or not they believe it, or just want to go through the motions as a cultural adherent of it, or just decide to find something else that squares with their experience and reasoning. If they decide that unbelief is the way that they should go, they usually decide that they are still going to be ethical people. Those ethics might well reflect many facets of the dominant religious tradition of the area they reside.
Santa, the Easter Bunny and The Tooth fairy do indeed create a community but areare primarily for children and do not deal with issues such as morality, marriage, child rearing, fidelity, citizenship and neighborly-ness the way a religeoen does.
It's all a matter of when individuals get disabused of these notions. I seem to remember that adults used to keep the Santa Claus myth going far further in childhood than people do today. As for religion, a lot of the questioning of it comes during adult life. For some people completely immersed in a religious tradition that permeates every area of life, that questioning might not happen until quite late in one's adulthood.
TV and Hollywood do establish a set of common values, but these are subject to the mores and changing beliefs of men. Religeous values are much more enduring.
I agree. But religious values do indeed change over time, I wonder what the Puritans would say about contemporary American evangelicals and their lifestyles. The bible gets reinterpreted and retranslated about every ten years these days!
The False promise of Hope by the empty suit is not the same hope people have in being re-united with their loved ones in the here-after.
One big difference, soon enough, plenty of people will see with their own eyes that the Empty Suit is a fraud. It's a lot more difficult to verify the whereabouts of deceased family members. But you gotta admit, the 'faith' that the true believers in Obama have exhibited up through today has been as fervent as any cult you've ever heard of.