Does Religion Provide Meaning to Life?

The Fact of Religion

Looking at the history of mankind, the facts lead to a definition of man as homo religious (religious man), as one of the constants of human societies has been the existence of religion. Even when the religious meaning has been distorted, or in the few cases where it seems to have been lost, people have constructed absolute idols and those who worship with a sense that becomes religion: money, pleasure, history, or even matter no more, and they replace the true God.

Man is religious by virtue of their rationality, not by virtue of its animality. The loss of God is due to an error of reason with some frequency guilty, it is natural to be religious, as is natural that men talk and think, although there are dumb and feeble-minded.

In recent years, advancing studies of primitive religions and their evolution to present times, we see that these are the older, more refined is his sense of God. In some cases slip then to polytheism, which in some cases, derived in turn to henotheism (predominance of one god over others)? In other cases, the shift is towards Pantheism, which believes that everyone is divine and identifies God with the universe. These recent findings have exceeded rationalist theories, for which the oldest was animism, to be followed by polytheism, to end finally in monotheism. These theories are a priori and have found no confirmation on proven, but, as we have seen, quite the opposite (D'Amato, 54).

The Meaning of Life

The religious is inseparable from the question of the meaning of life. Every man needs to answer these two questions: Why do I live? What do I live? If one accepts the existence of God, the meaning of life is exhausting, necessarily, in the material realities, death is, then, a mystery insoluble to the human heart, which aspires to immortality, happiness, and perfection.

Do not think of God, as advocated agnosticism, leaves the problem temporarily suspended in the air, but sooner or later, the need is urgent response, because you cannot live a properly human life without knowing why and what you live. Only religion, supported by philosophical reasoning can make sense of the deepest questions of man and know why and what we live. Then, like pieces of a puzzle that fit together on, meaning also acquire different human activities: work, family, rest, prayer, joy, death, pain, and so on (Siebers, 2).

The man needs to legitimize its existence that is sometimes painful. Subjective response to this need religion leads with the objective reality of God. The suffering and blows of fate are often particularly suitable for placing before man the divine reality which is then the need to reach out to a force, which represents for him salvation and help.

The religious idea gives meaning to human life and the development of this idea is an enrichment of the human spirit. The highest key values are the values of the ...