WHY IS THERE RELIGION?

It’s certainly worth noting that all peoples of all places in all times (with the possible exception of the present) have had a religion. The reason is not understood as yet. One hypothesis is that people who act in a group have a better survival rate than those who act independently. If there is a catastrophe (whether man-made or an act of nature), survival will favor those who help each other simply because they’ve increased the odds of surviving. A group which doesn’t act as a community might be wiped out by the same type of catastrophe. Another theory maintains that if your god is more fierce than your neighbors’ god, you’ll fight harder, be more likely to win, and hence ensure the survival of believers in your god.

But there are other benefits beyond survival. The way the human brain is made makes a sense of community very rewarding. Virtually all people prefer harmonious music over discordant sounds. When we move together synchronously (such as during a dance with agreed-upon steps), or speak or sing together harmoniously, the human brain rewards us with a feeling of well-being. If the words or songs are supportive and uplifting, we get a double dose of pleasure from them. While music and speaking together are part of many religious rites, modern religion has moved away from synchronous movement, and is thus missing one of our reward responses. But ancient religions used this to its fullest.

The need for community is strong. Singing, dancing, or speaking together bind us in a rewarding way. The fact that an appeal to a ‘higher power’ is often part of these rituals is probably no more than hope. Hope that doing the right ritual in the correct way will bring rain, head off enemies, or avert natural catastrophes. Hoping together is rewarding, but not nearly as rewarding as acting together. Instead of (or in addition to) prayer, if one makes a bucket line to the nearest body of water, some of the crop might be saved during a drought. But to get the best out of our efforts requires not religion (and its acceptance of 'judgement' or 'fate') but that we both work and think together, and come up with a way to avert this and all future droughts by (say) building an aqueduct. While praying together is rewarding, accomplishing something as a group is much more so. So why do we huddle in our churches as the land around us dries up and our crops die? Simply because it is easier, and the lesser reward is immediate. And for the vast majority of human history, the price of un-belief was summary execution, usually by the cruelest means believers could come up with.

The need for religion is misleading in some respects; these diverse groups have had very different ideas about their gods and how to propitiate them. In ancient Mongolia, where the sky was believed to be god, and storms signs of his anger, one could be executed for hanging wet clothing outdoors to dry, because this was thought to attract a storm. This isn’t as unreasonable as it might sound at first. We have the same superstition these days; that if we go to the trouble to wash and wax our cars, it’s inevitable that rain will come soon. Friends may even blame the resultant storm on us. Just ratchet this up one notch, to where storms cost lives (as they can on the Mongolian Steppes), and you could be headed for execution, too. It wouldn’t be fair or reasonable or logical, but it would satisfy the suffering community’s need to correct the un-holy behavior, in the hope of staving off future storms, not to mention an outlet for their anger and revenge.

In the end, there’s no solid evidence for why humans feel the need for gods. Like all human subjects, it’s convoluted, twisted through history, mutated, and complex. But the need for a bound community and the reward of singing, speaking and dancing together remain in us. We should be forming communities around something other than a ‘higher power,’ but without the possibility for ultimate reward or punishment, we seem unwilling to do so.

Remember that until Martin Luther brilliantly translated the Bible into a language people outside the priesthood could read in the 1500s, people’s only knowledge of what was actually in it was what was presented by its best salesmen. Christianity is astonishingly self-protecting; the Bible is Holy Writ, and not to be questioned, and anyone who dares to question it is an agent of Satan, automatically evil, plus damned. Add the useful and comforting thought that ‘we’ have always held to this religion, and it seems self-evident that one should just shut up and participate. This makes it impossible to tell how many people have actually believed in their religions.