why do people have the necessity to believe in a god or gods?

Question

basically its happened in all cultures, I think I've never heard of one without some kind of religion

Answer 1

because they are brainwashed.

Answer 2

Its the opium of the people :)

What follows is just my opinion, and not necessarily factual.

The people that are alive today are offspring from thousands of years of human evolution. The people that have survived and reproduced over the last 5,000 years or so obviously felt a need to continue living and felt that life had a purpose. Otherwise, they wouldn't care about waking up the next day, or doing anything for that matter. so the poeple that felt like there was no purpose in life slowly get trimmed out of the gene pool while the people that believed there was a purpose to life survived and reproduced. now you have a large group of people that all believe there is a purpose to life, but WHAT IS IT???? everyone came up with different answers to that question.

Therefore, in my opinion, religion is the answer to the question "Why are we here?" and different people will come up with different answers. The question will continue to be asked because the general population can't stand to think that our existence is meaningless. The population can't stand to think that our existence is meaningless because of evolution. The people that accepted the idea that life is pointless didn't reproduce.

Ironically, it seems that evolution plays a big part of the formation of religion.

Darwin was the man.

Answer 3

1. Because God is the answer. }} WAIT WAIT {{ Don't stop reading. We need easy answers. Explanations, right? Listen to people talk about potitics or about family regarding various reasons for others' decisions and behaviors. True answers are very complex but people tend to come up with pat answers, but the main pat answer is to pretend to know the true answer. Every religion and belief in God is an opinion. We want understandable explanations.
Yes there may be a God but the evidence is unclear. Some of us believe in IT (God) in order to simplify our thinking. A sort of laziness (if you will).

2. Some of us can feel IT rather than reason into IT. After years of being bewildered about why people around the world kneel, bow, and pray, I now get it. I am not a born again Christian but I would never belittle one. To me, every religion is equally valid as an opinion of the origin of that religious feeling/experience.

Archetypes, I think, are valid, but don't explain the religious FEELING.

Answer 4

"There are only two ways to live your life, one is as though nothing is a miracle, and the other is as though
everything is a miracle." Albert Einstein

People who lived at stone age or uncivilized period, what they lack of is science, what they need is education. Science enlightens human thinking, and education changed the human civilization.
When people don't understand how nature work, they answer the question by using supernatural power theory such as god or gods. Those answers can easily be created and be accepted without going through all the rational explanation. Why? Because of the belief.
Once you established what belief you believe, you'd fulfill what psychological satisfaction.
In fact, nowadays, many people are still having such belief to satisfy their psychological needs.

Answer 5

I believe in God for two reasons:
a. Science as we know it says something can't come from nothing. Someone must have created the original materials that started the Big Bang.
b. As a friend brought up- the beauty of nature. Why aren't we just a gross world of plants containing vomit-filled substances? Chance? Things worked out too well. Someone must have planned everything out and used every concept of science to create what they thought up. You can basically say that science was the tool that God used.

-I believe in a higher being for those two reasons. HOWEVER, I do know that people like to use religions for three other reasons:
a. It gives them a purpose in life, and makes them look forward to an afterlife.
b. Governments can use people's religious beliefs to their advantage. Some use them to justify acts that can bring on death, etc. while others (and this is in third-world places where science is widely-unknown and unpracticed) like to use "witchcraft" involved in some religions as a way to make people think that they are being cured.
c. Governments, parents, etc. like to use religion as a way of keeping people under control by mentioning the moral quotes, etc. involved in religious text. I know some people -for example- who are atheists but read the Bible. (They like the positive messages and moral values that it contains.)

Answer 6

(1)Some areas of the human brain have been identified in some reasearch projects that appear to suggest we come already "hard wired" for spirituality.
(2)Some scientists believe that there is a gene or genes that determine some spiritual traits or behaviors.
(3)Psychiatrist Carl Jung developed psychological theories which were opposed to the theory that "won" (Freud): He believed that human beings share a common type of unconscious realm called the "collective unconscious" where there are models ("archetypes) of certain needs and types of meaning that most humans have. In Jungian theory, the need for religion (or belief in a god or gods) has to do with our psychological unconscious need to interact with archetypes.
(4)My own theory as a psychiatrist is that we're believers in search of what to believe in. Even so-called atheists believe in something (that there's no god, in their case). So the need is not always to believe in a being, but to believe in principles. In the case of atheists we find the archetypes' role being fulfilled by other people or things in their lives, many of which do not have an overtly religious connotation.

Answer 7

People generally want to know who they are, why they are alive
and where they are going. Rules and regulations for living are, unfortunately necessary and religion provides some of these.......Quite a few of these rules are fanatical and applied before we had modern electricity and knowledge. Religion can be comforting to some people. So whether we believe in God or scientific theory we have an answer to take us on our journey through life. It is only through living that we can truly konw.

Answer 8

Because often times in my life, God was all I had, and when you've got nobody and nothing, you need to not feel alone. And sometimes, when I'm at the end of my rope, and I'm not sure I can hang on anymore, I've needed some reason to hang on. God gave me that. So for me, the answer to this question is entirely personal.

Answer 9

not every religion have god. take buddhist for example they dont wordship god nor believe in god. its more liek a philosophy than a religion. they just teach u stuff like how find your own happiness or do stuff without depending on none else but urself and 2 let go some of ur desire and how to think for urself instead of a bible etc

Answer 10

Because, evolution-wise, it is better to believe things are there that are not than to not believe things are there that are.
We evolved to believe there is a tiger hiding in the grass, and run. If we didn't believe there was a tiger, and there was, we wouldn't live to have more children.

We don't know there is a God or not. Totally unproven at this point in time. We have to believe there is something because we have to fear to survive, just in case he's a malevolent god.

Answer 11

Becase all people have this desier to belive in a higher power . Most cultures do have surtin religions but thier are also some that don't belive in religion or God at all i'm catholic and i do belive in god bye loves it