#Facebook: Why do people belive in #religion

I love me some Facebook Questions. For real, they populate some pretty random questions on the right hand side of my Facebook navigation ... like this one ... "Why do people belive in religion?" Here are the top 3 reasons as voted by Facebook users.

1. Belief in a higher power is what gives many a sense of reason or purpose to life and existence. With intelligence and self-awareness, naturally come the desire to find a meaning for it all to be in the first place.

Humanity tends to reject the concept that we are all merely "just here", and so having such faith can provide great comfort to the faithful.
Science can provide answers to the tangible things in life. For example, how does gravity work. It explains the physical world around us. Before we observed things with the rational scientific method, religion and science often intermingled. In the modern world we now separate science and religion in our secular society.
 
What science fails to explain is why. Why am I here? What is my purpose? Is there any meaning to life? The existence of God can or cannot be proven. Organized religion is just a centralized place for people with common beliefs to meet and share their common quest of the divine. It is much of a community as it is a place to worship.


 
Imagine sitting down with a deck of cards. Without a game to play, you possess nearly unlimited possibility, but very few interesting outcomes. You could of course make your own game, but not many people have the creativity or the patience to do this.
 
Now, imagine sitting down with a deck of cards to play Solitaire. All of the sudden you have a framework of rules in which to act, and you can act rationally inside those rules to win or lose.
 
Religion puts the infinite possibilities into a shared context, it gives us some rules and expectations with which to use. Religion is the codification of society. It is a pursuit of meaning beyond what we can simply experience with our basic senses. It opens a dialogue and community with people who share similarities to us, and gives us a perspective to share with others.
 
Try finding directions without picking a final destination. Most people are not willing to just pack up, hit the road and see what they will... existentially speaking.

 Check out the work of Dr. Andrew Newberg.

2. A theory goes something like this: Religion is a human slant on the brain-wiring that attempts to make animals work for the good of the pack, clan, or tribe, instead of the individual. As humanity evolved into our modern selves, we applied our knowledge, experiences, and social norms to that basic wiring, thereby creating religion.





Well, I think it's safe to say everyone "believes in" religion as an organization, since its existence is pretty plain. So I assume you mean to ask why people participate in organized religion. There are, of course, many answers to this, depending on the individual in question. Think of the institution of the state. Why do people participate in this institution? One person might do so because they believe it is the best available means to reaching some desired end. Another might do so simply because they were born and raised within a state, and may not have given much, if any, thought to their participation therein.
 
Similarly, some people participate in organized religion simply because it is what they have always done, while others participate because they believe it is the best available means to reaching some desired end. This end will, in turn, vary. Many certainly believe their religious traditions are the best available means to securing some form of immortality and eternal reward. Others may have more this-wordly interests in mind, whether they be something base, like profit, or something more noble, like perfection of character. Yet others, however, may believe the activity entailed by such participation to be an end in itself, as in the case of the Muslim mystic Rabia al-Adawiyyah, who famously prayed, "O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your Own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.” Similarly, the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart warned: "Know this: as long as in one way or another you seek your own advantage, you will never find God, for you do not seek God exclusively. You are looking for something else besides God. You behave as if you transformed God into a candle, in order to find something; and when one has found what one looked for, one throws away the candle." This, however, raises the question of the relationship between seeking God and participation in an organized religion, which is more than I have time to address at the moment.


       
3. Fear. People are brainwashed to believe that, if they don't have faith - which means not only belief but failure to question illogical beliefs - that they will be in trouble not only in this life but in the afterlife. The threat of an eternity of torture is a strong motivational tool.
 
Religion has been used for centuries to control the masses of people. If you get them to obey without question, you can accomplish a lot more than if they all think for themselves.
 
The sad part is, many religious people believe that if they profess their faith, they will be forgiven for all their sins, so they go ahead and do awful things to other people, knowing they can get away with it because they are "godly" - or worse, that they will be commended for it because the horrible things they are doing are against people who are "ungodly" i.e. do not believe in the same religious laws.
 
Many people are afraid that if religion disappears, that people will do horrible things to each other because, without belief in a higher power, there is no reason to act morally. This is why many believe atheists are the worst kind of monsters. While there are logical reasons to act in the best interest of society, it is often at one's own detriment, so one would need an inherent sense of altruism in order to act morally without faith. Since most people are naturally selfish, religion is the only way to scare most of them into behaving most of the time.

Not too shabby ... not too shabby at all. 

Oh baby, I love it when you pout at me like that. *drool*