Religion

What is the main influence in a person’s behavior? Psychologists and psychiatrists have disagreed about that question from the advent of their science. Is it their emotions, their physical desires and comforts, their baser instincts or their ability to reason that most influences their behavior? I propose it is their religion. Funk and Wagnall defines religion as the beliefs, attitudes, emotions, behavior, etc. constituting a person’s relationship with the powers and principles of the universe, esp. with a deity or deities. Even atheists and agnostics have a religion, no matter how much they try to deny it. Everyone has beliefs regarding the universe and few are more passionate about them than atheists! So we may say that atheists are among the most religious people in our midst. For more than a hundred years scientists have been denouncing Darwinian Evolution as a realistic explanation for life on Earth, yet we still teach it in our public schools as the only valid reason for our existence and absolutely fail to offer alternatives or even pretend there are alternatives to it. Let me return to religion before this turns into a tirade against Darwinism.

Religion is not only our attempt to approach God, but also one of the ways He approaches us. Of course this is plainly evident in such wonderful traditions as Judaism and Christianity where the evidence takes little to no effort to see how God longs for our companionship, or communion, if you prefer. What about paganism, ancestor worship or atheism, which can only be described as demonic in nature? There can be no mistake that participants in these brands of worship are attempting to discern the truth, to gain a union with the divine or the universe as they understand it, so the real question becomes does God try to approach pagans and atheists and others in these cults and misguided religions?