To continue your analogy of people praying on a hijacked plane, they don't fight the hijacker who is, presumably, armed and quite willing to kill them because they fear for their lives (small picture - they get stabbed/shot they die, not big picture - plane crashes they die). Heroism is a lack of time to consider the facts. They pray in the hope the someone more powerful than themselves will intervene, if an armed SAS lad was on the plane everyone would be asking him to help not praying to God. Religion as a whole, with singular of multiple deities, is the bases of a moral frame work for society, the installed belief in an authority figure who is inescapable and infallible. Fear is what drives all human kind, a sad fact that the many governments of the world are cashing in on at the moment. The fear of death, the fear of failure, the fear of isolation. These are the things which drive us. "Morality is the herd instinct in the individual" Oscar Wilde.


If you believe everything you read, better not read.