Wednesday, January 09, 2008

The Need for Religion

Today was an awesome day, I finally learned how to solve a rubix cube! Its cool but there is a lot of patterns that you have to memorize. It snowed a lot today so there was really nothing else to do.
I have an Ethnographic Essay due tomorrow for English so I worked on that. It is about Man's need for religion.

here it is:

Man’s Desperate Need for Religion

Why does man have a need for religion? This is the question that often pops into my head when I am sitting at church. I want to say right now, before I get into things, that I am not an Atheist. I am a Mormon and I go to church every week. At times I wonder why I’m there, I could be snowboarding or doing something important, but every week, I still go and sit for three hours listening to people talk about our religion. Why is religion so important that millions of people dedicate their time and money to teach it and live by it? Through this paper I hope we can find an answer.

First, I’m going to go over the many elements of religion. Most religions are based upon a specific event in history. For example, Jesus Christ is believed to be the messiah. Most religions believe in a higher power or God that governs all people. They also have set standards to live by or certain things you can and cannot do. They have a specific location to gather and worship on a specific day. Some religions can’t really even be considered religion, take Theravada Buddhism for example. Thomas A. Idinopulos writes, “Here is a something called "religion" which is not a religion. Although Theravada Buddhism is usually included in any book on the world's religions, it is not theistic, recognizes no sacred being or beings, and does not officially encourage worship of Buddha or any "higher being" (despite popular veneration of the Buddha-ideal). Theravada Buddhism appears to be a technique or program for human self-purification or self-fulfillment or self-negation.” So not all religions believe in a god.

Some people might wonder, is religion a scam? Did the government create it to control the people and get revenue? Why can’t it be proven? You might be thinking that whoever asks these types of questions must be paranoid. Austin Cline wrote, “One of the reasons for the existence of religion is that it's an effective means for society's powerful to control everyone else.” Diana Hardman states, “It is proven in statistics that without God as a basis for living that crime, sex, drugs, etc. has greatly increased.” So this shows that whether the Government created religion or not, religion does decrease a person’s motivation to commit crime. There is no solid evidence that there is a god or higher being. On the contrary, evolution has been proven on a microscopic level, InfoZine News says, “DNA sequencing and molecular biology have provided a wealth of information about evolutionary relationships among species.” So it is up to the person if they want to believe in a particular religion or not.

A major reason a person would want to be part of a religion is they want a feeling of belonging. Some people join a religion because they feel their life has no purpose and they want to put meaning to their life. Ohio State University Research states that there are 16 desires of humans that attract them to religion, “The desires are power, independence, curiosity, acceptance, order, saving, honor, idealism, social contact, family, status, vengeance, romance, eating, physical exercise, and tranquility.” Ohio State also stated, “people embrace religion because of a fear of death, as expressed in the saying ‘there are no atheists in foxholes’.”

There are many reasons why people need religion. As stated in the previous paragraph, people need a sense of belonging, direction, power and family. Imagine a world with no religion, what would it be like? What kinds of problems would there be? Without religion what is the purpose of our existence? It’s surely not to just live, reproduce and then die. There has to be something more meaningful to life. It’s up to you to decide if you want to have a long purposeful life, or to live in fear of dying. It’s an easy decision for me.


There you have it. Feedback is appreciated.

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