Why do you think religions find ways to explain the origin of the universe?

Science and history both try to understand how things hang together, but religions do too. Since the beginning of human existence on our planet, most people have asked questions of a religious nature. For example, what happens to the dead? Are they somehow still connected to the world of the living? In his insightful book The Broken Connection, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton observes that in the scientific age the bonds our ancestors felt between the living and dead have been weakened or completely broken. Scientifically educated people now often question the connection that religions professed to find between our present life and a wider world of sacred mystery.

Nevertheless, many of us still ask religious questions. Why, for example, does anything exist at all? Why do living beings suffer? What happens when we die? Why do human beings have a sense of rightness and wrongness? How can we find meaning in our lives? Can we ever find final release from concerns over sickness, oppression, isolation, and guilt? Where can we find perfection? What is really going on in the Universe?

Responses to these religious questions have usually taken the form of myths and other kinds of narratives. To most religions, in the “really real” world is infinitely larger than the visible one available to scientific study. Religions try to connect people to this wider world. Ever since the earliest stories and oral traditions, most people have had an intuition that the world is large enough to include spirits, gods, and long-departed ancestors. Religions strive to break through the physical limits that cut human existence off from the mysterious worlds to which their symbols and stories point. Religions seek to mend the sense of broken connection that stems from the experience of meaninglessness, guilt, pain, and death.

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