Serendipity Daily Thoughts

Hi. Thank you for coming back to another post where I explore important developments ever made in human history. For today’s post, I would like to start writing about a new topic – religion.

Whether we believe in a God or not, it is true as a fact that religion has influenced how the world has been shaped so far. For an instance, it was possible for Roman empire to spread its land because the power of Christianity was so strong that the majority of people were easily manipulated to follow the emperors through the power of religion. In fact, in a book “Social Contract“, written by J. J. Rousseau, he suggests a society to have a common belief in which norms and legal frameworks are set so that the society can be stabilized. There are three other reasons why religion has its power. One is that the religion plays as a bond of community. For example, the Christianity requires followers to visit a church and pray for the God once a week. It contributes to the followers to communicate each other, have a social interactions, and keep the sense of belongings. It further, and potentially, leads to better mental health among the society.

Another reason is that the religion actually gives people reasons to live. Since the humanity has developed its technologies, people have gained more time and energy to spend on their “thinking”. This is one of the reasons why humans have been able to develop further, but it seemed that it had its downside too. Some people started questioning about their existence. It is evident that some Greek philosophers considered the matter seriously, thinking that we may not exist in the world or if we can be permanent. This kind of feature in human kind cannot be observed in other animals, because animals are programmed to live longer and pass our genetic information to the next generation by instincts. Anyways, the religious beliefs gave people meanings to their lives. With my understanding, ancient Chinese religion propose believers to live in accordance with the sense of justice rather than profits. Buddhism also recommends followers to live as simple as possible. People are no longer needed to struggle with questioning their existence as far as they believe in a God.

The third reason is that religion assists political leaders to organize the group, because believers of a religion tends to adhere to what their God says without questions. Therefore, in our history, a country with a strong religious base had a dominant power around the world. As I mentioned for several times, Roman empire was able to spread out partly due to the power of Christianity, and the Chinese empire played a dominant role in Eastern Asia utilizing its ancient religion. Interestingly, when the Western thoughts, including Christianity, entered Eastern Asia in the late 19th centuries, China resisted accepting the new religion, claiming that the world has been organized according to their own religion. As a result, China still holds its identity as a separate country than other major countries around the world, complicating and balancing the world power distribution.

I have written about the religion and how it has affected the human kind in the history in today’s post. I would like to discuss more in the next several posts about this topic. I hope I will see you again, and thank you very much for reading my writing. Please feel free to leave any comments!

Chao!