ogon,
Have you considered than religion may just be the natural outcome of human experience which lacks a direct physical explanation?
Let's take something simple like ghosts. Disembodied spiritual beings are today and have been in the past seen by all cultures. Now even though atheists and fundamental christians share the belief that ghosts don't exist, that doesn't make it so. Also people see them, so they must be explained.
There are of course other things people expierence. Let's take a look at this site:
http://www.deathreference.com/Py-Se/Reincarnation.html
It's a short synopsis concerning reincarnation and gives a nice overview of the research done at the University of Virginia concerning young children who begin talking about having lived before. Many had died violent deaths and many have birthmarks or deformities relating to the death injuries of the previous personalities. Both my sons mentioned having lived before when they were small, but not with the passion or emotion seen in these cases. No big deal for me, I remember having lived before, but did get to my wife a bit who is a Roman Catholic.
If children do this today they did it in the past. It needs to be explained and incorporated into "what exactly is going on here?" which is one of the questions which religion should be dealing with.
More info can be found at the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies here:
404
Could go on but have lots of work to get done at present.
In closing let me say I feel religions today are very poor at explaining "What exactly you are." and "What the hell exactly are you doing here". They pontificate about God, a subject they appear to know absolutely nothing about.
In this regard I'm with RAZD. You are much better off exploring on your own. Face it, would you use texts from 2 or 3000 years ago to find out about biology, chemistry, geology, physics, sociology or any other subject? Why do it when exploring the spiritual? Those people knew a hell of a lot less than you do. God doesn't speak to anyone today and he didn't in the past.
Edited by petrophysics, : fix typos