Cause And Effect Of Religion Essay

Introduction

Humans have been cultivated religion since human beings emerged on the earth. Nowadays religions are part of our lives. There are several major kinds of religions in the world: Christianity, Muslim, Buddhism and Hindi. The people who are religious enough obey the doctrine and pray regularly. For example, Muslims pray 5 times a day aiming at Jerusalem, the holy place of Islam, and one of the denominations of Buddhism requires to recite prayer to the Buddha regularly. Offering is obligation for Christians, Hindis must not eat beef, the meat of the sacred animal of the Hindi, and Muslims must not eat and drink anything during the day time in the Ramadan, the fasting month.

We are all liable to be influenced by religion. The survey carried out by Pew Research Center shows that in 1996 in the United States, more than 50% people pray at least once a day. This means that there exists significant difference between the people who believe in different religion, and between who believe in religion and who does not believe in God in their lifestyles. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that religions affect individuals in various ways. Then it

We can assume two extreme models of effects made by religion. One is direct effects, and the other is indirect effects. Islam regards suicide as a high crime. So we can predict that in the Arabic countries, where most of the people believe in Islam, the suicide rates are lower compared to other regions. Thus we call this effect direct effect. On the other hand, the relation between religion and the purchasing decision is relatively hard to expect. Thus we call this indirect effect. Because it is impossible to decide what is directly related and what is not, most of the effects lie between the direct effect and indirect effect. In the following sessions, we discuss mainly the indirect