Religion: a feature, not a bug

When people ask, "why did God make Man?" it is common for theologians of monotheistic faiths to reply, "So that we could worship him".
I've always found that rather an odd response. Why should we pretend to know why God does something? And why should the omnipotent creator want to create beings of limited perception just so they can worship him?

But recently I've seen the subject with other eyes. I realised that, while the deeper philosophical questions remain, there can be little doubt that we are made to worship.

Anti-religious writers try to disprove the existence of God - as does Richard Dawkins in his most recent book. (Not read it yet, but his others have been good.) Having proved to his own satisfaction that God doesn't exist, presumably he regards human outreach to God, in prayer, ritual and worship, as falsehood and fraud. Well, that's his opinion, and he is entitled to it.

Now to the title of the piece. Worship, I contend, can be shown to be such a part of human life - any time, any where, that it should be refgarded as a faeature of our make-up, not a bug in the system.

Our mind consists of hardware, firmware (that's embedded software), software, instructions and information. These approximate to our brains, our instimcts, our learned experiences, our knowledge and our environment. Religious belief can be regarded as a bug in the system, to be decoded and removed - or it can be seen to be a feature which we can't remove.

More seriously - if the capacity for religion is denied, it will emerge somehwre else, like any other repressed drive. Represss sex and it will come out as obsession or perversion. Suppress any feature and it will emerge again.
And as open religion declined in the 20th century, we have seen the emergence of false gods.
Political leaders in totalitarian societies.
Celebrity culture.
Shopping and materialism
Screen idols and pop idols (the use of the term "idol" says it all).
Obsession with sports teams, the World Cup, the Ashes cricket trophy (I plead guilty).

The list can be extended.

So, to worship is a feature of life, not a bug. Whether we believe we are made by a "blind watchmaker" in an evolutionary process, or made by a benevolent creator, or a malevolent one for that matter, it is sheer folly to deny that our make-up inclines us to worship.

Recognising that we are made that way enables us to apply ethics to the object of worship, and to our relationship to it. Denying that worship is normal means the question is not raised.

Recognising idols as false gods - as did Abraham - means we can dethrone them from our hearts and place them in proper perspective.

Maybe it is possible to do this without believing in a god or in his son, the suffering servant. But if we stand in awe and wonder at the magnificence of the world, I do find it somewhat easier to relate to it when seeing it as a creation, not an accident of nature.