What is religion?

The main question for every person has always been and remains the question of the meaning of life. Not everyone can find the final answer, not everyone is able to justify it. However, in every normal person there is an ineradicable need to find this sense and its reasonable justification.

A large number of diverse beliefs and ideologies surrounds the modern man, but all of them can be united around two basic worldviews: religion and atheism. The third, often called agnosticism, in essence cannot claim a worldview status, since in principle it denies the person the possibility of knowing such worldview realities as the being of God, the soul, the immortality of the person, the nature of good and evil, truth, etc.

Religion and atheism should be considered as theories of being (or nonexistence) of God, in which the appropriate scientific and other criteria are applied: the presence of confirming factors and the possibility of experimental verification of the main theses of the theory. A system that does not meet these criteria can only be considered as a hypothesis.

In this scientific context, religion and atheism appear in the following form. Religion offers a huge number of such facts that testify to the existence of a world of the supernatural, immaterial, the existence of a higher Reason (God), the soul, etc. At the same time, religion offers a concrete practical way of knowing these spiritual realities, that is, it offers a way to verify the truth of one's statements.

Atheism does not have facts that confirm the non-existence of God and the spiritual world. With the infinite knowledge of the world and breadth and depth, the non-existence of God can never be proved, if only because all human knowledge at any given time is just an islet in the ocean of the unknown. Therefore, even if God were not, this would remain an eternal mystery for mankind.

The second and no less important for atheism is to answer the question: what exactly should a person do to be convinced of the non-being of God? In atheistic theory, this question remains without a convincing answer. For the believer, the answer is obvious: it is necessary to personally embark on a religious path and then only it will be possible to obtain appropriate knowledge.

Thus, both religion and atheism, together in a paradoxical unity, call upon everyone who is searching for truth to study and experimentally test what is called religion.