Religion does NOT keep one sane.
I beg to differ! Christians believe that if they commit all their concerns to God, peace of mind will ensue:
"Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding,
shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."
My own life being a series of crises, I can say honestly that I have accumulated sufficient verifiable empirical evidence to convince me that the above statement is true. So from the standpoint of Christianity I would say that religion can indeed keep one sane.
Nothing that's not in the natural world has any demonstrable power to affect me. It
Then why does
music affect you? Music is nothing but organized vibration: that is the extent of its reality in the natural world. But it moves you. It can give you a spiritual experience. It can move heart, soul, spirit, and whatever it is that resides in our deepest recesses with something more profound than a fleeting emotion.
Science produces the musical instrument, yes. But the transcendent experience a musician elicits in us, within our innermost being, can only begin to be explained by the supernatural. There is no scientific reason why organized vibrations should make a person experience love, or hate, or sadness, or joy.
On the question of which is better for humanity, I think the answer is that we have to embrace both. The Christian religion approves science because it teaches that science itself proceeds from the God who gives wisdom, intellect, curiosity, creativity, and the power to infer and deduce: "I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of
witty inventions," the scriptures declare. But the Christian scriptures also provide a moral framework within which science should function. "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and other such precepts ought to preclude the abuse of science, or at least give us pause before we invent the next weapon of mass destruction.