The root of religion.

A few weeks back, I was in school at lunch time chatting to a group of friends. Since a number of my friends are, what they describe as "spiritual", the conversation turned to ghosts. I was surprised by one particular girls answer as I wouldn't have tagged her to be a ghost-believer. I usually find the most fruitful discussions evolve from getting the believer to answer to their own beliefs, and so, rather than going off on my own tangent, I simply questioned her. The conversation (roughly...) went as follows...

Me: So, why do you believe in ghosts?
Girl: Your soul/spirit/essence has to go somewhere.
Me: But why do you believe in a soul?
Girl: You need a soul to get to an afterlife.
Me: But why does there need to be an afterlife?
Girl: ... You can't just cease to exist.
Me: Why not...?
Girl: (recoils at the implication) ... I don't know... You just can't.

Dominos. With a semblance of skepticism and a persistent curiousity, her argument crumbled. What she considered to be deductive reasoning and a rationalisation of her beliefs, was based upon a wispy, unresolving and frankly, hollow, "I don't know". What a foundation. The follow up, equally shallow and meaningless, is simply an appeal to an emotion. Existence, like to the rest of humanity, is pretty damn significant to her and even imagining the thought of true nothingness, is difficult. She has allowed her own personal distaste over the prospect to fully justify its impossibility without indulging in any further explanation. Her 'logic' is simple: she doesn't like it, she doesn't want it, and that settles it.

I admit, it humoured me to watch the pillars of her reasoning disintegrate. 'Why', that wonderful, valuable and ever-so promising monosyllabic word, swiftly and acutely sliced through every single layer of her argument with graceful ease, revealing the root of her pronounced faith: death. A fear of it, more precisely. And so the foundation of her entire rationale, connecting ghostly apparitions to the ubiquitous ponderings of what happens after life, is based upon nothing but an emotion. A raw, unreasoned and unquestioned feeling - the instinctual (and perfectly natural) revulsion over the prospect of her own demise. And that's it - although she wouldn't like to admit it and most certainly would never phrase it in such a cutting fashion, but that's the base of her beliefs; the root of religion.

We all have an innate biological drive for survival. Without it, you quickly plummet from natural selections favour; dissolving your propensity for a genetic legacy. This inherent and overwhelmingly powerful aversion to death (particularly in a dangerous situation, of course), is essentially your DNAs motivation to survive long enough for you to be able to successfully serve as vehicle to carry your genes to the next generation. This crude and visceral disposition is the base of the fear and causes things like adrenalin rushes and crazy heart rates. Since we are sentient beings capable of abstract thought, we can also fear death on an intellectual level: by realising and appreciating the significance and temporal nature of our being, and therefore contemplating the idea of our non-existence.

So, as result of all that biology and philosophy, our end answer is that death truly sucks and is to be avoided at all costs.

A mask to the eerie...
And here is where religion steps in to save the day, or more appropriately, delude the uninformed. Most religions come packaged with a very shiny and colourful lure - the promise of your survival past this finite world. Whether that be perpetual bliss in the clouds, unending misery down under or some form of continuous reincarnation, where some essence of you gets the privilege of lingering on in this earthly domain and simply continuing to be; it sure trumps cold, hard, mortal reality. This intrinsic abhorrence of our own delicate existence is soothed by the whimsical fantasies religion has to offer. It hazes the truth, subdues the fear and masks the inevitable finality that is death.

Since the scope of religion is narrowing due to the progress of science, theists have a lingering tendency to put death at the base of their reasoning. After all, it's an integral part of our humanity; something which we fight against with every breath. It deserves significance.
Believers no longer rely on gods to grow their crops or to explain why rainbows exist: science provides acceptable explanations for such occurences, yet, for the most part, death remains in the realm of the supernatural. In such minds, it's untouchable by science. People just don't want to hear of a void of nothingness. They don't want to accept sciences explanation this time round. Death is simply something most people don't want rationalised.

It's the perfect root for religion to rest upon.