RUNNING HEAD: Religion and Underlying Insecurity
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Religion and
Underlying Insecurity
Kevin Jones
Highland High School

Author’s Note
This paper has been prepared for AP Literature and Composition for Mrs. Kochheiser.

Religion and Underlying Insecurity
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Abstract
This essay will discuss the possibility that religion is not only driven by faith but also underlying insecurity of all people. Insecurities discussed will include fear of death, fear of persecution, lack of comfort, and the stress of guilt. This paper will relate each insecurity to religion and how these insecurities make religion attractive. Exploring our deepest fears and insecurities will help break down religion into why it is attractive to so many throughout the world today.

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Religion and Underlying Insecurity
The battle of religion has raged for hundreds of years. Many wars have been fought over religion that still continue to this day. The crusades between the Christians and the Muslims were fought for nearly two hundred years while Islamic extremists target Christians in beheadings and massacres still today. It is clear that religion has been prevalent for many hundreds of years.
A
worldwide study conducted in 1993 shows that only twenty percent of the world is categorized as non religious with nearly five billion of the world’s six billion human inhabitants claiming some form of religion (Sexton & Finley, 2015, para. 20). A 2009 study even found that eighty five percent of a fifty thousand person poll claimed a religion in the United States (Sexton &
Finley, 2015, para. 21).
Religion continues to have a major impact on today’s world, but one question remains: why are people religious? People are not simply born religious. Scriptures document religion in order to pass it on to future generations. Many lack faith because they feel as though religion fails to show any proof of its’ true existence (we will refer to them as non­believers), but why is it that people still follow without any physical proof to verify the word they read? It is my belief that not only true faith creates religion, but the insecurities of people lead them to trust religion in order to put their mind at ease.
Standstill
Non­believers clearly do not believe that religious followers truly feel faith in a deity because they think it doesn’t exist, but maybe confuse these feelings of faith with other feelings created through religion. Their main claim is that religion lacks the proof to verify the religion itself.
Writers Sexton and Finley state that “German scholar Johann Gottfried Eichhorn wrote that the stories in the book of Genesis were not historically accurate but were, instead, myths”

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(Sexton & Finley, 2015, para. 16) which helps support a non believer's claim that religion lacks proof because its writings are not liable sources but myths.
In the same token, non­believers cannot fully prove that religion is not true because science has yet to prove where or how the universe came to be. That part is left to theories such as the Big Bang Theory or String Theory.
However, Religion is also a theory in its’ own way. In that respect non­believers cannot disprove religion entirely until science proves that the universe started in some other way than a divine one. Until one finds evidence to disprove the other, non­believers and believers will continue to make his debate for many years to come.
Many major religions exist throughout the world today. The world contains beliefs including Christianity, Judaism, Islamic beliefs, Hinduism and Paganism along with many others. If one is not following a religion then they are likely an atheist or something closely related. The writers
Chittum and Donnelly define atheism as, “.. a doctrine that states that nothing exists but