I long ago came to the conclusion that religious/spiritual belief is as much a part of human nature as the desire for sex or to eat good food; that for all the banging around religion gets, trying to beat it out of people is like trying to beat the desire to procreate out of them. Yes, some people have no desire to procreate, but they are a minority and likely always will be. The same appears to be true of religion. People will have religion seemingly no matter what you do; even in Europe, where organized religion has long been on the wane, many people who self-describe as atheists still believe in things like an afterlife, ghosts, astrology, and so on.
Indeed, to me it appears self-evidence that atheism itself often leads people who would otherwise be religiously inclined to gravitate toward ideologies; Marxism, Objectivism, radical Feminism, “Skepticism” as a way of life and a fierce self-identity, even the bizarre crowd that goes by the name of Atheism+, which is as dogmatic, closed-minded, and intolerant as the most rabid fundamentalist Christian extremist or old-school anti-Vatican II Catholic sedevacantist. Even when I considered myself an atheist (I no longer do) I always believed that the seeds of fanaticism were a separate thing from the seeds of religious belief, as were the fruits of same. The human need for spirituality and the human expression of fanaticism may spring from the same soil (the human mind) but they are just not the same thing; take away religion, and something else will take its place that will likely be no better and could conceivably be much worse.
Anyway, having come to this conclusion years ago, I was fascinated to read that there is a Study group at Oxford examining humans and the prevalence of religion among them and that it seems to have come to similar conclusions: religion is as natural to the human animal as anything else we do. Most humans will have a religion, formally or informally; the only question is what form it will take.
Oh, and by the way, a happy and blessed Easter to you all.
Dean Esmay is the author of Methuselah’s Daughter. He has contributed to Dean’s World, Huffington Post, A Voice for Men, Pajamas Media. Neither left nor right wing, neither libertarian nor socialist.