Extreme religiosity is associated with brain damage. Hit an agnostic hard enough on the head and he/she will turn to God. And I am convinced that some are born with defective brain wiring, that there is in effect a God gene. [Wasn't this a lead article in a Newsweek some years back?]
But lemme explain my view more clearly. Humans have big brains. Along with those big brains are baggage, self-defeating irrational behavior, an assortment of nearly paralyzing feedback loops in nerve cell programming or development. Especially, though, we fear.
With our big brains, we can imagine all the bad things that can happen to us and to those we like or depend on. The ability to anticipate bad things means fear. Fear can be paralyzing, numbing. Truly, Frank Herbert wrote in Dune that "fear is the mind-killer...." So we humans do anything we can to alleviate fear. By magic, by rituals, by appealing to gods.
Irrational behavior is not seen only in humans. It's not only a big-brain thing. Consider, if you will, the chicken. Put a chicken into a skinner box, give the chicken intermittent reinforcement. If a chicken gets fed when it pecks a certain lever, then the chicken pecks at the lever when its hungry. BUT. If the chicken is rewarded by a food pellet only SOMETIMES when it pecks a lever, the poor chicken goes crazy, obsessively pecking at that lever.
We are exactly like that chicken. [Gambling is as good an example as religion. When I go into a casino, I see all those chickens pulling at slot machine levers. Gambling is an obsession caused by intermittent reinforcement.] We pray or sacrifice, and often times, more often than not, things work out okay. (We only die once, but we fear death many times. And the last time, when we die, we do not live to draw any kind of false conclusion from the experience.) So like the chicken, we pray and propitiate the gods constantly and obsessively. That is how we deal with anxiety.
Think about sacrifice. God or gods have no need of human sacrifice. They don't eat flesh or the produce of the field or anyone's first born. But we obsessively offer these things because they mean something to us! We created the gods, in our image, with our wants, to obsess over us. We are the center of our universe, and the gods we create obsess about humans and the conduct of men and women! [I say that God needs to get a life, study astrophysics or go knit worm holes around the universe and get away from obsessing over human sexual behavior and that pet ant farm on earth.]
Confession time. I've never confessed this to anyone, though some may guess. Remember Jack Nicholson in the movie "As Good As It Gets"? I have for many years and especially in times of fear and stress engaged in ritual behavior, you know, turn three times clockwise before leaving home, touch the doorknob five times, turn the key back and forth twice, avoid the cracks in the step, and so on. Not quite like that, but close.
Why, for pete's sake, do things that stupid? Because they work, or seem to, at least part of the time. Think about that chicken in the skinner box, given intermittent reinforcement. That ritual behavior is precisely like the ceremonies of religion, in the case of Christianity, telling oneself that "Jesus is with me and there is no reason to fear death for myself or my loved ones because at death we will become one with Jesus." I knew an old man, seemingly rational, except that he would constantly, every few minutes, say quietly, "Praise Jesus!" When he was talking, he'd interrupt himself every few sentences to say, "Praise Jesus!" Perfect example of ritualistic behavior. And how is that any different from telling a rosary by fingering the beads, or spinning a prayer wheel?
Where religion is not purely the result of brain damage, it is a product of our irrational ways of coping with fear.
