Religion to my understanding is the Culture of people’s beliefs.
Culture is the general accepted Values and norms of group of people, society or country. The fundamental blocks of culture are values and norms.
Values are abstract ideas about what a society believes to be good, right and desirable. Values affect everything, political and economy systems as well as culture. Values include attitudes towards concepts like freedom, honesty, loyalty, justice, responsibility and personal relations including marriage. Values shape individual behaviour by identifying appropriate and inappropriate forms of human interactions.
While Norms are social rules and guidelines that prescribe appropriate behaviours in particular situations. Norm shapes the action of people towards one another.
Religion as per what I can deduce from above explanations is just like cultural value. The general accepted principle of people’s beliefs as per nature, existence of humans, divine and how to worship God is religion. For instance almost if not all religions teaches the rich to protect or help the poor and also for the strong to protect the weak and so also all other general accepted appropriate behaviours in every society. People’s beliefs renew their minds towards a particular direction and mostly to God and good behaviours in the society; it teaches them to conform to the rules, regulations and expectations of their faith. It give them hope, peace and expectation of eternal life or after life as a believer and eternal condemnation to hell as non believer.
The all of the above, are the reasons why we have religion. It has been hijacked though for selfish individual or group ambitions and goals. People are brainwashed and mislead by using the power of their beliefs to set them against each other. We cannot say one religion is guilty and the other is not. All religion is now keg of gunpowder or let me say nuclear bombs ready to be detonated.
The power of religion both in the olden days and even now has shown that people’s beliefs are their existence. Through religion believers seek answers to creation so also through science the scientist or mostly non believers seek answers to evolution. Some of us believe that evolution is just the scientific finding of God’s creation but in whatever form we may elucidate it, religion is a very volatile and delicate property of our world.