Before I even begin to get into the thick and thin of my observations and understanding, I would like to clarify that this is not a piece of writing where I discuss the existence of God. I care less about that and more about how people around me perceive, mold, and adopt the ideas they talk about.
Morals are a very complex thing for a person without an identity. Suppose we somehow calculated all the personalities of people who have ever existed and then plotted them on a graph or spectrum. If we removed people with an identity and any subconsciously informed thought process, and then asked them what they perceive as right or wrong, the people at both extremes would contradict themselves.
Morality, or anything that requires a complex thought process, is often dictated and adopted by the beliefs of both extremes. Observe a person with a religious belief and a societal contribution, and his morals will be a mixture of what is dictated by the books he believes in and the animals or people he is disgusted by.
If you carefully observe the nature of morality, for those without a thorough system of thought in place, religion—most of them—tries to save the rest of us from them.
Not knowing
The inherent explanation of life is meaningless; pain, humiliation, or rejection have no deeper reason or explanation, and regardless of what we want, we have no control over the environment or the randomness of the events we are part of. All of this is very depressing and almost always very tiring to accept. There is almost no reason to accept them either.
But uncertainty is quite unsettling. It feels like a war to accept that rejection from a client was not in our hands and that the death of something holds no explanation other than it being an event of no return. It takes a mountain to accept that luck can't be triggered through a set of certain actions or that religion exists for the good of those who aren't religious.
Every bone and muscle inside us is creatively wired to find the why, what, and how behind everything. For those without an informed thought process, reaching a stage where morals are supposed to be dictated by the self, or standing on a mountain of questions with no definite answers, would drive them insane. After all, thought and self are conquered only after a tough process of observation and examination.
Peppa Pig
Peppa Pig
Religion, similarly, through the god of certainty, tries to provide a compelling, temporary answer to every question rooted in uncertainty. Morals, too, for those who are busy existing without questioning, religion provides the morality upgrades as well. It tries to keep them hooked in a set of activities, beliefs, and purpose. But Peppa Pig, after a while, starts getting repetitive and boring, stops feeding curiosity, and babies eventually understand that they never wanted or asked for it to be played.
People realize that the questions of the self are getting simpler but deeper, and religion can no longer provide answers.
Identity is vague
Peppa Pig is no longer leading the desires for demands, but it is in place with the habit of accepting distraction as an answer. Identity, self, and subconscious are very complex subjects and are not discoverable to those who can accept temporarily distracting answers. Religion most often fails to bear the load of providing answers and distraction, but is good enough to guide as a base for ideologies.
Most religious people who get deeply involved with it have a subconscious that looks for ideologies to mold itself. Ideologies, for them, are a way to hold an identity, gain a purpose, and ignore the questions that religion raises in them. Temples are a strong symbol of religion; the flag, the color, and the rules around them, similarly to humans, provide it with an identity.
God
Since we biologically have eyes looking into the world, we find it easy to be blinded to the self. It is easy to escape from these questions, explanations, and expectations. Someone with a grounded identity gained through religion and the ideology around it will be shaken to the core if you try to question their beliefs. It provides a very intriguing and self-sufficient medium to reach exactly where you are, with many identical elements that distract the subconscious, which never stops looking for answers through the conscious self.
Religion and similar ideologies save the rest of the conscious ones from being perceived as someone with answers, in other words, as a god.
It saves the conscious from the consideration of having an explanation, from being held accountable for the dark of darkness and the glow of light, from being someone who is supposed to be the purpose or provide it.
Whether escapism was the reason behind the birth of religion or a desire to find answers easily is hard to determine, but religion surely saves them from themselves.