Becoming religious is like forming an addiction to a drug.
When a person takes drugs, it is typically to escape their life, be it their environment or their trauma and difficulties or both.
Christianity provides the same kind of escape. While drugs let a person escape the torments of their life in the moment, Christianity has a similar effect by getting people to believe that the torments of this life are proof they are on the road to heaven, where they will be rewarded for their devotion to hoping there is something better than the life they have here on earth, as human beings, with a life they've always hoped for - one where they finally get to "be like God," as the serpent promised Adam and Eve.
The throngs of people who crowded in the belly of ships like sardines to come to America from Europe all thought and hoped the same thing, but that was not what they found. Far from it, the conditions in America were often as bad or worse as the conditions they were trying to escape.
Heaven, however, is sold as a paradise where a person can live forever, free from all the troubles of life, like getting old and dying, and being forgotten. After all, if God is just an infinite immaterial intelligence, a mind free of the ball and chain of a nervous system and a brain, then the person who believes they will live forever in such a mind is just a memory.
For consciousness is to a body what time is to space.
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