Work Text:
Religion: A Review
Growing up, I used to think religion was a kind of map—solid, reliable, printed on sturdy paper that could guide anyone safely from birth to death if they just followed the lines correctly. As I got older, I learned that religion is less like a map and more like a compass: useful, comforting, sometimes inaccurate, and often pointing not to a place but to a feeling.
Humans have been practicing something recognizable as religion for at least 40,000 years, based on archaeological evidence of ritual burials and symbolic art. One of the earliest known religious sites, Göbekli Tepe, predates agriculture by 6,000 years. This means humans were worshipping before they were farming—before bread, before villages, before the idea of staying in one place long enough to plant a garden. We built temples before we built towns. In other words: meaning came before infrastructure.
I think about that a lot.
Religion has created some of humanity's greatest art—Michelangelo’s Pietà, Rumi’s poetry, the cathedral that took generations to complete because no one kept track of time when they were building for eternity. It has also been used to justify violence so old it feels fossilized. God, apparently, speaks with infinite clarity, but humans interpret Him with astonishing inconsistency.
When I was younger, I thought of religion as a test I was destined to fail. Adults told me faith was simple—just believe. But belief has always been complicated for me. It’s hard to trust invisible things that promise visible consequences. And yet, I still find myself praying at strange moments—inside hospital rooms, before long drives, whenever planes hit turbulence. Every time, I tell myself I don’t really believe in intercession, but I still whisper a name anyway, hoping the universe is listening.
Psychologists call this “uncertainty reduction.” When we face things we can’t control—illness, loss, long airplane flights—we reach for rituals. Some people cross themselves. Some grip lucky keychains. Some recite old words. Religion, then, is partly a coping mechanism carved into the human brain: a structure of meaning we lean on when reason doesn’t offer enough comfort.
But religion is also community. Studies show that people who attend services regularly report higher levels of belonging and lower levels of loneliness, even if their theology wavers. It turns out that sitting next to people who sing the same songs and repeat the same stories matters as much as the stories themselves.
I once heard someone say that religion is the language humans invented to talk about hope. I don’t know if that’s true, but I like it. Hope is fragile; it needs metaphors and repetition and sometimes a little ceremony to survive. Religion gives that to people—candles to light, words to say, days to set aside so we do not forget we are tiny and temporary and still somehow significant.
Of course, religion can wound. It can exclude. It can shame. It can draw lines between “us” and “them” even when the sacred texts insist we were all made from the same dust. But it can also bind people together across generations, turning individual lives into something that feels collective and eternal.
I don’t know how much I believe, or what belief even means most days. But I know that when people gather—whether under a steeple, in a mosque courtyard, beside a river, or around a kitchen table—and speak out loud their longing for forgiveness, or purpose, or love, something in me softens. Something in me recognizes that ancient human impulse to reach for something bigger than ourselves.
Religion is messy and beautiful and dangerous and necessary.
It has shaped empires and artworks, caused wars and healed grief. It has changed laws, saved lives, broken families, and held them together. It is one of the longest-running human experiments, powered entirely by our need to make meaning out of the otherwise unbearable fact that we are temporary.
On good days, religion feels like a hand reaching for my shoulder. On bad days, it feels like a question no one can answer. Either way, it reminds me that being human has always been an act of reaching.
I give religion 3.5 stars—not for its accuracy, but for its persistence, its comfort, and its refusal to let humanity stop searching for meaning.