It’s truly remarkable just how drastically humans evolve through the millennia, and I do not mean this in Darwinian terms, but rather in terms of mentality. Consider how we gradually made less use of our tails, causing them to recede back into our coccyges only to be discovered by us, the tailless descendants, some blip in time into the future. I find that at some point in the last couple of centuries or so, our spirituality became a vestigial part of the mind, as neither people nor even whole civilizations are built around religion or a pious commitment to moral values.

In the past, religion is what gave rise to the unity of people, acting as the foundation of great empires, from the Greeks with their polytheism and the Abrahamic religions starting in the Middle East, spreading to the farthest corners of the globe, to the cave paintings found in rural parts of France or Spain and the unfathomable Moai statues on Easter Island. In one sense or another, despite the great diversity of every religion that has ever existed, they all seem to inevitably share a sense of mysticism or fantastical elements which we nowadays tend to discredit as impossible feats; unlikely to have ever happened.

In this particular sense, religion serves the purpose of incorporating said fantasies as a means of making sense of and giving purpose to our otherwise enigmatic existence as human beings and an explanation of the natural order of things. Every Greek myth from the Odyssey to the story of Hercules serves as evidence of that alone. This may come across as stating the obvious, but then again it is this very fundamental element of mysticism which, in the current age of science and technology, discredits the viability of religion.

We live in an age in which rationality, structured thought and empirical evidence dictate the laws of the universe and can trace it back to its very origins. We have access to knowledge which none of our ancestors could have ever hoped to achieve before. Living standards have improved tremendously, such that we do not base our wealth so much on the kindness of God as we do on our own labor, and we have achieved the very feats which were once thought to have been impossible, such as landing on the moon. And yet, recently we have begun to take the religious sense of mysticism into our own hands, instead of learning it from oral or written tradition. As such, we question whether stories containing prophets performing miracles ever existed in the first place. Progress in the physical sense has caused us to regress in the mental and emotional, since this propagates a certain kind of pressure imposed on ourselves to constantly take matters into our own hands.

I am not here to argue whether all these stories, legends or myths actually ever happened. They have however shaped, and continue to shape, our very existence, although now our spirituality has been substituted. Given all the possibilities that technology offers us, it also places too much responsibility on us as we put perpetual pressure on our limited ability to improve ourselves. With this comes Ibsen’s ever popular argument of blissful ignorance versus burdened intelligence, to which different individuals provide different answers. The point here, however, is that religion is not blissful ignorance: it is a more natural part of ourselves than our own internal organs. We have always had religion in one form or another, but just as the appendix is not useful anymore, perhaps religion too has outgrown its use. Hence, considering the various forms religion has taken, it can very much be argued that science is added to one of many individual dogmas we base our lives around.

What is remarkable, on the other hand, is that it is only until recently that religion has been used as a means of unifying people under a universal cause. 20th-century communism provides powerful evidence to support the concept that people do not require gods or enlightenment to strive for a better future. Interestingly enough, I have heard many people quote Marx on religion being “opium for the masses.” Many take it with pride that since they do not practice religion, they are the exceptional members of society who can identify “opium” when they see it and hence refuse to take it. Marx provides a powerful analogy, yet gives a pessimistic view of religion. Yes, religion can be a singular cause bringing the masses together, but even the exceptional ones, i.e., those with philosophical, theological and scientific intelligence have their own versions of “opium.” It is because of our advanced status with education that we have reached a stage at which every individual is equipped with the means of developing their own religion. I say this in a broad sense, but quite literally every person who has ever lived has a religion, though nowadays it is so varied amongst us that it becomes dismissed.

I conclude with the very question that moved me to write this piece in the first place: do we still need religion, or have we out-evolved it? The answer is that the question in and of itself is not quite viable. We will always have religion, in any and all of the infinite number of forms it takes. What is really off-putting, however, is when we ask ourselves if one religion is more viable than another, especially if religion nowadays is so diversified on an individual scale.