ABSTRACT
Many have seen religion as a source of comfort. Marx (1847) described religion as ‘the sign of the oppressed nature’, and Weber (1965) argued that the need for salvation is an expression of distress, so that religions involving redemption appeal most strongly to the under-privileged. Nietzsche (1968) saw Christianity as a sickness, an expression of envy by the poorly endowed who invented an ideology glorifying weakness and intellectual poverty. Others have seen it as a way of coming to terms with death (e.g. Malinowski, 1954). Yet others have stressed that religious belief systems interpret the world and give meaning to the experiences of life (Geertz, 1975). Thus one thing seems certain: the rewards that people may obtain from their religious beliefs are diverse, and it is folly to seek a single explanation for religious involvement. Systematic proof that any issue is an important causal factor for religious belief would be difficult if not impossible to obtain, but this chapter reviews evidence strongly suggesting that religious beliefs are associated with a number of basic human propensities that are of biological importance in other contexts.
