Religion's Origins

First, religion needs to be recognized for what it is: a conduit, or expedient for ethics. It is a widely-held misconception that adherence to religious principle is required to possess an ethical worldview. This misconception grows out of the monopoly that religion has retained over morality and ethics throughout most of recorded human history.

Religion's origins lie in the personal and social development of the human species. However, it is most broadly described as a social institution that extends to many areas of human life and that developed due to a complex mix of factors. But in its most benign capacity, excluding the perversions of religion at the hands of power-hungry leaders, the dogmatic ideas decreed to prop up decaying beliefs, and the subversions of genuine morality that have occurred in the process, religion satisfies a primal human urge. That urge, or necessity, is our need to explain and understand the world around us. In the infancy of the human species, these explanations took the form of superstition and lore. This is because we lacked the scientific tools to explain the dynamics of this planet, which- let's face it, appears pretty damn big and scary when we don't understand it. Natural disasters, disease, and death are less frightening with even a poor explanation than with no explanation at all. It is ingrained in our nature to fear the unknown; we have a compulsive need to seek, learn, and illuminate the dark. Religion thus satisfies a need; without it, our species would have had nothing to fill that void.

But religion goes beyond merely filling a void. If our basic human instincts demand an explanation to how the world works, our advanced human minds an explanation of why the world works. Additionally, religion is an outgrowth of our need to seek, contemplate, and understand patterns in space and time. Our minds demand that we see these patterns because they are wired to do so; this pattern seeking behavior is the basis for the broader ability to observe and learn that has contributed to our evolutionary success as a species. This mental capacity caused us to become aware that some things lie beyond our knowledge. Eventually, this same mental capacity caused us to believe that something lies beyond our experience. Therefore, religion underwent a gradual shift in purpose: in the first phase, these human tendencies manifested primarily in superstitious beliefs regarding the dynamics and functions of our environment. After superstition established an understanding of how the world worked, albeit a flawed one, these same human tendencies lead us wonder why the world worked as it did, ushering in the second phase: religion as we know it.

The next change religion underwent was not a shift in focus or emphasis, it was a fundamental change in purpose. Eventually, religion came to occupy a position of morality. What intrigues me is how religion's original purpose, the need to discover and chart the unknown, evolved into the source of morals and ethics.