Got Religion or is it Something Else?

I've been fascinated by history my whole life. Some of you who knew me back in high school might remember that besides being a troubled kid who did plenty of stupid things, I passed Mr. Culley's History class in the first week of our Junior school year when he gave us his post-test to see how we'd do. He had repeated one question twice, giving the test a possible 101 points and that was the only question I missed, twice!

Well, I've been re-reading all of the material I reported on for him about the world’s great religions over the ages. I've read everything I could on Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Muslim, and the ancient Greek, Norse, Roman and Sumerian beliefs and/or religions/ mythologies, if you will. To those, I've added the texts of the Egyptian Royal Dynasties, as we understand them to my list. The Books of the Living and Dead are very old, superseding even the Sumerian beliefs by a thousand years at least.

The common themes running through all of the religions I've read are the lists of do's and don'ts and the shared morality. It's amazing to me that in the Egyptian Book of the Living I found the same 400+ laws handed down to the rest of the middle eastern religions. That the shared morality developed separately to the Druid, Norse and Native American beliefs is remarkable and telling. I’ve not been able to find through sociology or philosophy any link to any long held beliefs of Middle Eastern religions to any cultures outside of the geographic area where those beliefs developed. However, the mores underlying all religions is universally shared among all human kind. The whole world once shared a common set of mores and we have developed branches of that commonality we choose to call religion.

I guess where I’m going with this is, believe what you will about whatever you want. However, doesn’t it bother you that you may have been snookered into something that is not actually true? Don’t you think it would be better to make an informed decision about those beliefs rather than blindly believing, however popular, the current iteration of a common theme? What core values do you want to teach others? Would you rather teach others to think critically and find what is real? On the other hand, would you rather teach your kids why bother to think at all and just accept anything that thrown at them? Isn't blindly accepting what others say is good for you what happened in Nazi Germany?