The short answer is if god made the Universe than who made god?

How many gods are needed before the explanation of something having to come from something else doesn't make sense because it would have to continue infinantly.

religion is regressive for humans. It holds them back from moral growth by constructing an evironment of supervision and doctrines that threaten punishment for infractions.

The religious member is never able to decide for himself what is wrong. Instead, he is more apt to please the supervisor in order to avoid punishment/secure reward.

In Kohlbergs stages of moral development,this confines the religion base to level 1 morality.

This is evidenced and reinforced by heaven and hell. Most christians (and others) are so tightly wound up in the idea of punishment/reward, that the terminology and social interactions have become "God forgive your soul", "Don't believe in God? You'll wish you did when you get to heaven and God says 'I knew ye not' ", etc etc.

Of course, the hardcore religious will say that these kinds of people will never to go heaven either and that they are just fooling themselves. However, the hardcore religious have their own problems. Who goes to heaven. Only christians? only catholics? Only jews? A mix of all religious members?

The common consensii is that heaven is relegated to those who either love god, or those that simply follow the commandments. These consensii have two problems. Honoring ones parents is not a universal social virtue, and loving God is strict in which religion is right.

At the end of the day, religion is too restrictive of it's own merit and reward to be anything close to what an actual spirituality should consist of.

Ok see this is where I stop because I see where this is headed.

Some have used the same logic to say love does not exist it just a chemical reaction. Another example;  Just because  there are physical causes to depression does not prove there is not mental causes that cause depression.  "Spirituality doesn't exist" is the point I'm debating.

You do not understand what DMT does despite my having explained it.  It's not just a hallucination causing chemical every and anytime you have a spiritual feeling, it's a DMT release, small if the feeling is faint, large if you hallucinate.  Trust me I've done a lot of studying on religious rituals and their connection with DMT release and the spiritual high it creates.  I've meditated, spoken in tongues, and even done some of the extreme practices that shamans use to prepare themselves for a spiritual journey.  I've eaten nothing but unsalted fish and plain white rice with water for a month (which puts you into a hallucinatory dreamlike state alone.)  I've spent an entire day in meditation, I've fasted.  All of these religious rituals come from different religions: christianity, buddhism, shamanism, etc.  Yet they all produce the exact same feeling, which is the exact same feeling one feels when they smoke DMT (and yes I've done that too.)

There is no difference between the effect of accidental release of DMT and the high produced through religious practices DMT=spirituality.  Plain and simple.  It's not some drug you get hooked on for the feeling, it is the feeling.  It's the feeling you've felt everytime you've felt spiritual, anytime you feel you've connected with god or whatever you believe in, it's a DMT release.   It's not even correct to call DMT a drug since it's produced endogenously, that means within your own body.  The textbook definition of a drug is "Any substance other than food or water that enters the body" thus since it does not enter the body but is produced within the brain it's not a drug but rather a neurochemical, no different than dopamine.  Which by the way is the chemical which produces that fuzzy feeling you had when you met your wife as well as the fuzzy feeling you get for staying with her.  It's the reward neurochemical and when you feel rewarded you feel good because of dopamine.  Now there is a neurochemical out there that releases during an orgasm (dopamine also releases with an orgasm, along with it's counter part prolactin which causes loss of libido, mood changes/depression; in men the onset is rapid which causes an urge to sleep [no I'm not making this up] and in women it's gradual thus the dopamine and good feeling is prominent for a longer period which makes them want to cuddle) which causes feelings of bonding but I'm hard pressed to remember it's name now, but that chemical is in large part responsible for your continued love for your wife.  The more you have sex with each other the more your brains are told that you are linked with one another.

The chemicals in our brain rule our worlds, like it or not.

And before I post I must remind you of the words of Aldous Huxley "Just because facts are ignored does not make them any less true"

Edit: I've found the chemical, it's oxytocin, it releases for birthing/nursing mothers, during sexual arousal and orgasm, and it causes a relief from fear, anxiety, and causes the persont to feel more trusting and thus creating a bonding moment.  Apparently it also inhibits the creation of a tolerance to many addictive drugs which interests me.  It is in my experience that a happy healthy couple of people on average are less likely to develop a habit, tolerance and addiction directly linked as tolerence leads to addiction (the more you need to get you high the more you'll be using, eventually you'll need a lot of the stuff and all the time to satisfy yourself.)  I'll have to look into that.

We also know serial killer brain are different than brains of other people. Even scientist warned we need to be careful how this data is interepreted. There is two possiblities

1) brain activity causes the person to become a serial killer

2) Serial killer causes the brain activity.

 we have many examples of the mental effecting someone physically as well as the physical effecting someone  mentally

 If chemical does in fact rule the world this would also included the  belief that chemicals ruled the world.

I don't have to find comfort in the idea that life somehow makes sense.

No such thing as free will? You seem delusional.

BIG BANG THE BEGINNING? AND YOU CAN BRING ME PAPERS (FACTS) TO PROVE THIS "BIG BANG THEORY". Dude its called the Big Bang Theory for a reason. 

Yeah people change but most likely if you are raised a  certain religion, that is what you will stick to because its 1. what you know and 2. what you've believed your whole life.

I'm in favor of option 1 as there is more and more evidence piling up showing that Neurology is better at explaining human behaviour than psychology.  At this point I wouldn't blame you for siding with the psychological side of the argument (that humans aren't entirely governed by chemicals but rather their environment; nature vs nurture) but I would readily disagree with you.

"it's called a theory for a reason" man, has no one yet told you that a theory in science must be supported by facts an evidence before it is accepted as a theory?  

Hey guess what?  Gravity is still just a theory

Scientists find definitive proof of the big bang in cosmic microwave background radiation

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=misconceptions-about-the-2005-03

An explanation about how scientists refined the theory to explain the problem of infinite density

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=echoes-from-before-the-bi

An article on how the BBT has stood the test of time and keeps showing itself to be correct

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-big-boost-for-the-big-b

Take note what the scientist says at the bottom of the article because I think it's of importance to the highly religious who denounce science "I am happy that the Big Bang theory passed this test, but it would have been more exciting if the theory had failed and we had to start looking for a new model of the evolution of the Universe"  Science is not dogma, scientists try to prove the BBT wrong all the time because science is about finding the truth, not sticking to old ideals dogmatically.  This is why we abandoned heliocentricity, geocentricity, the belief that the world is flat and other such things that were the science of yesteryear.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/astronomy/bigbang.html

January 2001 edition of Scientific American "That the universe is expanding and cooling is the essence of the big bang theory. You will notice I have said nothing about an 'explosion' - the big bang theory describes how our universe is evolving, not how it began"- cosmologist P. J. E. Peebles 

Now personally I take the determinist side when discussing free will and determinism (there's also the third option compatiblism which argues that the two do not contradict and can both exist.)  But really I don't know if this is the thread for that discussion anyways, it actually does not matter if you believe in god or not; determinism vs free will is a complex argument.  You could argue for a god with free will or a godless deterministic universe, or you could argue for a godless universe with free will and a god who determined everything.  I think I'll start a separate thread for that because in here it might get too tangled with people arguing religion which tends to become more heated than that sort of philisophical debate.