The idea of a deity and an afterlife came from the same people who wrote our barbaric scriptures, and they plagiarized it from the civilization that came before them. It is an after-effect of centuries of dogmatism and mass delusion. It is an old idea, and not a very good one, and it has been hanging around because people give in to cultural, parental, and religious bullying too easily. (More on this a little later).
Secularism has been around, in one form or another, as far back as the ancient Greeks. All of the great minds of discovery had no choice but to feign belief in the divine. Why? Because they valued their lives and thought they were doing important work, which they were. Speaking out against the gods or the god of Abraham was an automatic death sentence, and still is today in many parts of the world.
Still, when we speak of great discoveries, we credit the mind and not the religion, and that is as it should be. If anyone believes that Newton was a great physicist because he was a Christian (a Unitarian who denied the trinity and the divinity of Jesus), or that Alhazan was a great polymath because he was Muslim, you are sadly mistaken. Their ideas flew in the face of the rigidity and dogmatism of their faith, and it was very hard to reconcile the two. To the extent that they were scientific geniuses, it's to the extent that they were NOT religious. And in the case of Newton, perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived, he too was susceptible to mass delusion as evidenced by his lack of inquiry and skepticism in his later years. His work stopped the moment he started attributing the unknown to the divine.
Thankfully, modern scientists live in an age where openly stating disbelief in ancient ideas is not a death sentence as long as you live in a secular society. There is that word again, secular. I think we forget how important that word is. I think we forget how bad it was, and is, to live in religious societies. I think we forget that religion is a fucking stupid idea which has caused more harm and misery than anyone will ever know. And, even today, I think we forget that it's science, skepticism, and free inquiry which has allowed these secular societies to flourish.
Our current understanding of nature has changed. We have learned things since claims (god, afterlife, creation myths, etc) were made by Iron Age peasants who didn't know anything about the nature of the world. Our modern morality supersedes theirs BECAUSE OF our greater understanding. We know that other races and women are not inferior; we know that homosexuality occurs at the same rate across most mammalian species; we know that stoning people to death constitutes cruel and unusual punishment; we know that piling sins on a goat and chasing it out of the city does not relieve us of personal responsibility.
The people who gave us the ideas of gods and an afterlife are the same people who tell us, across the generations (just pick up any bible) that it was completely acceptable to massacre all the men in a village and keep the women and girls as slaves. When Genghis Khan did the same, at least he said it was because he liked fucking and he didn't want the boys to grow up and take their revenge; not because an imaginary god told his ancestors, one of whom wrote it down in a book full of other barbaric and crazy stories no child would believe if it were not for outside pressure. We simply know much more, and we don't need these ideas which were born in the infancy of our species.
Don't take anything on faith. Ask questions, demand evidence, and use the tools of logic and reason which took 4.5 Billion years to evolve. Don't throw away the only weapon you have, don't throw away your mind for a notion as ridiculous as faith. Faith means believing in something on insufficient evidence for inadequate reasons. Faith is an insult to humanity, and to the work of all the great minds who propelled us from wretched ignorance to reaching for the stars.
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