Is the human being essentially religious?

Human asks himself/herself, how I came into being, what I am doing here in this world, how this world came into being, what's the aim of life. Since he couldn't answer those questions, he created another concept, and that is god. He said god must have created me, this world, and the aim of my life is to make him pleased. The poor man gave his god every kind of attribute he could imagine, to create a great, tremendous concept named god, just to relieve him from thinking too much.

Is human, religious? I would say he is just curious and a little bit impatient and weak.

Spirituality is the sense that the Universe is Alive.

Religion is the belief it expects something of you.

Of the many paradigms that serve human survival,

Religion is a particularly recurring & enduring one.

It exists & persists because it conveys a survival advantage on those who believe.

On cannot really say humans are 'essentially' Religious

for the simple reason that many humans can survive without being so.

If Religion were essential, like say the air, this would not be the case.

But it is profoundly inaccurate to imagine, as many 'enlightened' liberals do, that Religion is some arbitrary mental dysfunction, here for no apparent reason besides intensifying human suffering.

The sense that an all encompassing Universal Logic is alive, within you and driving you to a cause...is profoundly alluring & empowering,

If given a choice to battle

A man with faith & a sword

Or one with just a sword

Choose the latter

This is the essence of Religion

Human beings are not essentially religious. Since religion is a man made conception we can not be at heart religious. However there is some part of the human condition that leads us to try and explain things beyond our conception. Religion is a way to answer those questions. Good or bad, religion will alway be connected with humans. We will never reach the stage where we have all the answers. So we will always look to bigger forces to explain our existance.

Not so much 'religious' as the term religious pertains to the conformation of a belief structure whether it be by choice, upbringing, or, in extreme cases by force.

In a sense Atheism, not choosing to believe at all, can be considered a religon since it is within itself a belief structure.

There is a certain, curiousity that human beings have from day one. This curiousity begins with trying to get a simple grasp of the world around them, and, over time, evolves into a great longing to understand the reasons of the universe as well as find their place in the 'grand scheme of things'. The questions of 'how' are eventually replaced with questions beginning with 'why'.

Religon, in it's many forms, offers a possible venue of understanding the world (and a possible 'beyond'). It offers a set of morals and standards to be followed thus providing a concept of 'right and wrong'. An 'answer sheet on life' for those who seek it. In short, it attempts to satisfy many of human beings' basic curiousities.

I don't think so.

I do think that Humans want to believe in SOMETHING. Many Humans are afraid of the Afterlife, or the Unknown, so religion tends to be very comforting to them.

As for being religious, a lot of it comes down to how you were raised and what you believe in. It's possible to come out of a religious family being an Atheist. I've seen that happen a lot as well.

That depends on what you mean by essentially.

I would say that human beings are INITIALLY religious. It is very important to humans as a species to understand their surroundings. If you look back historically, no ancient culture said they didn't know where the sun came from, they all thought they knew about their natural surroundings (though they we all wrong). This shows that humans feel a need to have explanations for things. This is still apparent in children, who easily accept the concept of a god because it is a simple explanation for complicated things.

Now, if by essentially you mean in at the core of their psyche, I would say that humans are very irreligious. Humans always strive to better understand things that they have already learned. Once they learn the what, they ask how, then why, and so on. Proof of this is in the constant advancement of science. As a species, humans ultimately never settle for their explanation for things. We used to think the earth was flat, even Newton's theory of gravity was proven wrong by Einstein. These theories weren't disproven because they had obvious flaws, but because humans weren't willing to accept something they didn't fully understand, so they kept thinking thinking until they thought of something better.

This is even apparent in religion. There are man religious scientists and other people who try to look at religious books like the bible and scientifically prove things in there, such as the great flood, rather than just accept it as fact.

No, humans beings are essentially irreligious.

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I've read people's responses and I find it very interesting that so many people believe that religion is only taught. I am an athiest who was raised by athiests. But that doesn't mean I was never religious. Of course, I was never a christian or muslim, but at a young age, before I could speak, I naturally accepted things as existing just because. Though I didn't personally experience this, I've found children are VERY quick to accept the concept of santa. Once the present gets under the tree, no child questions how santa could have done it, they simply accept it. This shows how prone humans are to religious beliefs. A possibly better example is ancient mythologies. No one TOLD the first Greeks that thunder and lightning was the god Zeus showing his anger, they came to that conclusion themselves.

Are human beings essentially religous? I assume you mean born religious.

Let us take the following scenario into consideration:

A child is born into a non-religious family (no mention of religion/higher power at all), of which lives in a jungle amongst a tribe of approximately 5000 people. At the age of 4, the child's village is whiped out and he is left in the middle of the jungle alone, fending for himself based on instincts and what he has learned during his upbringing.

The child has no formal belief system and has never concerned himself with the possibilities of "life after death". However, upon experiencing the death of his whole village, the child is introduced to a whole new aspect of life. He now knows that there is an "end". At some point every moving/living thing around him will cease to move/live.

Curiosity builds into the child's head, in which this curioisty begins to not only drive him mad, but somewhat desperate. One day during the child's daily routine of finding food to eat, he stumbles across a book buried under a patch of leaves. The child open's the book, only to see magnificent pictures, of what seems to be a magnificent man, a super man.

The child, bearing no formal knowledge of any other way of life besides that of which was normal in his tribe, is intrigued by this man. Pictures of a massive man with seemingly uncanny strength, and most importantly, this man is flying. The child tries and tries to fly, but with no avail. He is so confused as to why these pictures show a man flying, but he is unable.

His only logical explanation is that this man is a super man, a god. This is his god. Fast forward 10 years, the child decides to wander further out, meets a run-away girl from another tribe, has kids, and only logically (his logic) raises the kids under the assumption that god is the man he found in that book.

A lot of nurture, w/ a little bit of nature. His way of life was his religion, the super man in his book was his god.

For more civilized groups of people, our way of life is our religion, and god is the person they have put in their books.

Our essence is spiritual.

Human has faults but spirit is pure.

We have the tendency to worship but just what we worship gets confused. Most of us know we aren't the greatest yet many are satisfied to worship something not much greater than ourselves.

So we havn't really understood how small we are and how great God is.

We have ability to understand deep truths and we have a tendency to get distracted onto trivial matters.

Humans like to worship something or someone therefore we have added many things onto our worship and called it religion. So there is the tendency but that tendency sometimes become favourable for our spirituality and sometimes it becomes unfavourable.

Our spirituality means to realize our pure spiritual nature and our place in all things and to strive to serve and please God.

The German philosopher and theologian Schleiermacher said that we were all religious, in that we had an innate sense and taste of the infinite within us. Formal religions are merely attempts to come to terms with this.

Unfortunately for philosophical debate, many on these pages and elsewhere confuse religion with culture wars about lifestyle, and use it to merely define where they stand on issues of dreary public policy.

A human being need not be a religious person but must be a person of moral and discipline.