Reasons for Religion

It is useful to realize where religion has come from and why we have it. Where does the human need for spiritual belief come from?
I say, it is an acquired need. Acquired as a species throughout the centuries, and acquired as an individual within our society. Let me explain..

Depending on the society in which we grow up, the concept of religion is more or less spoon-fed from when we are little. The right for freedom of religion which is constitutionalized in many developed countries is therefore a right not applicable to children. Religion is forced upon them by their parents and environment at an age where they are not mentally developed to come to their own conclusions. But the matter of freedom of religion will be discussed more in-depth in a future blog entry, as it's a topic on it's own.

The need for spiritual belief is a very old one, stemming from an age where humans lived in groups of hunter-gatherers. Probably even longer before. Without digging to deep I'd say it has arisen somewhere in the evolution between monkey's and humans. As far as we can scientifically know, the need and presence of spiritual belief is reserved for human beings. It cannot be ruled out that monkeys or even our pets have it, but we have no scientific way to find out due to lack of effective communication.
As with everything in evolution, there must have been a certain need for spirituality to develop. Now, when humans initially lived together in tribes of hunter-gatherers, there was a strong need for social cohesion. There are several 'emotions' that help with this social cohesion.
One of them is aggression, which was needed to fend off intruders (human and otherwise) and protect the tribe.
Another was discrimination, the feeling that people from other tribes are no good, which serves the same purpose of keeping the tribe together.
Last but not least we have the social cohesion of a common deity, and all the rituals that come with it, which stem from that spiritual emotion. If a certain group has a common set of beliefs and rituals that come with it, this serves social cohesion very well. We still see this today where people from various cultures in the middle east, Africa and Europe feel a sort of bond just because of their common deity and all the rituals it entails. Language and food are other factors that benefit social cohesion.

Looking at the above one could come to the conclusion that spirituality, like aggression, discrimination and also love, can be seen as an emotion. Yes it can be seen that way.
And depending on the social context and strength of the spiritual emotion this surfaces as some form of religion. The former sentence has severe implications, specially the words social context. What I mean by that is explained with the following example.
Say we take a young child (not yet able to speak or understand spoken word) from the middle east and place him in Texas. The chances of this kid becoming a Muslim is very small, because the social context he is placed in will most likely make him a christian. Of course, his new parents may raise him without religion and at a later point he may choose some religion as it suits him. But even if his parents don't raise him that way, his environment has a very strong christian backdrop and it will inevitably influence him in that direction.

So now we have established the evolutionary reason for a spiritual emotion in ourselves, what further purpose brings this to us?

All religions that I know off have some concept about life after death. This is a big topic that deserves it's own post, which it will get. But the fact that religions make this promise to people make them popular. It is hard for a person to find peace with the fact that after one's death there will be nothing. It is the big unknown, because nobody has come back from death. Yet it is a universal thing in life, we all die. If we wouldn't die, we wouldn't be alive, because one doesn't go without the other. Religion provides consolation for death more than for anything else. Not only to the dying, but also the ones surviving a loved one. The fact that a loved one is still "alive" somewhere in heaven can be very consoling if you believe it. Life after death and consolation are two things almost every human being asks for in some stage of their life, and many find the answer in religion.

So here we have two things that people look for in their lives and which are provided by the established authoritative systems of theology.

Another thing is leadership. People need leadership, and in the case where they look for spiritual leadership they turn to religion. Or whiskey.
This religious leadership often comes in form of ethical guidelines. Rules on how to behave morally so to say. The ten commandments are probably the most well-known. They are so general that they can't really be attributed to just one religion, but to believers and non-believers. Having said that: the commandment of not serving any other god than the christian god does obviously not apply to atheists. Now we have arrived at the ethical issue of religion, which is only to be mentioned here as it needs more than one blog-post on its own!

Last but not least: people turn to religion to get an explanation for things they cannot understand. It is hard for human beings to accept that they don't understand certain things, so they seek for answers. Where logic and experience fall short, there is an intellectual vacuum which can be filled with religion. Thus religion provided answers to scientific questions for many centuries. Truth is, that people have believed a lot of strange things. That the earth is flat for example, and that the sun turns around it. Science has solved a lot of mysteries and somehow demystified the world we live in. This is also one of the reasons that religion is slowly on it's way out. I am fairly confident that in the long term, we can find the answer to all questions and make religion obsolete as a means of explaining the unexplainable. The law of Murphy dictates this: anything that can happen, will happen sooner or later!

Looking back at all this, religion seems to be a solution for quite a few things, and gives an answer to quite a few questions that we all struggle with. It seems quite a task to set it apart, throw it out through a stained-glass window, and replace it with something else. A lot of people would probably say "don't try this at home! it will go horribly wrong!". Which it has: some of the most terrifying totalitarian regimes were atheist ones. Albeit not because they were atheist, but because they didn't have a proper replacement for what they tried to abolish, most of all a moral code.

So establishing a non-spiritual alternative for what the religions provide us seems to be quite a challenge. One that I gladly accept!