What’s your best understanding of the religious/god impulse?

At every point in our society nothing happens unless someone or something causes it. So it's easy to carry that idea over to how the world/universe was created. There must be someone that created it. It's the simplest answer that makes sense in our minds. We have a good imagination and can come up with ideas of how something was created. Add to that how easy we believe what others tell us, especially people we respect, then we have what's needed to create a god and the need to worship him/her/they/(?).

We seek an answer but there is no answer. We can never know how our universe came to be. We don't have someone to tell us and we can't go back in time. We think science might help us but science has limits that we can't overcome.

There's also the overwhelming fear of death. Religion gives us relief by teaching that there's an after world. No one has returned from death to tell us all about it so we have no absolute answer. So anything you believe has a chance of being right. I choose to believe that our spirit continues. It works for me.

It stems from the human desire for an ultimately ordered world that also allows us some agency (because evolution wires us to maximize our security). Such a thing is impossible without a godlike force that imposes order (or at least will eventually impose order) and also provides a path through human agency to reach a state of "everything's going to be okay forever".

The desire can become so great (especially during times of insecurity or trauma) that people will start imagining that such a being/beings/force exists, and has offered them agency and a path.

Such beliefs are actually evolutionarily useful because they can counter the despair that can creep in during stressful times, giving believers a survival edge. They can also foster social cohesion, another survival edge.

Some people have a mystical experience, called satori, which changes their beliefs about the world forever.

Mystics are people who have seen, in moments of satori, the importance and significance of certain truths which most people recognise as religious in nature.

Others, observing the happiness of transcendent bliss, and wanting such happiness for themselves, take note of what the mystic says about the truths hinted at above, and a religion is born.

My pastor released this video, may help us to understand too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKDxWeLYAlQ

Simple, its fear of death and more so what comes after it. Cure death and you may get rid of that impulse until entropy comes into play.

I observe that successful cultures develop strong religions, successful meaning that they prevail over others, with the last 200 years being an insignificant exception in the scope and duration of human history. I'm not going to offer an explanation for this, it's just an observation. From an evolutionary point of view, which ever genetic predisposition causes people to participate in religious communities, poses an evolutionary advantage, hence the trait and resulting behaviour prevail.

Seek Truth. www.truthforlife.org