In the spiritual life of a person it is difficult to find a factor that would play a more important role than religion. In search of God, mankind proceeded many roads, going from the world-rejecting mysticism to the God-rejecting materialism.
And only then, when this path has been traveled, the fullness of time has come, in the biblical language. The world approached the Revelation of the greatest mystery, and the path to a perfect life was shown to man.
History does not know a single nation that would be completely devoid of faith. Even atheists cannot be considered truly unbelievers. The ideological myths that they take for granted are essentially a converted religion. As a result, there are “beliefs” of atheism, trying to bring meaning to nonsense, intended to reconcile a person with what he cannot accept by nature.
So let's try to figure out what religion is what are the causes of its occurrence and trace the history of the emergence of religious beliefs.
What is religion?
Religion (from the Latin religious — piety, shrine, subject of worship), worldview and attitude, as well as appropriate behavior and specific actions (cult) based on the belief in the existence of a god or gods, “sacred” — i.e. one or another kind of supernatural. (Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary 1987)
The main question for each person has always been and remains the question of the meaning of life. Not everyone can find a final answer for themselves; not everyone is able to justify it sufficiently. But in every normal person, the need to find this meaning and its rational justification is ineradicable.
Modern man is surrounded by many diverse faiths and ideologies, but all of them can be united around two main worldviews: religion and atheism. The third, often called agnosticism, essentially cannot aspire to a worldview status, since in principle it denies a person the possibility of cognizing such worldview realities as the existence of God, the soul, the immortality of personality, the nature of good and evil, truth, etc.
It is advisable to consider religion and atheism as theories of the being (or nonexistence) of God, in which the corresponding scientific and other criteria are applied: the presence of supporting factors and the possibility of experimental verification of the basic principles of the theory. A system that does not meet these criteria can only be regarded as a hypothesis.
In this scientific context, religion and atheism appear as follows. Religion offers a huge number of facts that testify to the existence of a world of supernatural, immaterial, the existence of a higher Mind (God), soul, etc. At the same time, religion offers a concrete practical way of knowing these spiritual realities, that is, it offers a way to verify the truth of one’s statements.
Atheism does not have facts confirming the non-existence of God and the spiritual world. Given the infinity of the knowledge of the world, both the breadth and depth of the non-existence of God can never be proved even by virtue of the fact that all human knowledge at any given time is only an island in the ocean of the unknown. Therefore, even if there were no God, it would remain an eternal mystery to humanity.
The second and no less important for atheism is to answer the question: what exactly should a person do to be convinced of the non-existence of God? In atheistic theory, this question remains without a convincing answer. For the believer, the answer is obvious: it is necessary to personally embark on a religious path and then only it will be possible to obtain appropriate knowledge.
Thus, both religion and atheism, together in paradoxical unity, urge every person who seeks truth to study and experimentally test what is called religion.
So what is religion?
The word “religion” is a word which until recently in the eyes of the vast majority embraced all spiritual life, and therefore only crude materialism can attack the essence of this, fortunately eternal, need of our nature. There is nothing more harmful than habitual language norms, due to which the absence of religiosity is mixed with the refusal to join one or another belief.
“Religion” is a Western European term. In Latin, by the early Middle Ages, the word “religio” began to indicate “God's fear, a monastic way of life.” The formation of this new meaning in the Latin language is usually derived from the Latin verb “religare” — “to bind”. Already in the word formation itself, one can see the specifics of what began to be considered religion in Europe.
Religion is the power connecting the worlds, the bridge between the created spirit and the Divine Spirit. Strengthened by this connection, a person turns out to be an active accomplice in world creation. God does not enslave a person, does not constrain his will, but, on the contrary, gives him complete freedom, including the ability to reject Him and seek his own ways. For example, in the Dutch language, the word for religion sounds like “Godsdienst,” which literally means “worship.”
Scientists and theologians defined religion in different ways and sometimes very contradictory, for example, K. G. Jung wrote: “Religion is a special setting of the human mind, ... careful consideration, observation of certain dynamic factors understood as forces, spirits, demons, gods, laws, ideas, ideals — and all other names given by man to similar factors that he discovered in his world as powerful, dangerous, “religion” is a concept that indicates a special attitude of consciousness, changed by the experience of the numinous. “
A. Einstein wrote: “I cannot find an expression better than “religion” to denote faith in the rational nature of reality, at least that part of it that is accessible to consciousness. Where this feeling is absent, science degenerates into a barren empirical state. ”
A. Men believed: “Religion is the refraction of Being in the minds of people, but the whole question is how to understand this Being itself. Materialism reduces it to an unreasonable nature, while religion sees in its basis the innermost Divine Being and realizes itself as a response to the manifestation of this Being. ”
God is that primordial Being and Consciousness at the same time, thanks to which there exists any material and spiritual being and consciousness in the whole world with the diversity of their forms, known and not known by man. God is a really existing, unchanging personal Ideal of good, truth and truth and the ultimate goal of a person’s spiritual aspirations. This religion is fundamentally different from other worldviews, for which the highest ideal does not really exist and is nothing more than a theoretical model, the product of the mind, its hopes and dreams.