Religious Rituals Are Torturous

Here are just some thoughts on religion that may or may not make you question your belief, or even affirm your disbelief. Good questions are highlighted.

Why torture yourself?
It is a fact that most humans, except for some smart people in educated society, like to torture themselves. Most religions, if not all, must be made up or are false religions, this is the reality which is proven by there being so many different religions out there.
While watching the show "tribal rights"(on travel channel), you see what kind of futile work and stress go into every differing ritual. Did god intend us to suffer for him forever? Is god a sadomasochist?
Why not focus on living life rather than getting stressed out about religious predictions about the end of the world? You can always build a fallout shelter to put your mind at ease, if you're falling for holy rollers predictions.
Why create a split personality called "god" which is actually -you telling yourself- what you can and cannot do?
Some religions make you do constant prayer, others require constant memorization of religious manuscripts, others make you sing in church even when you don't feel like it, others make you do back exercises while sitting on your knees until they hurt, others make you perform long drawn out rituals of chanting and magical gestures, that make absolutely no sense in the real world, others make you want to "settle" into war torn areas like the Gaza strip and live there, others make you bathe in dirty human bacteria infested water, others make you repent all of your sins because someone must be watching you 24 hours a day just to see every fart you deal.
Is god a voyeurist?
What if eating was illegal in heaven, we would say "well god probably wouldn't keep us from eating, because that's unreasonable". Therefor in every ritual we tell ourselves that we're still allowed to eat. In the end it is just us telling ourselves what we think that any of the gods of the world would most likely think is reasonable for us to do. In other words we're telling ourselves what we think, god thinks, instead of him telling us personally.
I guess mass murder of animals is a good thing in heaven, so that we can still eat, except if the animal being killed is a human.
Wouldn't a real god see the flaw in this logic of letting us hear by word of mouth and our own imagination what god wants us to do? Wouldn't he rescue every wrong religion from torturing themselves by just coming out and saying what the real rules were? Instead of letting us torture ourselves and each other for the rest of eternity.
Maybe the lack of god interfering with us is one of the best pieces of evidence that he doesn't exist.
If god or gods decide who wins wars, then why do we as humans ever have to try to win the wars.
If god or gods decide everything that will ever happen then why do we ever try in general. Animals never try, but it's said that they don't have a god.
Why make offerings to the gods, can't they just take what they need by themselves? Also when we do offer money or other things to the gods, how do we know how much to offer to the gods and if the priest is or isn't skimming some off the top?
Why are all religions possible in spiritualism, but the thought of there being no god is the one impossibility?
Naturally humans will always tend to torture themselves to the maximum of reasonable limits.
But then again there are every few years a new religious cult that forces mass suicide. Even with rituals that unreasonable it still happens.
Is there a special heaven for stupid people?
Why praise the lord? Is he so insecure that we need to keep telling him that he's great, and giving him moral support? Maybe, in some small way, we just - sort of selfishly - want something in return for praising him.
See: George Carlin on religion for a good laugh! I'm just repeating what he said.

Joke machine

Have a database of jokes that actually have been shown to make some people at least laugh.

Then type in key words into this portable joke database like "cow + ckicken", and it will automatically come up with a joke that has those 2 words in it. The joke comes up on the screen and then you either read it to your friend or press the "next joke" button and it comes up with the second most relevant joke which uses those 1 or 2 or 3 key words.

you may also have a USB cord that can get downloaded jokes from the joke machines website. This could also charge the portable joke box.

Another version of this invention is a robot that spontaneously tells jokes all the time and has a personality of its own. For this it would recognize key search words with speech recognition software.

Contradictions

• I like how after god destroyed the dinosaurs, he then twiddled his thumbs for 65 million years until he finally decided to create humans.
• Also he was nice enough to save the Jews the first time from the Egyptians but wasn't so keen on saving them the second time from the Germans.
  
• Is god happy when you die because you are then able to be with him, and if so does that mean that god would be happier if everyone was dead, so that they could be with him.
  
• A good excuse is always just to say, "Well if god doesn't care then why should I care". This works in almost any arguments that have to do with ethical debates.
• But my personal favorite is when people say "you can't do it that way" I like to say " Well the universe tends to disagree with you". This is good when you're around controlling family members that always want perfection and things to be done there way.
• If you have to change yourself in order to get into heaven then why did god make you the way you were.
  
• One religion in Taiwan says that you need a face tattoo at some point in your life in order to be accepted into heaven. And others say that in order to get sex in heaven you need to kill lots of other people by blowing yourself up. So which one is the right religion anyway, it's too bad that god won't tell more people about the requirements for heaven than just the one religious profit, who could actually be an evil person in disguise. Why wouldn't he give believers proof that their leader was not an evil person in disguise.
• Fact: The most dangerous criminal is one that is willing to commit suicide, because you can't really punish them if they're already dead. So if there are no consequences to dieing because of a belief in an after life then you're creating perfect criminals or soldiers that don't fear death. What god supports such an evil thing.
  
• God isn't very smart if he has to keep changing his original plans by meddling in human affairs, and using miracles to fix what he did wrong previously. Basically any miracle is god breaking his own laws of physics, so then why did he even make those annoying laws of physics in the first place. But when was the last real miracle that you've seen, really, that could be proven was not just a magic trick, or a misinterpretation of natural events.
• Using the bible to win any argument, is very easy because the bible contradicts its own words so many times that you can find verses that back up your point of view in any philosophical debate, for basically any point of view that anyone has(Hitler did this and also terrorists). That's the reason why there are so many interpretations of the bible and so many spin off religions of the very same book(catholic, presbyterian, jewish, mormon) all because of all of the different ways of interpreting the same words. The main reason being that the words are interpreted metaphorically and also that the words contradict themselves so much. See: This link of all of the bible contradictions.
• Unsubstantiated theory: Higher education correlates to lower levels of belief.
• The word belief is a contradiction in and of itself. Believing in something, for no reason, is not rational. You could hope the world is that way, but telling yourself that it is that way for certain when there is no possible way to be certain, is just contradicting your own thoughts.
  If the bible only had facts and proof then it wouldn't be a religion.
  

Seems to me that this is all better explained by there being no good, or bad, or a "god" at all that meddles in any human affairs, because if a "god" or ghosts were real, then all of the evil world leaders would have had retribution by now. This is how you can prove that both god and ghosts do not meddle in human affairs, because they would have gotten back at evil killers by now. And if that's true then it's probably luck and skill that have won all of the world wars so far.
UPDATE: I do still keep an open mind to spirituality and living forever and becoming more than human because maybe when we are able to travel the galaxy an meet new intelligent species and philosophies they will know more than we know about the after life and being happy and all knowing and spiritual.

• Also see a previous post.
• Also see for fun George carlin's religion and bullshit.
  
• Also see The after life idea, for ghosts and god.