by David Colello

Created on: April 25, 2008

The need to believe is universal, although what someone chooses to believe in is the most individual of all human characteristics. A great many believe in a single God, even if they cannot all agree on which culture's God is the "only" single God. A great many others, perhaps most, believe in multiple deities. Some believe in an eternal Way, or order, that everything in Nature follows. Atheism is also a powerful belief system, where a belief in the human intellect replaces god(s). In America, individual freedom has extended so far that the only thing some believe in is their team's chances of winning on any given night. In my opinion, it is vastly more interesting to discuss the innate human need to believe than to argue over the details of the countless belief structures.

Humans need to make sense of the world that they live in, and are passionately driven towards finding answers to their questions. For everyday issues, superstitions are an incredibly common behavior often built up to explain why things happen. However, something grander is called for when people are confronted with the larger issues of life: birth, death, beauty, laughter, pain, joy, peace, sadness, not to mention the looming crisis questions, "why is there something instead of nothing?" and "what happens to consciousness after death?" Religions, along with logic and science, have come about to combat these more difficult issues.

Religions are the most common method for a society to collectively answer the big questions in life. Complicated forms of religious belief have been documented in virtually every culture ever known, going back to at least the beginning of recorded history. In fact, the earliest known examples of human writing, pictures, and sculptures are all religious in nature. Does this mean that newer religions such as Scientology should be compared with Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Taoism, or for that matter the scribbling on ancient cave walls? Yes, but only if the comparison is based on the roots of why these beliefs came into existence. The ubiquity and underlying moral similarity of different religions speaks volumes about the basic human need for belief.

Science has gradually begun to replace religion in the modern humanistic Western world, but it is also a belief system that seeks to make sense of the world around us. It differs from religion not in its root causes or end goals insomuch as it does in its methods and dogma. Whereas religions weave

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