> It is odd, at least to my mind, to think that
>even tiny, isolated tribes in remote parts of
>the world believe in a god of some sort. It
>would seem to me that the human psyche is
>programmed to need to worship something, thus the
>widespread belief in a supernatural power. But
>that's me.

It is certainly true that people have been making up gods to explain things that are inexplicable to them pretty much for as long as there have been people. It is also true that most every culture in the world and probably every culture that has ever existed has had their gods to pray to/appease/fear. But I'd sooner think this is more simply a result of human nature than anything else. Humans naturally want explanations for things. We're really good at pattern recognition and cause/effect logic. We don't want to believe things happen for no reason, and we want explanations for things that do happen. Spinning tales of spiteful gods throwing lighting bolts around on a whim or nuturing gods making plants grow tall and true help us explain things that seem to happen without cause or without purpose.

If you take a look at cultures and their gods, the gods tend to reflect the core values of the culture that worships them, and/or the environment the culture lives in. The Vikings lived in harsh climates, had to contend with poor farming lands and short growing seasons, and often were raiders and pillagers, taking from others what they wanted or needed. Their gods reflect this--the Norse gods are harsh, often have no real concern for their worshipers, and are quick to anger and quick to take vengeance. Even their version of apocalypse ends with all the gods basically killing each other. The gods know this, and know they are powerless to prevent their fate. It's a pretty dark and gloomy religion (even with the aftermath of Ragnarok being a new and idyllic earth, it's pretty clear most of the gods wont live to see it and neither will most of their erstwhile followers) for what was essentially a dark and gloomy people living in a harsh environment. Consequently, many Viking raiders who settled in the milder lands they raided on the European mainland cast off their religion pretty quickly and adopted whatever local religion was prevelent.

To say that there is a universal need to "worship" something is fairly innaccurate as well, I would submit. Most early/primitive societies didn't worship their deities in the way we would use the term today, so much as appease them. Gods were often things to be feared, powerful entities who would just as soon strike you down as help you out, so figuring out what the god wanted (sacrifice, prayer, the death of a rival tribe) and giving it to him as best you could was not an act of worship, done out of admiration or love for a deity, but more an act of self preservation.

To refute a claim you never made (but that I have seen advanced enough to want to make an attempt at a rebuttal here ;-) ), the idea that all humans have a natural "need" to worship something, or that all societies believe in some form of diety, somehow proves that some such diety must exist, is bad logic at best. Even a universal belief in something doesn't make it true in the absense of other evidence. And in truth, that "need" is much better explained as simply the result of human nature, the natural thought process of a thinking mammal groping around in a harsh world.

-- Dave