Ah, the million dollar question, "why do we have religion"? What purpose does it serve? Why bother? etc.
I don't know that there is a good answer, and I think that part of that stems from the fact that we don't really know what religion is (see the ever-growing thread on that one). How can we know why something exists if we don't even know what it is?
Maybe there is some psychological factor that draws us to religion. Maybe religion is just an aspect of culture which explains anything that is thought to be unexplainable. Maybe there really is something "out there" (or "in here") that is bigger than us -- call it God, call it the Divine, call it the Source, call it whatever -- that is drawing us to it.
The thing is, I don't think there's a "one-size fits all" answer to this question.
Even when it comes to the afterlife, things get murky. Take, for example, Judaism. Many forms of Judaism don't have any answers to the question of "what happens after I die". The approach is that the focus ought to be on this life, not on the afterlife. Beyond that, it's up to the individual to answer those questions for themselves, if they want an answer. Now I realize that this may sound contradictory to what I said in the "Define Religion" thread, but there I was talking more on a micro level (the level of the individual) rather than on the macro / meta level like I am here.
So yeah... I'm not sure why we have religion. Like I said, that's like the million dollar question for a lot of people. :-)  |