As far as 'R.E' (religious 'education' as taught in schools) that I knew from even before it started, I couldn't see the science behind 'god' in any other sense than in the context of either an alien contact or more likely contacts, with primitive civilizations (to any civilization/tribe/demographic group sufficiently inadvanced to realize the fact as axiomatic, any sufficiently advanced contact from another group or species would appear to the more primitive group as gods. For a historic example, take Cortez, the conquistador, being received as Quetzalcoatl by the Aztec people, before turning traitor and beginning a mass genocide of the mesoamerican people. He had a military force (and doubtless far, far insufficient ammunition to turn the tide of even a single mass charge of aztec warriors equipped with at most the likes of bows, blowpipes and poisoned darts perhaps, maybe bolas, slingshot etc. and no firearms, even if they were equipped only with maquahuitl (a maquahilt (sp?, my Nahuatl is somewhat limited in terms of my lexicon with regards to the language) is a sword-like weapon, basically a wooden handle and blade-holder as one piece, where the blade itself lines the outside edges of the main wooden body, and consists of segmented blades of chipped onyx, a kind of volcanic glass which when chipped to sharp edges by knapping, as with flint, the chonchoidal fracture resultant, can be so extremely sharp as to have a monomolecular edge, and these native weapons were sharp enough to do terrible damage, take off limbs with a single strike, even reputed to be capable of decapitating a horse with one single well-struck blow, and quite certainly capable of shearing off the arms or legs of a human, and not only were the blades sharp, they were formed as segmented arrays rather than one single carved blade, so were inherently serrated, and the edges so sharp that they put even the sharpest metal blades to shame utterly).
There would have been many casualties, unless skilled attrition warfare was put to use, but even a single massed charge would have wiped his (Cortez) army out to a man, yet by posing as a god, and taking advantage of their religious beliefs and prophecies, Cortez slaughtered thousands, who put up little if any resistance, thinking Cortez the incarnation of Quetzalcoatl, one of the major-league players in the aztec pantheon of deities. So efficiently that the empire itself, many cities, was exterminated.
I guess, from the moment I could speak, read, and thus obtain information I was too logical in my cognitive patterns to accept religion. Most religions of a monotheistic nature if not all, name their own personal god 'the one ''true'' god' If there is more than one monotheistic religion, and more than a single one makes this claim, all but a single example of such a monotheistic deist cult must therefore be incorrect in their professed belief. That is, if a one true god IS in existence. For all we know, such powerful beings may well in ancient times have visited the earth and its cultures, most likely several given the massive differences in claims, and both poly- and mono-theistic religions, of different races, or different sects of the same race of rival natures making different claims. Species go extinct, and those at one time 'gods' (obviously, if they had or have the technology to come here from another star system they would possess such technology so as to quite literally appear magical to spear- bow- club- and blade-wielding societies. Even today, if an english, american, russian, etc. regular infantryman squad were to appear to such an uncontacted tribe with zero knowledge of such technology, things like radio communication, modern high explosives capable of remote detonation, bodyarmor that would of course utterly nullify a poisoned dart short of a lucky strike, deflect arrows, shatter stone blades, let alone things like laser aiming devices, aircraft, hell, even ultra-modern battlefield-deployed laser tanks, aircraft mounted chemical oxygen-iodine lasers (like the aircraft MIRACOIL devices), microwave weapons that can set up areas where anybody entering without shielding would experience non-lethal effects, primarily extreme burning pain (the frequency of these weapons is intended to penetrate only a few mm into the skin and so be nonlethal but cause extreme pain, although lethal effects are doubtless possible), modern sonic weapons, battleship-mounted hypersonic railguns (yes, the US have them now, battleship-mounted railguns, firing a 4kg round, AFAIK encased in a discarding sabot, the rounds being nonexplosive, solid slugs that not only can, using a ballistic trajectory hit a target from many, many many miles outside of visual range and despite simply being solid metal rounds, pack the same destructive energy as a cruise missile costing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars (ballpark estimate, since I am not an arms dealer but certainly hundreds of thousands at a bare minimum, per round, to a lowtech solid metal slug and sabot plus the electrical power to fire the railgun already on tap, the capacitor banks of the railguns being drawn from the nuclear reactors of the ship), sonic cannons, even (in test, afaik but I believe they have seen battlefield action) a kind of hybrid electrical/plasma pulse rifle, capable of either stunning or killing a target
These work by means of a laser-induced plasma channel, using a phenomenon known as laser blooming, using a pair of laserbeams of high energy to ionize a pair of conductive plasma channels through the air, through which an electric jolt is sent, if the energy setting be sufficient, there is not only an electroshock effect but also the lasers ablate a portion of the target surface into the gaseous state (not sure if the lasers contribute to the localized plasma cloud effect or only induce the plasma channel to serve as conductive channels for the electrical charge, along with the vaporization of part of the target)
The electric pulse then detonates the gas cloud of ablated target material, turning it to plasma, causing not only thermal and electroshock damage but also a concussive shockwave is caused to pass through the target when the plasma or vapor/gas cloud detonates when hit by the electric pulse (energy weapons are somewhat of an interest of mine. I'd love to build one of these PEP rifles myself, just for the fun of it (stands for 'pulsed energy projectile'), russian military operate both laser weapon-mounted battle tanks and also a tank-mounted high-energy microwave pulse device which is used for clearing mines by destroying their electronics. Although with modern plastic-encased mines, and using oldschool detonation systems like glass cartridges, a pressure-inflicting pin when stepped/driven on which ruptures the acid and a conductive filament which when the power supply (not sure if this could be rendered insusceptible to microwave pulses, although a faraday cage might be employed to dissipate the charge, especially, one presumes, if grounded, to protect the filament, perhaps the filament being made from carbon, and an acid like piranha bath (a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and concentrated sulfuric acid generating the unstable, and dangerous peroxymonosulfuric acid (used mainly in labs to, once any organics have been burnt to char as a pretreatment, for getting rid of the most resistant of gakked up mess caked onto glassware, since it will oxidize inorganic carbon to CO2)...
But yeah, anyhow, technology such as mentioned above already exists, much of it already in battlefield use, such as the iraq war (the illegal one, courtesy of collusion between bush and bliar (spelling quite intentional), these things would make men appear gods in the eyes of primitive people, seeming to be magic. And if WE, I.e 1st world, high-tech countries did not know such things were technology not magic, then if even more technologically advanced xenos life were to come to our planet for whatever reasons that technology would to us too, appear to be magic, and the aliens to be gods.)
So at a very, very early age, I realized that religion cannot be true, if the 'gods' are anything other than extremely powerful and technologically advanced alien species, taken in the context of the level of technological advancement, and the context also of religious belief of terran civillizations of the time.
