On a side note, how many of these devout atheists hedge their bet on their death bed?
If there were only one religion then it would be easy to accept the logic of Pascal's wager... but there is not. If you're dying, how do you choose which god to believe in?
And believing "just in case" isn't real belief anyway, it's like trying to sneak in the back door or something.
And in any case if the idea of punishment after death were plausible, then it wouldn't have to be so terrible to carry conviction. You could instead say something like "for every sin you get a year of punishment" instead of "if you don't 100% believe, then you'll be tortured FOREVER." It's a pretty childish threat honestly.
After some time people remembering and forgetting.Also people separated on continents and islands.Just figuring it out how to announce the news.If we observed religion carefully,we would find that it acknowledge the beginning of time event and due date.It is an administrative procedure in advance civilization.Thus it is quite fair to overcome the above obstacles.It was also aknowledge the three minimum requirement to overcome the ancient time limitating condition.
Christianity evolved and spread in a very mundane way, and continues to behave as all natural man made religions behave. Over time both dogma and sacred texts change. It splinters into sects when people disagree. It was doing this from the very beginning e.g. docetism. What exists today isn't what existed 2000 years ago. It's a derivative of a derivative, filtered down through multiple cultures and languages.
If its utterly mundane appearance is purposeful, so that we have free choice in our belief without persuasion, the illusion is perfect.
Skinny lines of ants snake through the rainforest carrying leaves and flowers above their heads -- fertilizer for industrial-scale, underground fungus farms. Soon after the dinosaur extinctions 60 million years ago, the ancestors of leaf-cutter ants swapped a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for a bucolic existence on small-scale subsistence farms. A new study at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama revealed that living relatives of these earliest fungus-farming ants still have not domesticated their crop, a challenge also faced by early human farmers.
Modern leaf-cutter ants can not live without their fungus and the fungus can not live without the ants -- in fact, young queens carry a bit from the nests where they were born when they fly out to establish a new nest. The fungus, in turn, does not waste energy-producing spores to reproduce itself.
"For this sort of tight mutual relationship to develop, the interests of the ants and the fungi have to be completely aligned, like when business partners agree on all the terms in a contract," said Bill Wcislo, deputy director at the STRI and co-author of the new publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We found that the selfish interests of more primitive ancestors of leaf-cutting ants are still not in line with the selfish interests of their fungal partner, so complete domestication hasn't really happened yet."
Just as human farmers harvest their vegetables before they go to seed, ants want their fungus to minimize the amount of energy it puts into creating inedible mushrooms full of spores. It is best for the ants if the fungus grows more of the fungal hyphae that fill up the chambers in their underground gardens and serve as food for the ants and their larvae.
In a study of Mycocepurus smithii, an ancestor of the leaf-cutters that has not yet domesticated its fungal crop, at the Smithsonian research center in Gamboa, Panama, Jonathan Shik, a Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow in Jacobus Boomsma's lab at the University of Copenhagen, and collaborators discovered that the ants adjust the protein and carbohydrate concentration of the mulch they provide to minimize the amount of mushrooms that their non-domesticated fungal cultivars produce. When they provide mulches rich in carbohydrates, the fungus can produce both hyphae and mushrooms, but carefully provisioned doses of protein can prevent the fungi from making mushrooms. However, this strategy of keeping their fungus in line requires that the total output of their fungus gardens remain low.
"The parallels between ant fungus farming and human agriculture are uncanny," said Shik. "Human agriculture evolved in the past 10,000 years."
"It took 30 million years of natural selection until the higher attine ants fully domesticated one of their fungal symbiont lineages. We think that finally resolved this farmer-crop conflict and removed constraints on increased productivity, producing the modern leaf-cutter ants 15 million years ago," said Boomsma. "In contrast, it took human farmers relatively little time to domesticate fruit crops and to select for seedless grapes, bananas and oranges."