I'm an atheist and I love religion. And I don't love religion in a snarky mean-spirited way; I unabashedly, sincerely love that we have religion beca… - Patton Oswalt

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I'm an atheist and I love religion. And I don't love religion in a snarky mean-spirited way; I unabashedly, sincerely love that we have religion because if we didn't, we wouldn't be here right now; being all postmodern and ironic. There'd be no civilization. If no one invented religion, we'd be fucked right now. Because at the dawn of man, civilization was the biggest and the strongest... and that's as far as we're gonna go. It was whoever was the biggest fucked, killed, ate anything they wanted. That was it! Civilization was a huge psychopath with a club goin', "I'm gonna have rape for dinner." That was it! That's as far as we were gonna go. And then one of my ancestors, some weakling, said, "Look there's no way I can beat that guy, but what if I trick him into thinking that if he doesn't kill and rape people while he's down here, when he dies there's a magic city in the clouds and he can go up and have all the cake he wants?" Now that's not a very well formed plan but he went and told the big psycho. And the psycho heard that and said, "Uhh, I like cake." "BOOM! There you go! That was the beginning of civilization. Now we can work on fire and writing and agriculture. That's religion. It's the ol' sky cake dodge; it worked! And by the way, things were great for a while. But then, what was happening then was that shit was going on all over the planet. They would just use different deserts. They would tell them about sky cookies, or sky pie, or sky baklava. So as each of these civilizations grew, they built ships; they'd go visit each other, and the one guy would walk off the boat and go, "Hey, did you hear the good news about the sky baklava?" and the first guy went, "It's CAKE, motherfucker! You're dead!"...