Fundamentally, what is religion?
It is a set of beliefs and theories on how the universe as the promulgators of the tenets saw it works and functions. It need not be true, it need not be false, but the interest or the need for this concept is more sociological and ideological. It is more of a set of rules than a system of unravelling the mysteries of the universe, although the latter is a significant part of religion. It's chief concern lay with the society than with the heavens.
Man is a social being. Therefore, in order to live among other such beings, each with objectives and aspirations as self-serving and diverse as one's own, a protocol has to be stipulated. The protocol goes by various names and forms from the Ten Commandments, Shariah, Dharma, Tao, etc depending on the region. Judeo-Christian cultures have the Ten Commandments, Islamic culture has the Sharia, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cultures have Dharma, and so on.
If one looks at all these scriptures, one would notice striking similarities between them, indicating an underlying symmetry, the sociological need to arrive at very similar sets of rules across diverse cultures and beliefs. This means that the fundamental sociological needs of every human being is the same, regardless of the culture, race of geography. They are:
- The need for respect: Human beings crave for the respect and approval of their peers. It is an evolutionary trait to make us want to be agreeable to others, so that we remain a social species. No matter what anybody says regarding how they live life for themselves, and how they are not influenced by what the neighbours will say, they will always do, for we are hard-wired that way.
- The need for survival: This need is not restricted to us alone. Every organism does the most in its power to stay alive.
- The need for comfort and pleasure: We constantly strive to make life easier for ourselves, it is also an evolutionary trait, perhaps trying to make us work towards the betterment of our own lives to give us a better chance of survival.
To broadly cater to the above needs, humans have constantly tried many strategies in the past. We were hunters and gatherers, we then invented the techniques of agriculture to make life easier for us, so on and so forth. But these needs frequently intrude upon the same of another, demanding a resolution of this issue in order to maintain man as a social animal. This is the first necessity of religion; to identify boundaries on the pursuit of one's needs in order to extract maximum benefit for maximum number of people in an ideal case, or in a more practical case, to extract the benefit as equivalent to one's position in the society's pecking order, for it was rarely egalitarian.
It's next concern was to enforce these boundaries, in a form as agreeable to the followers of this set of boundaries on one's personal liberties. This is very similar to managing a bunch of people with the carrot and stick approach. The stick is the limit on one's liberties, the carrot is the fulfilment of need 1: the need for respect. A person who acts unrestrained and has a seeming disregard for another's needs suffers from diminished respect and approval from the society than another who binds himself by these norms.
This now established, these rules have successfully infringed upon personal freedoms for the sake of the greater good. Now, there is another need to be addressed; something not discussed as of yet. It is not a necessity like the above three, but still is important to keep people from getting restive and frustrated. Man is an intelligent being, at least when compared to other species that share the planet. With such a large brain, man was occupied by the need to survive, escape predators and devise hunting strategies when he was a nomadic hunter or gatherer. As time progressed, man got less busy and got more free time in his hands, letting his intelligent and curious mind wander into pondering the questions of life and its purpose.
Once again, it was religion's responsibility to answer these questions and man tried to explain all phenomena he observed satisfactorily with the resources and knowledge at his disposal at that point of time, with his imagination filling the gaps. Religion also became the bridge that connected us to nature, gave a seeming purpose to existence and provided us with answers that satiated our appetite for knowledge. This is religion in its crudest form; it lays out rules for peaceful co-existence among the society as the formulators who defined its confines saw it, it provides answers to questions that emerged from the long periods of inactivity brought about by a settled lifestyle and it tries and maintains order among the group of people with whom the formulators of the same identified.
As one can see, religion can be purely attributed to addressing a sociological need to maintain order in a society of individuals with interests and aims as diverse as themselves. This was probably why government and religion were barely discernible in most cultures till around a hundred years ago, they both more or less had the same function. This was the sole reason, apart from man's egregious odiousness, that religion transformed itself into organised religion.
Organised Religion is probably the reason for everything that is wrong with our world, from terrorism, the crusades, the holocaust (it was not so much as religious as racial, nevertheless), I could possibly go on. One could name any problem on a large scale, not something like one failing in mathematics, and possibly trace it to religious intolerance. So, how did something devised to maintain peace become something of a cause with which one can justify killing thousands of people? For this, one must compare our society with a pack of wolves, or a pride of lions, or hyenas, or any social animal.
Elephants, for example, have the matriarch at the helm, with other females following her to any end. This was a system devised by the mind of elephants, who also had similar needs like our own. It was probably noticed that males tend to often get rowdy and uncontrollable when they went into their teens, while females remained sensible and docile. Therefore, they had to go. Males were kicked out, to rot in the open grasslands, while the females had the wisdom of the matriarch to guide them. Males, when kicked out, formed their own bachelor herds, which is a different story. This is a female-dominated society unlike our own, where the women called the shots. However, it must be noted that this system of obeisance to the matriarch is restricted to the herd. Another female of another herd would munch grass disrespectfully and pass water in front of our matriarch with impunity if it came to it. That female would have her own matriarch, whom she reveres above all else, and would be offended if somebody did that to her.
Similarly, we are also like a pack of wolves or a herd of elephants, who have respect for a common entity that maintains order within the clan, restricted to the clan. Formulators of their religion concerned themselves primarily with furthering the cause of their own clan alone, not humanity in general. So, there must also be a clause in every religion that calls for loyalty to that religion, as a clan could identify itself then only by religion, nationalism is a relatively new concept. Added to loyalty alone, there must be a mechanism that ensures that the clan is defended from other such clans, either through hard influence (invasion) or soft influence (conversion). So, came the concept for fighting for one's religion in order to defend it. The defence of religion is a vague grey topic, open to interpretation, and hence even though Christians, during the crusades, invaded the Holy Land that was thousands of miles from Rome, they were not attacking Islam, but defending Christianity. We, however, need this "one of us, one of them" mentality if we are to survive, or we would have just dissolved into another clan, which typically in olden days involved enslavement and or or ethnic cleansing. So, religion had to have teeth to defend itself and its followers, the defence being subjective owing to practical considerations. Although anachronistic, this trait of religion has existed tenaciously throughout history, and while the world would be a much better place without it, the world would not be a good place without religion itself, for all the reasons mentioned above.
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