https://infidels.org/library/modern/ken ... roots.html
TL;DR:
Humans are primed to ask for and receive comfort and sustenance from birth on by relying on a mother to fulfill needs and the reality of child and mother are inseperable to the child for the first 15 or so months.
As realities begin to diverge for children they have been primed for something to fill a void.Thereafter, as the child embarks on the process of separation from the caregiver, it will begin to implicitly suffer the terrifying loss of worldly hegemony. "This movement away," the author adds, "is attended by powerful anxiety and by the irrational wish to have it both ways: separateness and symbiotic union" (p. 57)
The child's desire to have it both ways--to separate, yet preserve emotional union or dependency on a caregiver--is what eventually results in "the central motivational goal of the religionist's spiritual commitment" (p. 24). By the time religious narratives exert themselves, the child has "already been 'primed' and prepared for initiation into the divine, supernatural realm" (p. 24).
I thought this was worth some contemplation.Religion, of course, is anything but a passive recipient of immature minds. According to the author:
[Churches] strive to trigger state-dependent memories of the early period through formal, diurnal practices.... [Religion] has shrewdly played into man's most childlike needs, not only by offering eternal guarantees for an omniscient power's benevolence (if properly appeased) but by magic words and significant gestures, soothing sounds and soporific smells--an infant's world.... (p. 22)
Thus religion is a cunning, unconscious method of preserving the tie to the ... original mother and father.... We can play the game of life in two directions, staying put and moving on.... (p. 103)
And so it is with religion....
Not only does one get the caregiver back, but one gets the caregiver back in an idealized form. One is not alone, and one has nothing to fear from a just and merciful God (p. 84).