I don't believe in religion. I understand it's importance in the dark ages and how it came to be, seeing as the human race was primitive and feeble minded still.
Humans were neither primitive nor feeble minded a thousand years ago. It was not as if the entire species devolved just because the Roman Empire collapsed, and Rome was an clever, enterprising, innovative civilization. So were Greece, Egypt, Carthage, China, Japan, the various Persian states, Babylon, Assyria, Sumer, India . . . and just about every other civilization before the Dark Ages. The enterprising and innovative aspects carried right the fuck over through the Dark Ages; progress was simply hampered by (and this is a gross oversimplification) a slew of political/military catastrophes beginning with and focusing on the fall of the empire that was holding together the entire known world west of the Silk Road. If the entire United States got overrun by a bunch of third world countries, would you blame the people living in following generations for stagnation in cultural, societal, and technological progress?
That's setting aside the debate of whether or not there was a definitive amount of stagnation; a
huge amount of advances were made in the Middle Ages, many of them financed, planned, and led by the Church.
Which reminds me, I just love the way so many proudly iconoclastic atheists (who, frankly, are so moronic that they haven't earned the intellectual right to be as full of themselves as they are) badmouth Christianity for the Crusades while refusing to give Christianity any credit for the advances it generated throughout its history. I don't run around giving you and other atheists shit for how your brother in arms Stalin killed
millions of Christians and deported fuck knows how many more. We all know Stalin's harebrained tendencies have little in common with the prevailing atheist school of thought. Same goes for Christians who have committed atrocities. And while you're at it ("you" addressing no one in particular), rudimentary study of war policies in the Middle Ages would show that many of the so-called atrocities committed in the Crusades were not atrocities at all by contemporaries' standards.
They couldn't understand anything and people felt that perhaps there were deities controlling the weather and whatnot.
Until very recently, the human species did not possessed the technology to develop many scientific theories that we find so basic. Don't get me wrong; they weren't completely helpless (Eratosthenes, Posidonius, Pythagoras, Heraclides, Aristarchus—the list goes on and on). But they simply didn't have the gadgets you need to figure out how the universe works. They needed gods to fill in the gaps. There was no other logical explanation. It's the same way with us. There are a number of aspects of the universe that we are fairly clueless about, and there are aspects that haven't even occurred to us.
The issue isn't that we can't "understand anything." It's that we just haven't found everything yet. In a couple hundred years there will be people saying that those guys in the twenty-first century "couldn't understand anything"—and they'll be full of shit.
. . . I grew older and payed more attention at Sunday services . . .
When a girl about a year or two younger than me tried to explain the creation of the grand canyon and mountains/valleys with the argument that the Noah's flood created them, the argument persisted. She had never even heard of plate tectonics, because her private christian school didn't teach it to her. I mean really? All the mountains, valleys, canyons, caves and rest of the worlds topography created by a 40day flood? And there was no rain ever until that flood? How was life supported with no precipitation? Where the hell did all the water that just came out of nowhere, go? It covered the entire world then just disappeared? If the only people alive in the world were on Noah's boat, wouldn't the worlds population(5-50 people I guess) die out in the next century from inbreeding? I mean.. aifjadigajgi
Now I know that there are more enlightened Christians out there than the 14 year old girl who had an IQ of a fish, but seriously, how do people believe such silly things?
Well, sir, if you really did pay attention to your Sunday services, you'd know Christianity—or at least, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and almost every Protestant sect—doesn't teach what that girl was arguing. There are a lot of atheists around who are so stupid they boggle my mind. I don't hold their idiocy against atheism as a whole (which I realize is largely the point of your last sentence).