Understanding why people are religious isn't hard.
This article by David Shariatmadari is sort of a review of Dorothy Rowe’s new book “What Should I Believe?”.
In the book Rowe looks at why people believe what they do. Apparently we are all motivated by our fear of annihilation. Some of us seek solace from this unpleasant fact through religion and dreams of an imagined after life. While others are content with the thought that their work will remain or that they will live on in the memory of friends or via the selfish-genes they spread about.
It’s hard to get a full grasp of what Rowe’s full argument is since Shariatmadari goes off tilting at his own windmills which in this case seem to be atheists who espouse better education as a cure to religion. He rightly claims that even if we did get rid of religion, people are stupid enough to find some other nonsensical ideology to get hung up about and the ills associated with religion would just move of elsewhere. He then makes the claim that such attempts to educate people wouldn’t work any way because of our psychological fear of death.
So essentially he seems to be saying our emotional and psychological evolution is now stuck and our only way to cope is through death cults from the middle ages.
