[CliffFletcher]

It’s 2500 BC. You’re among the 98 per cent of people on the planet who are farmers or pastoralists. Your prosperity, health, and life are subject to environmental conditions you have very little control over. Every 5-7 years the crops fail due to drought or pestilence. Your animals die. You dig in the earth for roots and eat grass. Your children die wailing. Many who survive are stunted and deformed for life. It’s a collective trauma and catastrophe.

You have no way of predicting when this will happen or of doing much about it. Just as there’s little you can do to prevent attacks by marauders who massacre, rape, and enslave. This psychological state is literally unbearable.

So humans being social, story-making animals, your people develop stories about why this happens. About ancestors and gods and how they work their will on your lives. You develop communal rituals to propitiate these powers. The rituals bring the community together. Unify and build trust. They give you some sense of agency against the pitiless vicissitudes of life in the pre-modern world.

These beliefs and rituals, in varied forms, spring up in every corner of the planet that humans inhabit. So yes, it’s about as human as you get. It’s the peculiar state of not being religious that requires explanation.