Oddly this is not a post derived from a discussion in my major class. This is from my Canterbury Trip (one sadly devoid of tale telling on the bus). While there, each student got to sign up for a short 20-30 minute talk about The Church. I chose the Psychology of Religious Belief (which was held in the choir of Canterbury Cathedral, thus fulfilling my required blasphemy for the week).
Religious belief can be looked at as "the norm" for two reasons. One: only 10-15% of people consider themselves non-religious, and two: there is a rational, cognitive reason for believing in things. Long, Long ago, there was actually an evolutionary advantage to believing. The supernatural grabs your attention, so, when something bad or unusual happens, the supernatural explanation is often the first that comes to mind. And we need to assign agency to something when something unusual or unexpected happens. Imagine yourself a Stone Age hunter. If the bush moves and you assume it's nothing and it's actually something, you're dead. No more passing on your genetic material to whatever Stone Age female you can club and drag back to your cave that night. By assigning agency, we protected ourselves. And when there's no possible explanation, we assigned agency to God. Nowadays, we have science and such which can assign agency to real, perceivable agents, but it is still ingrained in our Cave Man minds that one must assign agency and one must assign agency to the first thing that pops into your head. And that became a wild animal or God.
Religion also served to bind communities together and keep order. In the early days of our first civilizations, communities were bound together by mutual ritual practice and order was kept by the rule of law. Of course, if no one caught you, you could get away with anything. That's where God comes in. He, like Santa Claus, knows if you've been bad or good and punishes you if you are bad. In that way, ancient civilizations created motivation not to do wrong even when no living people were around you. The Greeks incorporated this idea into their Shame as opposed to Guilt idea. Conscience did not exist as an internal concept for the Ancient Greeks; they had Shame instead. This could be instilled by a God or a God working through a man, but the end result was the same: atonement. This kept wrong-doers in line and brought people together to worship. And, in fact, mutual worship also serves to strengthen belief. If you go to Mass every Sunday (a rather time wasting ordeal), you must be going because you truly believe. This is the principle behind Cognitive Dissonance and it affects the average church goer just as much as it does the Mormon standing at your door trying to convert you to the teachings of Joseph Smith.
Atheism is in fact a very recent, western phenomenon. The urban, industrial society of today's cities often breeds atheism. There are fewer unexplained occurrences and agency can be more readily attributed to people or science and technology as opposed to God. Leisure time and education stimulate deeper thinking, causing people to question their beliefs. The watching eye of God has been replaced with the watching eye of CCTV. And people are brought together by Facebook and Twitter as opposed to mutual worship.
So will we start worshiping "Our Ford" instead of "Our Lord"? I don't think so. Religion is still a big part of many people's lives and faith isn't going away anytime soon. We still need to be able to think about things like what happens after we die, and for that reason faith structures are probably going to stick around.
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